Okay, I have a dish-washer. Now how do I use it? (Truly basic questions inside)

Factual Questions
1

(Not sure if this is GQ or IMHO)

For the first time in my 39 years of life, I will be living in an apartment with an automated dish-washer. I have no idea how to use it. :o The dish-washer is pretty old, 80’s vintage or older (probably older, given that the stove in the apartment is a lovely Harvest Gold.) :eek:

As I understand, the dishes should be rinsed thoroughly of all food particles, right? And glasses and tupperware go on the top shelf, upside down, but all other items go on the bottom part? What about lip-prints on the glasses, do I need to worry about them or will the machine clean them off?

What kind of detergent is best? Powder or liquid? (Is there even liquid dish-washer detergent?) There’s some sort of thingie on the door for the detergent to go in, and it seems to have two compartments? How do I fill it? How do I close the door without all the detergent spilling out?

What do I need to watch out for? I know that with clothes, you have to wash some in cold and some in hot and so on - is that the case with dishes, too? Dishes won’t shrink, of course, but will different temperatures have different effects on the cleanliness of the dishes or other factors? Is there a dish-washer equivalant of the Gentle cycle? If so, what do I use it for?

I truly loathe hand-washing dishes, despite having done it for most of my life. I welcome my new dish-washing-machine overlord. But I don’t have the slightest clue what to do with it…:smack:

2

Especially with older machines, there’s a certain amount of guesswork at first, even among us experienced dishwasher users :slight_smile: until you get a feel for the machine’s strengths, weaknesses, quirks…

The newer machines are efficient powerhouses … those older ones, not so much. So yes, you should rinse/scrape whatever food is on the plates, and soak off anything that’s dried/crusted/baked on. Lip prints on glasses should be fine - if you’re washing those off, you’re basically hand-washing anyway.

In my household, we have fairly hard water, and we’re too cheap to pay for the energy to run the “heat dry” part of the cycle. That means, if you run the dishwasher and then leave everything you get water spots all over everything. If that’s your situation, then the solution is to only run the dishwasher when you’re home** and then open it up as soon as it’s done running so things can dry faster. (Cold, dry A/C air will speed that along!)

** You should do this anyway at first - Og forbid the thing leak, but if it does …

One tip: if the little things (Tupperwares, small bowls, plastic cups, etc.) on the top shelf have a tendency to flip over during the cycle - thus trapping water and gook and generally not getting clean - a good trick is to lay a metal cooling rack over the whole thing once the top shelf is fully loaded. The soapy water goes right around it, but it’ll keep things from flipping over.

Also, if you have an SO, you will not agree on how the dishwasher is to be loaded. Guaranteed. The silverware basket is Ground Zero - handle up or down? All the spoons together, or separated by knives so they don’t nestle together? Despite what people will tell you - and trust me, everyone (including me!) has definite opinions - there’s no hard rule about those things.

3

True. The only wrong way to load a dishwasher is if you find broken glass and dishes at the bottom when you’re done.

You can load any small items that will fit onto the top shelf. Pots, mugs, measuring cups, colanders, whisks. It does indeed help to wedge small plastic bowls in.

Modern detergent comes in small, pre-measured balls. You just drop one into the detergent compartment, which should have a snap or slide to shut the door until it opens automatically during a cycle. There are lots of possible cycles and each model will have a different set. Check the internet for your model to see if you can pull down an old instruction manual.

The best way to test out an older dishwasher is to put in a variety of dishes with various levels of schmutz. Any new one will wash anything clean. Older ones take experimentation. I like to keep spoons from spooning myself, but I doubt it’s a big issue. Everything goes in together. The makers know that nobody will do the separation of objects, so washers are designed to handle everything at once. The lower cycles are more to cut down on water and electric use than anything else.

There are lots of additives in supermarkets. They help to cut down on spotting or remove grease or whatever problems you might have. There are special holes and compartments to add them to, and of course these also vary from model to model.

Every once in a while clean out the insides and make sure than none of the drain holes are clogged with anything, anything from a dropped fork to a container lid to a bit of plastic wrap. Don’t let grease build up either. If you don’t get good cleaning at first, check this to see if there’s a problem.

But mostly you’ll love having a dishwasher and you’ll wonder how you ever go along without it.

4

Ummm… Handle up. How else are you going to grab the clean silverware?

Make sure you use dishwashing machine liquid or gel instead of hand washing liquid. Unless you have a kid who likes to see bubbles pour out of kitchen appliances. If there’s no lid for the detergent compartment, then you probably don’t have a pre-rinse cycle, so it’s fine for the detergent to ooze out when you close the door: that’s how it gets to the dishes.

5

Youtube yielded some videos as to proper loading procedure.

And second the “make sure it’s dishWASHER soap”. Regular liquid soap in a dishwasher will result in a Candid Camera moment.

6

A friend told me how he thought his dishwasher was no good. The soap drawer never dispensed and he had to toss the soap in on top of the dishes. He saw the same machine at someone’s house, and asked how well it worked. She told him they had a problem at first, the soap drawer wouldn’t open if you put a large dish in front of it, but after she figured that out, It was working great. My friend kept his mouth shut, and says it all works fine now.

7

I also have this problem in my older dishwasher. Unfortunately, it isn’t a problem with mechanics, it is just broken. I get the dishwasher cubes and throw them in the silverware basket. I read this advise on the side of a detergent box once and it works reasonably well.

