Just finished hand washing about a dozen pieces of silverware that the dishwasher didn’t clean. :dubious: I always look silverware over closely as I put it back in the cutlery drawer. There’s always a knife with a speck of egg or a spoon with something on it. I set the dirty ones aside and hand wash. PITA.
I have a three year old Maytag. It seems to get most of the silverware clean but somehow there’s always a few it misses. It just doesn’t spray the water evenly through the silverware baskets.
I had a glass pot lid in the top tray that it did a piss poor job on too. Hand washed that.
Aren’t machines supposed to be time savers?
I always rinse my dishes really well before they go in the dishwasher. I shudder to think what it would do with filthy dishes straight from the dining table. I just can’t make myself put dishes with stuff stuck on them directly in the dishwasher. You know that stuff would just float around in the water and get on other dishes.
I barely rinse at all. It usually gets pretty clean. Make sure to spread them evenly. You can stagger them up-down, although knife blades go down. I rarely have problems except with things like cream cheese or peanut butter on butter knifes. Those get “prewashed” with canine or feline assistance.
I don’t have a fancy dishwasher. I’m not sure what you guys are doing needing the rinse all the time. Other than the above, I only rinse caked-on things or rice. If something’s not washing, put it on the bottom. The dishwasher is orders of magnitude more sanitary than your sink. I’ve never had problems with gunk “reattaching.” The dishwasher drains, and make sure to run the garbage disposal by the start of the cycle.
Maybe it’s time to run a dishwasher cleaner through your machine. I run mine with a cup of vinegar occasionally, for lime.
Mine is at least 10 years old – it came with the house. Silverware isn’t a problem. I make sure the flatware doesn’t “nest” and the handles are placed down.
I’ve found that rinsing in advance is important IF the dishwasher isn’t run for a day or so. If I run the dishwasher before the gunk has dried on the silverware, the dishwasher does it just fine.
We’re going to try putting less silverware in the basket. Give more space around each item. This basket has a slotted top that keeps the forks,spoons etc. from leaning against each other. It’s an improvement over my old dishwasher’s wide open basket.
Mine works really well. We usually give things a quick rinse in water when we put them in the sink.
Have you used something like dishwasher magic. We ran in a few months ago, and got a huge improvement on performance on our five year old dishwasher. The only other thing I do is I run the hot water tap right before the dishwasher to make sure that the water is hot.
There are several variables involved in using dishwashers:
Age and condition of your dishwasher.
Hardness of your water supply.
Quality of the detergent you’re using.
How you’re loading the dishes into the machine.
If your dishwasher is over 12 years old, you don’t have a water softener, you use generic store-brand detergent, and you load dishes without considering whether the water can actually reach them, then you’re probably going to be one of the people who thinks dishwashers are a joke.
Egg residue is the Achilles heel of every dishwasher I’ve ever used. I’ve never seen a dishwasher that could remove dried egg whites from plasticware.
Load your silverware tines/scoop up.
Keep them seperated so they don’t nest against each other.
Eggs are a bear, no matter how good your dishwasher is.
As for the glass lid - Did you have it laying down flat, so it held water? Anything that will hold water will gather gunk/food particles in a dishwasher.
My dishwasher does an excellent job. I don’t pre-rinse (except for cookware with stuff caked on it from heat), and as long as I don’t block an item off from the spray somehow, it gets everything nice and clean.
I do add a cup of vinegar to the wash pretty often–lime deposits are a serious problem here. It helps get dishes clean, too; I used to use it just for that when I had a less effective machine. Of course, I use a lot of vinegar for cleaning in general. It’s cheap and effective for lots of stuff.
