I recently bought a new dishwasher, after many happy months of having to check every item that came out of the old one, and rewash 80% of them.
Anyway, the instruction manual of the new machine has a list of handy hints about what should and shouldn’t be washed in it. Aside from the obvious stuff (fancy gold-rimmed crockery, non-heatproof plastics) and the less obvious, but understandably unsuitable stuff (who the hell would put towels in the dishwasher?), was this part:
“Do not place items contaminated with paints, varnishes or tobacco ash in the dishwasher.”
Paint and varnish I can understand. They’d gum up the filters and so on. But what damage would tobacco ash do? I can’t see why it would be any worse than other insoluble food particles.
I don’t smoke, so it’s not an issue, but if I did I could imagine washing ceramic ashtrays in the dishwasher. Apparently this would be a Bad Thing. Any ideas why?
It’s a Hotpoint Aquarius. And yes I know I could write to the manufacturer, but I don’t care that much, and in any case the SDMB can probably provide some more interesting, if spurious, theories
My parents are both smokers. Several times growing up we had ashtrays that were improperly emptied stuck in the dishwasher, resulting in gray, ash-flecked dishes. Very unpleasant.
-Lil
My reason for asking was to determine if it might be a model that has soil sensing capability - technology that passes laser light through the dirty water to see how opaque it is to determine length of cycle. My guess was that the ash would throw off the reading and greatly lengthen cycles. (I’m a dishwasher nerd ) Looks like yours does not posess this feature, so nevermind.
Hmm, I hadn’t thought of that. Seems that it’s just the fineness of the particles that’s the problem though, as they would pass through the filter and get recirculated. Thanks for the replies, all. Another tiny mystery of the universe solved…
Ash of any kind tends to be pretty heavy in relation to its volume. After all, it’s the stuff that was was too heavy to float away as smoke. Particles that are both fine and heavy tend to sink right to the bottom of a body of water; silt is the stuff that’s left on a streambed after the water has washed out the lighter parts of dirt.
So basically, your ash particles are going to sink to the bottom of the dishwasher and accumulate, instead of floating down the drain with the food particles that have a lower weight:size ratio. (What are the proper physics terms here? I feel like I should have used “mass” in there someplace …)
I suspect that the oils in the ash make rinsing them away more difficult. Anyone who’s tried to wash the cigarette smell off of plastic knows what I mean - it takes a lot of detergent and hot water, far more than you’d expect.
I don’t think it’s completely nutty to consider putting towels in the dishwasher. It gets hot and soapy and probably would disinfect my dishtowels if I used them. Heck, they tell you to put sponges in the microwave.
Weight if you’re talking about a tendency to sink. Mass if you’re talking about inertia (which isn’t dependent on gravity). Weight:size ratio is more often called “density”. Note that fine dense particles still take longer to settle than coarse dense particles: surface area to volume ratio increases as radius diminishes, so tiny particles have a lot of surface area per unit mass, and that’s what causes friction.
This is what I think. We’re both smokers and if I don’t rinse the ash trays well before sticking them in the dishwasher, ashy funk gets all over my dishes.
Whatever you do, and I know everybody’s going to roll their eyes and say I’m dumb and I guess I am, but it only happened a few days ago and it’s, heh, burned onto my memory - if you stop it in the middle of heated dry to grab something, and you notice something on the floor of the machine, like say your blender gasket, before you pick it up think about the heating elements. Like that they might be right next to your item and BLAZING HOT.
My thumb knuckle actually stuck to it for a moment.
) Looks like yours does not posess this feature, so nevermind.