Our dishwasher does a horrible job drying dishes. A friend of mine who is handy around the house clams his dishwasher does rather well and has both a hot and cold water supply line. The hot water, plus the drying element, raise the water temp hot enough to give him good evaporative drying. However, I always heard dishwashers only have a cold water line*. Is my friend correct? Do some dishwashers have both a hot and cold water line?
*I’ve even been told he purpose of the element is to heat the cold water into hot water! Is that true or salesmen ignorance?
FYI: Consumer Reports makes no mention of drying capability of the models they rated. Nor do they mention if some models have both hot and cold water intakes. Nor, do they mention wattage for drying elements. (Is it assumed all drying elements are the same?)
I can recall my parents dishwasher always putting out a cloud of steam after running whereas my present dishwasher never seems to do that. (Maybe our element is shot?)
What does the SD have to say about all this? Ultimately, is there any way to tell how well a dishwasher will dry dishes?
Every dishwasher I have installed (OK, the two I have installed), have only had a hot water line. The heating element will heat the water in the dishwasher, but back in the energy crises of the 1970’s, if you had a gas water heater, it was recommended to run the kitchen sink hot water before you started so that you wouldn’t have to use the electric element in the dishwasher to heat it.
Some dishwashers have a “energy saving” mode where the heating element is not used for the drying cycle. Maybe this mode is active on your unit?
Single line - always plumbed to hot.
Toilets get cold, refers get cold. Dishwashers get hot.
Now - the speed drying (and eliminate spots): When the drying starts, OPEN THE DOOR! Hold open until the cloud coming out is spent.
This lets the steam out - it will take most of the moisture with it, meaning no water condensing on your glassware (spots) and a very short dry time.
One nasty side effect: is you have laminated (Melamite) cabinets, you will steam the laminate off the edges of the adjacent cabinets.
I think I may have heard of some dishwashers that have hot and cold water plumbed in, but I don’t recall the purpose*. In any case, if there’s only one line (which is typically the case) it’s always the hot and you should always turn on the nearest (usually sink) faucet until hot water comes out.
The element at the bottom is to heat the water if it’s not hot enough. It’s also used for drying the dishes if you have that option selected.
As for telling how well they dry. I’d just read the reports. They’ll likely say if there’s a problem, otherwise assume it’s probably safe to assume, on the default mode, one dries as well as the next. You can check Amazon reviews, but keep in mind, it’s mostly people that have problems that write reviews so if something has 500 reviews and 400 of them aren’t good, you have to remember that the other there’s probably 3000 people out there that are happy and didn’t write a good review, I know I never do.
*Thinking about it. It may be for if you chose something like ‘light wash’. A selection that’s not really meant for cleaning, per se, just for people that toss some stuff in there, but only have a full load once a month or so and don’t want everything drying onto their dishes, so after each meal they let the dishwasher give their plates a quick rinse…it might use cold for that…or I could be wrong.
I’ve only ever seen dishwashers that take a single, cold water feed. The last two I’ve had specified that only cold water is to be used. I believe this is true for most European dishwashers.
I suspect this is due to the drive for using less water (so easy to heat up) and lower temperatures for the wash.
As for drying, never had a problem. The element heats up the chamber and the pots come out squeaky clean and dry.
I have two AEG dishwashers which are high-end machines. One is in a holiday home (mountain cabin) so it doesn’t get used a lot.
I made the mistake of plumbing it to the hot water supply. Wrong.
The point of cold water supply to a dishwasher is that the cold supply can carry out an initial wash to get rid of detritus, before the main orchestra plays. Cold water removes food scraps BUT hot water bakes it on.
How do I know this? My wife constantly complains about the holiday home washer not doing its job and I grumbling say I will fix it…one day. My bad.
Meantime the home machine washes and dries faultlessly even after 20 years. Never had a repair. Never stopped.
The idea of plumbing a dishwasher to the cold water supply is completely bizarre to me. And hot water baking food onto dishes? No. Maybe European dishwashers operate differently, but American made ones should be hooked up to hot.
I call BS on that. You can’t bake food on with hot water.
Food that doesn’t get washed off, getting baked on by the drying cycle, yes. But next time you need to wash some pots and pans by hand, why don’t you see if it’s easier to do it with cold water or hot water.
As to Euro machines, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re exactly the same as US ones with the manual altered to tell the user to connect to the cold water to meet code. Maybe, if anything, they change some of the programming a bit, but they might not even need to do that.
If the hot water is baking the water on then your hot water heater is set too high.
Max temp a water heater should be set is 120 F. That is not high enough to bake the food on. And the temperature of the water being sprayed on the dishes will drop a few degrees.