Also, everyone knows that silverware is down (so it stays clean when you pull it out) and cups, bowls, large utensils and plastic go in the top and everything else is in the bottom. Just don’t ask my husband. He doesn’t know what he is talking about. :stuck_out_tongue:

The biggest problem people seem to have is over-filling a dishwasher. When you put something in, don’t just assume the water can get to it. Make sure all surfaces are reachable. Some dishwashers also have a stick that rises up through the middle to send water to the top dishes. Make sure to leave that hole open, if you have one.

8

You can experiment with how clean the dishes have to be rinsed and with the amount of soap. The worst you’ll get is some cooked-on goop that needs to be soaked off. My experience is that most dishwashers will handle sauce-like stuff pretty well, but that certain particulate things–rice and chili powder being the worst–need to be rinsed off completely. If your water is hard, you will need much more soap than with soft water. We cut our soap use in half when we got a water softener. Too much soap was as bad as too little had been before.

9

Dishwasher manuals I’ve seen all say to put some silverware handle-up and some handle-down, particularly with spoons, so they don’t nest together and go uncleaned.

Also, make sure the dirty surface of dishes faces toward the center of the machine. Look inside and see where the water jet arm thingies are, and see how the holes are situated. This tells you how the water sprays onto dishes.

Each machine has its own quirks, and so do your dishes. Your soup bowls might be too big to fit in the top rack, or your coffee mugs too fat around to fit in the glassware row. You’ll figure it out eventually. Just don’t try to stuff too much in at once and you’ll be fine. And always get in the habit of emptying the machine ASAP after you run it, and of rinsing and putting dirty dishes directly into the machine.

10

If by “lip prints” you mean lipstick, you’ll want to wash that off first. Many dishwashers won’t remove it. Don’t overfill it, be sure there’s decent spacing between the items in the machine (especially plates in the bottom rack), buy a decent detergent, and good luck!
:slight_smile:

11

Cleaning the inside of your dishwasher every three months is a good idea. HG has a special product for this. It is a powder you put in an empty dishwasher, then let it run a full cycle. It cleans up the hidden dirt and makes your machine run better and it prevents repairs. HG has a good product, called service engineer.

It is better to use separate salt and rinsestuff. Many brands of dishwasher soap sell " all in one" tablets, but they don’t work as well as putting in the salt and rinsestuff separately. The rinsestuff goes in a reservoir in the hollow door, btw. My disher has a reservoir for it that I fill once every two months or so. It has a little lever on it where you can tell how much rinsestuff you want. If your dishes come out wet or with chalk spots on them, you need more rinser stuff per cycle. The rinse stuff is used to “grease up” the dishes so the water droplets don’t stick to the surface, but run off easliy leaving the dishes dry and spotless.

12

I don’t wash my uncoated aluminium pots in the dishwasher. It discolors the metal. Takes a lot of elbow grease with an SOS pad to get them shiny again.

I just bought a new maytag. It has this odd cover with notches that fits over the sliverware basket. I don’t like it because it forces you to put spoons & forks pointing up and butter knives down. That’s backwards to me. I want the bowl of the spoon or the fork tines in the basket. That way the part that is used gets the full force of the water.

The notched cover also limits how much silverware fits in the basket. I may remove it soon. :wink:

13

Wood stuff also gets grey in the dishwasher. So if you have a prized wooden salad bowl, don’t put it in. Those cheap wooden scrapers you buy at the dollar store? I put those in. They get grey, but they work just fine.

Also, occasionally thow in your glass vases, and your dishbrush and sponge if you don’t change those every week.

14

Maybe obvious, but no kitchen knives. The machine will polish the edge right off.

15

Dishwashers used to need soap in the door drawer, salt (it’s not NaCl but EDTA) in another compartment and another component, this one liquid, in a third compartment. Nowadays you get soaps which are 3-in-1 and go into the door drawer: get one of those and you’ll be saving a lot of work.

You don’t need to rinse off food (you may still wish to do it if it’s only you and it’s the kind of food that’s a PITA to clean if dry). You need to scrape it off, and there should be a basket in the washer’s drain where any solids will get trapped (you should clean it regularly); scraping leftover rice off takes no water, rinsing it off can take gallons. The machine should have a rinse function, which comes in handy when it’s partly loaded. It makes no sense to use it every time you put in a dish, a glass and two pieces of cutlery, but if you’ve put in enough for a family meal and have room for another meal, using the rinse function will need less water and energy than rinsing everything by hand.

16

Correct. Also, people tend to not get impaled nearly as much when the pointy ends point down.

17

Hard to believe, unless your machine runs with hydrochloric acid.

18

You can load it the way my daughter does, just pack as many dishes in there as you can fit and don’t worry about rinsing/scraping them first. 99% come out clean as a whistle. As for the other 1%, just leave them in there for another go round (whenever that is, probably next week).

19

Dishwashers are indeed ungood to sharp knives. Screws up the handles and the can make them loosen from the tang (the bit of the metal that is inserted into/between the handle material). And having other metal objects banging into knife edges does screw them up, too. Plus, they’re a cutting hazard.

It takes very little effort to wash and dry a sharp knife, which you should do right after using them anyway, because many foods are acidic enough to affect the metal.

20

I have this dishwasher where I used the dissolving packs with the gel in it, and it worked fine. I saw at safeway that they also sell detergent in the form of a powder, for much cheaper, so I bought that. Now everything I try to wash is coated with a white residue. I checked the box on the detergent and there’s nothing on there syaing that can’t use it with my dishwasher. Am I doing something wrong? Am I suppose dto put salt in it or something? :confused: