The creator argues that most dishwashers are designed to use a pre-wash dose and a main wash dose of detergent, a fundamental often ignored by single-dose pods, and presents independent ASTM testing confirming the new powder matches or exceeds the performance of a leading premium pod. The video also features a detailed demonstration using temperature logging and peanut butter to stress the importance of purging cold water from the hot water supply line before running a dishwasher, particularly in North America, to ensure the water reaches the optimal enzymatic temperature needed for effective cleaning. This is further reinforced by showing how adding pre-wash detergent dramatically improves the initial cleaning phase, especially with fats and oils.
One thing I can't get a good answer to is whether the "prewash" step is universally the case or not. I have a good Bosch dishwasher and there's no compartment for a bit of pre-wash detergent. I don't even know if my dishwasher cycle has a pre-wash step. I would assume the dishwasher manufacturer knows what's best.
The owner's manual gives advice about not pre-rinsing the dishes because the food bits actually help the wash cycle, so I'm wondering if it works differently from the two-step process in this video.
You can tell if your dishwasher has a pre-wash cycle if it does a short run, then you hear it draining, and then it does a longer full run. I expect it probably does.
Also, you can always add a bit of detergent to the main compartment of the dishwasher for prewash. The normal detergent compartment has a lid so the the detergent stays dry until the main wash cycle, and most prewash compartments are just an open tray.
Come to think of it, if there is a latching door on the detergent tray, your dishwasher definitely has a prewash cycle, or else they’d skip the door entirely
With better understanding you can achieve far better results. I no longer rinse or even scrape dishes. with the right approach my dishwasher performance has been stellar. The user manual also includes proper tuning to local water hardness levels.
Poor dishwashing also discourages people from cooking at home, which leads to less healthful diets. So it's an important thing to get right.
Dishwashing is fascinating.
The manual is likely referring to not hand rinsing dishes before loading them which was very common 30 or 40 years ago. I had to train my Mother to stop doing that.
The video explains why there always is a pre-wash step. Regardless of whether it comes with a pre-wash-powder compartment or not. I will try his solution.
Note: This dishwasher provides the optimum cleaning performance without the use of a prewash detergent and further enhances our standards of sustainability and efficiency.
The Extra Dry setting seems to help with getting the glass and ceramics dryer. Plastics still come out quite wet since it uses a hotter final rinse rather than a heating element to get dishes “dryer”.
Alec's dishwasher videos are based on some rather primitive dishwashers. For instance he talks about his test unit not flushing out the spray arms, but Bosch/Siemens filters the water going to the spray arms so it wouldn't recirculate dirty water anyways. Same deal with the prewash. Bosch uses a turbidity sensor to determine how many "prewash" cycles to run and when to reuse the water, something his test unit very clearly does not.
He is known as Angry Dishwasher Man for a reason.
This dishwasher also came with a box of Miele pods (and they encourage you to buy more). I think it's designed first and foremost to not use powder.
Like in the video: https://youtu.be/DAX2_mPr9W8?si=Njn749InqNCbjhQd&t=822
have you watched his videos? dude is on the spectrum.
to be clear, he makes good vids. but his fascinations exist for a reason.
American dishwashers don't have their own heater? All dishwashers I've seen in Australia only have cold water supply.
Some do, some don't.
The ones that do vary in ability by overall dishwasher quality.
The ones that don't are hooked up to the kitchen's hot water line.
This is considered more energy efficient because a home's hot water heater (whether electric, gas, or another fuel) is better at heating the water in a bulk capacity than a tiny heater in the dishwasher.
The downside is that the cold water between the big water heater and the dishwasher has to be purged first for it to be really effective. If your hot water heater is in the other side of the wall, no problem. If it's six rooms away, problem.
Whenever natural gas supply is turned off in the US, for any reason, only the gas company can turn it back on. And they can't do so if there's a leak at all. You have to call a plumber to come out, detect the leaks, and fix them. After that, you can call the gas company to come back out (but not on a weekend) to turn it back on. And a same-day request for service requires someone to be home ALL DAY after it's called in.