My google fu tells me there isn’t one simple answer. The vast majority of people (from comments I’ve read) hook up the hot water supply to their dishwasher. Seems sensible except I was told to use the cold water supply and thus believed that was correct for all machines.
Not so.
Meile and AEG specify cold for two reasons:
The initial cold rinse washes off food which might otherwise bake on. Egg yolk and gluten - as in porridge. I’ve seen it - very little to be fair, just a minor irritation.
The cold water is sprayed over the outside of the chamber at the end to cool it and draw condensation to the walls, resulting in dry dishes. Makes sense.
What about things that have concave bottoms (pitchers, drinking glasses, etc.) where the bottoms are concave so water collects there? I’ve never had a dishwasher that could dry those out. We usually have to shake those out between the rinse and the dry cycles. Ditto plastic food storage containers which are concave downwards under their rims.
Our current dishwasher doesn’t allow us to run the wash/rinse cycle and the dry cycle separately, which is a real pain in the neck, because if we don’t pause it near the beginning of the dry cycle to dump the water off these items, they won’t get dry. That’s something we’ll be asking about when we replace it. Also our previous dishwasher had a range of delay settings, but our current dishwasher has only one option: a 4-hour delay. We’ll be asking about that, too.
The irritating thing is, this was one of Consumer Reports’ top-rated dishwashers, which was one of the reasons we bought it.
I don’t think you could ‘bake’ food on if you put it in boiling water. In fact, in most cases, that would probably help to clean it.
If the OP’s dishwasher is asking for cold water, it’s probably just to knock the big stuff off, then dumps the dirty water down the drain and heats the second batch of incoming water for a ‘real’ wash. I bet there’s even a pre-rinse cycle he can (and probably does) elect not to run.
The items I have like that, that are really bad, I try to put in the washer on an angle. The ones that sometimes just have a tablespoon or so of water in the top I set on the counter (right side up) while I empty the rest of the dishwasher and when I come back they’re usually dry enough to put away.
I think the hot water line has pretty much been the industry standard in the US for dishwashers, although there may be some running from the cold water line, I suppose to save energy by not having the water heated. Can’t imagine that being as effective, and if they did do it this way, at some point it may just run the heating element in the dishwasher longer, so not sure if it is saving them much energy after all. If there is a dishwasher that uses both cold and hot water lines, it would certainly not be the norm in my area.
It’s been a long time since I last installed my own dishwasher, but I remember it saying the water temperature going into it needed to be at least 120 degrees to be the most effective. Look on-line for the model of your dishwasher, it should tell you, if you don’t have the operators manual that came with it.
You should be able to tell quiet easily what water line is being used by looking under your kitchen sink right beside the dishwasher. Take a look and see if it is the cold or hot line that is tapped into.
I consider the water that collects here a feature, not a bug. It is a telltale as to whether the dishes are clean or dirty. When I empty the dishwasher, I turn all such items on their side (so the water can drain off) at the start and then empty the plates and other items that are dry. By the time I get to the coffee cups, etc…, they are either dry or dry enough to go in the cupboard.
I’ve probably installed 20 dishwashers when renovating or fixing kitchens. Never have I seen a dishwasher meant to be hooked up to the cold water supply, European, American or Asian made. The vast majority of dishwashers just use the water as it is from the hot water line, some higher end models have water heating elements to bring it up to higher temps. Pro tip: run the hot water before running the dishwasher so the water is nice and hot, most dishwashers only use a couple of liters of water per cycle, not enough for the tap water to reach full hot by itself.
Traditional American style dishwashers have a heating element at the bottom to dry and sterilize the dishes, this style of dishwasher will have a vent at the front or on the top of the door. The disadvantage of this style is increased energy consumption and damage to cabinets from steam. The European style has a stainless steel interior and are designed to drip dry with no drying element, the use of rinse aid makes a dramatic difference in how dry the dishes come out. We have a new Miele. Neither Mrs Fluffy or myself could give a flying F*** about spots on the dishes so I didn’t bother with rinse aid at first. The dishes, especially any plastics came out with a lot of residual water droplets everywhere. Using the rinse aid they come out bone dry.
So, make sure the DW is hooked up to the hot water supply, make sure the water is hot before running and use Rinse Aid, which is really *drying aid[/I.
I don’t believe ANY dishwasher can dry all items, 100% - all the time, every time. Even excluding items that may be blocked by another and therefore may not dry so well, if water pools in a concave object (or base), the dishwasher’s drying feature is not going to evaporate puddles that may form.