And this is how I ended up showering at work for three days that week after not having had one over the weekend.
retrofitting old traditional houses (especially stone) with higher capacity plumbing was expensive and infeasible, so putting heaters in appliances was a cope for markets that needed it.
I'm also firmly in the camp of having a flat cutlery compartment at the top and not that inefficient, and uncivilized, scarring, basket in bottom section.
Until seeing that video I thought I was crazy. I've found my master.
It seems so arcane for the operator to have to do this before running a cycle
Yes, purging the cold water manually does exactly the same thing. We live in a flawed world.
But the quality of the summary - and maybe the ability to expand it if slightly more details are required - and the low latency with that - are all super important. In that sense, AI can potentially save a lot of time in getting the right information quickly.
I wish the description of the video was like an abstract.
YMMV. Based on the earlier videos, I did switch back to powder, and I did follow the steps of putting some powder in the main compartment for the pre-wash. And i did try several powders.
Yet, none of the powders were anywhere near as good as the tablet we use.
It also doesn't contain any nasty chemicals, unlike several of the powders[1].
So we went back to our tablets. It might cost slightly more, but hardly a significant expense by any stretch.
Now, there might be some powders that work better which aren't available here in Norway. But I gotta work with what I got.
[1]: https://www.forbrukerradet.no/siste-nytt/test-av-oppvaskmidd...
At least in the US my experience has been the reverse of that. Several of the companies seem to have used the pods as an excuse to increase the number of chemicals that require chemical burn labels on the packaging and switch "Best By" dates to very literal "Use By" dates. With those pods, there's a thin water-soluble plastic that is also prone to melting at the posted expiration dates as all that is between you and second or third degree chemical burns.
No thanks. I worked food service in High School and had more than enough Chemistry classes in college to have too much healthy respect for chemical burn notices to trust any of the pods at this point. (Especially as someone who lives alone and will almost never use an entire package of pods before "Use By" dates.)
I haven't tried powders, but I did go back to liquid detergents even though there's only about one option left on store shelves where I shop which have now devoted so much space to the wasteful plastic tubs of the pods.
The solution might be to put powder in the pre-wash tray and a pod in the dispenser. Or you could cut the pods and split the powder between the prewash and the dispenser.
I know they exist in the commercial realm, but I'm not 100% certain the wife is ready for a Hobart machine in the kitchen ...
I used to just use the Kirkland pods and they worked fine too. The reason I started using powder in prewash is to get any loose fat dissolved so that it doesn’t clog over a period of time, not sure if that’s a valid concern. And yes, I do run hot water before starting the dishwasher.
I (as is common for many middle-class South Africans) have a domestic worker who cleans the house, and in general you just have to accept that domestic workers will tend to use quite a bit more cleaning products than is necessary. At least with tablets, they will always use a set amount.
It's not their money that they're needlessly wasting and the thing not being clean is a more immediately noticeable problem with their work than you finding you're spending a lot more than usual on cleaning products.
It also wouldn't work to try give them a budget on cleaning products as then you're encouraging them to skimp on using enough so they get more money in their pocket.
Although our domestic worker is a lovely person who I help out as much as I can, at the end of the day she has limited skills and education, so can't demand very much of a salary, hence why she and many others in her position is a domestic worker.
When you're the one who does all the cleaning yourself and pay for the products you use, you'll try find the amount to use that definitely gets the job done, but isn't needlessly wasteful.
I also like the convenience of the tablets, you don't have to think about the amount or possibly making a mess or pouring too much powder in, etc.
Where I live this feature is called hot fill, I believe, and a lot of dishwashers don’t even support it. For those that do support its still generally not recommended to use it since the dishwasher now can’t do any rinsing with cold water, which is not only wasteful but I’ve heard the hot water can damage the water softener in your dishwasher.
But if you do hook it up to hot water (which is a lot more common in the US, I think) this makes a lot of sense.
In this particular case, it's spending 40 minutes of my life on something that could be explained in 4 sentences.
there are a lot of YT vids that can be summed up essentially in 2 sentences and I don't need to see 4 ads first.
YT's actual AI summary is useless, arguably net negative
"This video explores dishwasher detergent, focusing on a new powder formulation. The creator details the science behind effective dishwashing, including pre-wash cycles and water temperature. Independent testing results comparing the new powder to leading pods are revealed."
Also I should add Gemini (the app) is able to access YT transcripts most of the time, so sometimes I'd just paste the link and ask for a tldr. One of the few reasons to go for Gemini app, not google ai studio.
That said, Technology Connections is worth watching just because videos are very pleasant, it's probably my favorite YT subscription right now.
On the page it shows an extra TLDR button near the like button.
You can change the prompt to modify how the summary looks and has an optional mode with links to specific timestamps.
This video explores dishwasher detergent, focusing on a new powder formulation. The creator details the science behind effective dishwashing, including pre-wash cycles and water temperature. Independent testing results comparing the new powder to leading pods are revealed.
I've noticed that they all seem to not give away too much so you still have to watch the video to get the conclusion. It makes sense why they do this for creators, but I do agree it would be awesome to just read the conclusion on many of these.
Oh summer child, they do that because they'd serve less ads.
Heavy Duty + Hot Wash doesn’t usually work. Doesn’t finish washing.
Heavy Duty + Sani Rinse doesn’t usually work. Weird residue issues for entire top rack.
Heavy Duty + Hot + Sani doesn’t work. Both of the above issues at once!
But, as it turns out —
Normal + Hot + Sani does work, perfectly, repeatedly.
The takeaway from the latest video for me is that the options aren’t Boolean on/off flags for different cycle-specific parameters, the cheap U.S. rental dishwasher comprehensively alters the entire program based on which total set of options are selected in non-intuitive ways.
So I have to use Normal not Heavy, Hot Wash and Sani-Rinse, or my wash cycle doesn’t wash properly. Which is absurd and obnoxious, but TIL, and suddenly I’ve had two consecutive loads of dishes come out clean for the first time in a year of trying.
No, the pods didn’t work either, as it turns out my dishwasher doesn’t reach the “enzymatic cleaning” temperatures off my rental’s barely-120F water using Hot Wash alone. No, the filter isn’t dirty. Yes, it drains fine. Yes, I’ve run cleaning cycles with several cleaning powders. Yes, run the tap to hot. Etc etc.
TLDR for the entire video: If your dishwasher isn’t cleaning fully, even if you use maximum powder or pods or cleaning it, make sure you’ve tried counterintuitive combinations with Light/Normal instead of Heavy, or Sani Rinse to improve the wash cycle, etc. Ruling out unlikely combos because they seem illogical may prevent you from finding a working set. (And if you’re using a powder formulated by anyone who sells colorful dishwasher pods, it’s probably designed to be less effective than the powder in their pods.)
The worst thing by far about the pods though is the smell. I don’t know why anyone would want to eat off a fragranced dish but that is the vast majority of the market I guess.
In terms of powder I use seventh generation fragrance free and I have no issues with it.
It's good to know there's another HN poster out there like me who doesn't mind using Electron.
Business opportunity something something AI
Following his cleaning instructions and, subsequently, his usage advice, did the trick.
Regarding the latter, notably adding the recommended prewash dose of detergent in addition to the main dose, and running the kitchen sink's hot tap until the water is fully hot before starting the dishwasher. Here in the US with our lower power capacity, resulting in dishwasher heating elements being restricted to lower power to avoid circuit breaker trips, when the dishwasher is correctly connected to the hot water line (typically, of the kitchen sink), doing this results in a hotter prewash and often also wash.
This all really does make a substantial difference.
Take the time to watch his dishwasher videos. If you struggle at all with the performance of yours, you won't regret doing so.
What to look for is any powder or powder-filled pod with a) no AEs and b) does contain amylase and protease , two food-eating enzymes that are often omitted for who knows why.
365 Whole Foods brand pods are my go-to
Without rinse aid your dishes will never be even remotely dry unless you manually wipe them dry yourself.
> next, rinse aids. use them. this isn't a scam.
I'll trust the dishwasher expert until there's some proper citations.
You have to realize that every time you sip a glass or eat off a surface that's provided by a commercial entity, you're getting items that have come in contact with industrial appliances that dispense rinse aid.
I have a difficult time believing that something so ubiquitous is as harmful as you claim, but I'm open to being convinced.
what does that even mean?
Any citations here?
Edit: i see the linked pubmed in a child comment now. But it seems to be not in humans, so saying it "damages your gut" is not an appropriate conclusion.
Doubly frustrating since mine is a small, single-drawer dishwasher, so pods are even worse since I can't break them down. It leads to me having way too much detergent in the dishwasher and I end up with residue on the dishes.
https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/sainsburys-conce...
And this has worked for me too:
https://www.waitrose.com/ecom/products/essential-dishwasher-...
Pods are a different story.
At some point, I'll maybe post up the pics of repairing the door hinges - previously it was leaking badly because the chunky metal hinges had cracked and bent, pushing the door up enough to not squash the bottom lip seal. Unobtainable parts now, but if you have a welder...
If you don't use a JTAG cable and a MIG welder on the same project in the same day, can you really call yourself "full stack"?
Dishwasher detergent doesn't make suds. Dish soap does. Are you sure you're using the correct stuff? Or prewashing the dishes for some reason and not getting all the soap off?
With dish liquid.
It's almost like the movies where the wash machine fills the house with suds, and the occupants go floating out the front door.
After your weld, I hope you consider replacing all rubber with silicone, and add lubrication to at least an annual list.
The hinges broke because someone leaned on the door with their full weight while it was open. The grease on the hinge pins was perfectly okay too.
Ariston used to be a quality company.
Simply changing back to powder completely stopped the error and the leaking and this was in a 1 year old dishwasher
They are more expensive, but I buy them on sale at Costco for about $16/100, so at $0.16 per load I really don't care if powdered detergent is only $0.03 per load or whatever.
There is clearly a revealed preference for pods among consumers for these things, and "proving" that everyone is wrong for liking them is just not a very interesting exercise imo.
Grocery floorspace that was once primarily staples and whole foods is mostly now junkfood.
Proper razors have been replaced with disposables.
Skincare & toothpaste products contain sodium laureth sulfate , which lathers well, but causes mouth sores and skin irritation.
Letting consumers choose usually ends up optimizing superficial and sometimes harmful traits.
> Skincare & toothpaste products contain sodium laureth sulfate , which lathers well, but causes mouth sores and skin irritation.
This reminds me of how some of my house guests will accidentally splash water all over the bathroom counter and even the mirror when they wash up in the morning. I don’t say anything, to be polite, but they clearly lack technique lol.
This works for me:
0. store the dishwasher powder (box) under sink.
1. Open dishwasher door
2. grab box, place OVER the opened door.
3. dispense powder into cartridge in door (with spoon, tilting box, etc)
4. put spoon back in box OR fully tilt box back upright. “Crumbs” will drop onto the door, that’s OK.
5. move box back under sink.
Even if I was messy, I personally couldn’t make myself spend 5x on pods to avoid cleaning crumbs under the sink once a month. When i think of convenience i think of a dishwasher saving me hours every month. Not saving 10 seconds a month to wipe crumbs under the sink. :-)
We clearly all have different preferences and ideas of “convenience”. I respect that.
With a pod there is no technique to be improved. They just work, every single time.
I strongly doubt the stuff is good for your skin, so I've only done this a few times.
And yes, it’s not good for your skin, so avoid immersing your hands in it or wear gloves.
The most critical part is the part you put the coffee in, which you can just put in the dishwasher every so often. Soaking the top compartment might make sense, you could use a dishwasher but I'd worry about the rubber seal.
But he said that almost as a throwaway, with almost no explanation of his methodology in determining this, nor discussion about how common this problem might be.
https://youtu.be/WnBb3DLlVPwsi=1fW2qg8_Y1SmxkKo
Tl;dr He actually tested each cycle, timed what it did, and measured the energy with a Kill a Watt. He also found the repair manual, which included a diagram of each cycle that matched his tests.
His ultimate finding was that all of the cycles and modifiers did wildly different things, none of which correlated in any way to their name.
That said, based on his advice in a previous video, now I run the hot water tap until it's hot. I put a pod in the dispenser, and I sprinkle some powder into the dishwasher. My issues with the dishwasher getting the dishes clean went away.
- One of the key factors in powder over pods in his prior videos was cost. Cheap powder runs about 6.6¢/oz. The brand he’s promoting is $1.11/oz, nearly 17x more expensive than traditional powder. When comparing per-load costs, Cascade pods are about 39.5¢ per load and the promoted powder is 58.5¢ per load, or 48% more costly than pods. The price to performance is terrible and could only be justified if you also consider external factors like their sustainability practices and the donation of all profits to coral reef restoration. Not discussing price seems like a huge gap to me.
- I was disappointed that he only personally compared and tested washing performance against a pod and the promoted powder, rather than also evaluating a traditional powder. Could he have replicated and compared the subpar performance reported by others?
- I would have assumed that, if the pre-rinse is supposed to get hot, the heater would run until it reaches the temperature target. Is it normal for a unit to simply not care? Last I had done reading on this, whether to attach to the hot or cold side is actually a contentious issue, mostly around the gas vs. induction-based heating costs in water heaters, in addition to temperature losses in the pipes. If the pre-wash expects hot water, then that’s an extra point for the hot side backers. I guess one should always check their manual to determine best-practice on the purge and line placement.
It feels like his channel suddenly changed to go into "let's make some money", carefully packaged in a "non-profit / charity" deal.
Maybe I'm just overly pessimistic.
The thing about Hank Green is that he has been doing this sort of stuff (good things) for long enough time that I don't have trouble believing that this stuff a: pays fair and not over inflated salaries, and b: all the profits really do go to charitable causes.
I also don't think Alec is getting paid per sale, maybe he got some kickback for the consultancy, no idea. He would be obligates to disclose if he was getting a kickback, so I guess well see. If he is lying about such an affiliation, these things have a good chance of bubbling up especially for a channel the size of his.
Not sure if water can be introduced to bind the press, or maybe some other material.
Or did they not test the "putting some powder into the prewash" thing and so it was just "powder released all at once" vs "tablet released all at once".
Even there I'd expect some mild improvement from the powder mixing more easily than a plastic wrapped tablet (though maybe if the content inside is liquid this factor is reversed?).
Does this mean the big corps do have some chemical advantage that cancels out the crappy delivery mechanism?
Or does it mean that a mechanical spray prewash step isn't meaningfully improved by chemicals in most circumstances?
I was more alarmed by the wrappers being plastic. I had assumed they were some clever biodegradable thing but they're not.
So, even if they had equal cleaning performance, economically the powder would come ahead.
As it turns out, the 1/6th-as-expensive powder does an even better job than the pods, making the powder an even more obvious choice
(Unless you really value the handling convenience of using a pod and were willing to accept poorer results at a higher expense)
Namely, (spoiler) he finds some schematics in the door that would have informed his analysis prior. The fact he didn't just say, "hey you might have this in your door and could be helpful,..." And then proceed to do the analysis with the full information provided from the data.
Secondly, the purging test only compares hot water and "cold" water, and doesn't actually test the duration to get hot water to temperature. That is, is the 25s it takes to get up to temp matter? From the timings in the video it does, but it just felt like he was comparing purging and not, instead of hot water vs cold water.
Thirdly, hows do these advice change for newer models? Surely the dishwasher companies know some of this and can make things better.
I will be taking some of this practices to my dishwasher, but it is a newer Bosch model, and I would imagine I need to do some research to understand what is applicable to my dishwasher.
One aspect I like about it is that they have a fragrance-free variant, and even the "fragrance" one is not too bad. A second aspect I like is that it's biodegradable, et cetera. So a bit lighter on the environment, I hope, and the SDS is prominently available on the website.
I think another thing which is under-appreciated is that you need to know how to do the basic cleaning chores for your dishwasher-- for example if it has a filter, learn to clean it! Otherwise its ability to clean will probably be compromised.
That way you prevent polluting drink water with microplastics.
But you can buy a large box of generic and very cheap no-bullshit pods at Costco, and simply put two or even three of them in a load.
If you're going the multi-pod route, you can put one in the dispenser and one or more right in with the dishes.
powder deploys during rinse and wash. pods deploy only during wash (or only rinse if people put the pods into the tray, which is common)
And the dishwashers are designed with a hardness index in the hopper . you're supposed to line up the soap with your local hardness level to avoid residue.
I'm not sure if my machine even has a hardness marking, but when I used liquid dishwasher soap, I simply filled up the compartment every time.
As to the cost, yes it's 3X, but if you're reading this and you have a Costco membership, it's still a rounding error.
Pods just make life simpler and cleaner (no messy powders and gunky liquids in the soap cabinet), which is why I even have a dishwasher in the first place.
is my experience of dishwashers extraordinary ?
but if we talk about powders, they can be very different with different performance. There are commercial powders (for restaurants and such where dishwashers run on very short cycles) that I afraid to put in my dishwasher and there are eco powders that are made from unicorn tears (tried once, they cleaned dirt but leave stains on clear glass). i went through sds of a bunch of them. most of them have same similar basic ingredients, but in different proportions
Perhaps part of the issue is that the presenter in the video is using a somewhat primitive machine.
A couple of months into the experiment with the powder, the dishwasher started to smell a bit foul, which usually indicates time to clean the filters, which I did. But this happened vastly sooner than I was used to with the pods.
Even if the powder's performance sucks intentionally because Cascade made it worse now, as a sibling comment suggested, ultimately that's the only powder option still available here.
I like chocolate milk, made by mixing chocolate powder (Nesquik) into milk, and somehow everything except pods manages to leave a film of the chocolate powder over everything. I haven't watched this video yet, but my suspicion is he's using bad pods - ones that really are just packaged detergent without the extra chemicals they often include in the pods nowadays.
I wonder if part of it is differences in water hardness and such.
It's also why he's endorsing a new powder product he was involved in developing: it performs as good or better than the pods.
The new one (Bosch 500 series) takes three hours on its default "auto" cycle. No prerunning the tap to get hot water for the first fill, no worries about rice cooker pots. It runs for so long (quietly!) that everything gets soaked properly and comes off, sparking clean, no problem. Both the consumable (brands) that came with the machine as samples - the tablets and the rinse aid - are stocked in large packages at Costco at a per-wash cost that's negligible. I do put in rinse aid because drying is a weakness in this machine compared to the old one. That, and you can't run two loads in the same evening after a party. Prewash? Who cares, the dishes come out clean.
And that's kind of the whole point isn't it? Not to have to geek out with your dishwasher. Just fill it, get it started and expect to have clean dishes in the morning.
I mean, how come restaurants dishwashers wash things under 5 minutes? (Albeit with a lot of noise and with stronger water jets).
This guy has been incorrect in his yt posts so many times, I simply do not believe him anymore.
He is all about monetization and doesn't care about truth or accuracy.
I like pods because there is less of a chance my clumsy self, or younger kids can accidentally spill costly soap for my dog to try to lick up or overfill the dispenser. My dishes are almost never caked in fats and oils when I put them in. I do not use a pre-wash. If I do I break a pod in half and toss in the bottom.
This guy makes me roll my eyes. There is nothing more exhausting than a self-assured YouTuber lecturing others as if he has all the right answers. He is not wrong per se but not everyone has their own preferences and needs.
There's always chances with everything in life.
Perhaps teach/practice with your kids to be less clumsy - that will pay a lot more dividends than just using pods.