I’ve been using the soap compartment for years, I only recently just started chucking the packet into the silverware holder because I’ve heard that might be better (the little compartment might open too late and be less effective). I’m not totally convinced OP was doing a worse job accidentally
Maybe it depends on your model(like it was poorly designed or something), but in general the soap compartment should deploy precisely when it needs to. But, hey, if it’s working for you then who am I to say otherwise
I am currently on the other side - my soap compartment broke, and so I have to throw the packet in the bottom of my washer. It works… okay. The problem is, most of the soap goes out with the pre-rinse. So I often have dishes that I have to re-wash by hand now, versus never having to do that before. I dream of the day where I fix my soap dispenser.
If it gets stuff clean, you aren’t really using it wrong.
But… it didn’t.
They do come with a manual. (Says the guy who has never read his dishwasher’s manual.)
Houses typically include the appliances, so unless you buy from one of those rare boomer types that filed everything away, you probably don’t have it. I guess you could search it online, now I’m typing this out…
Every home I toured when I was buying had a manual stack laid out for the appliances.
I thought it was weird.
Now I own a home and when I get an appliance I just toss the manual on the stack.
Or maybe you buy a house and later renovate the kitchen, adding in a brand new dishwasher because there never was one to begin with.
Or maybe you buy a new development and it either has no kitchen appliances or furniture, or it has brand new appliances so the manuals and other documents are kept.
Lots of ways to still have the manual. Where I live, the cost of a new development is maybe 20-30% more per unit of area than a condo in a 40-60 year old commie block, but they look way nicer inside and out and they keep heat way better, which is important when you get really damn cold winters. Plus you can get better loan terms if it’s certified C energy class or above usually. For some banks it has to be A. Downside is you have to wait while they build the damn thing.
Or maybe like me, buy a house that had a dishwasher, pull it out and throw it away because you’re a single man.
Get married wife wants a dishwasher, buy a new one go looking for the manual one day and find the original dishwasher manual in the boomer folder of things left behind by the previous owner
You should get connected with the guy who has the dishwasher but no manual left by the previous owner, maybe it’s the same model
I’ve never had a landlord leave me manuals to my appliances
You can probably find it on the Internet.
I can only imagine what his dryer vent like.
Vent?
deleted by creator
Oh god, Roger had okra farts again
I read that it’s an American thing. Americans have dryer vents in the house that need to be regularly cleaned or they are a fire risk, while the rest of the world has a dryer lint compartment in the dryer, that also needs to be regularly cleaned or it’s a fire risk. FYI so that nobody gets butthurt: I don’t think either of this solution is better or worse, they are just different. This is no “muuuh America Bad Europe Good” comment.
Notable exception: dry/wash combos, they just rinse out the dryer lint with the next wash cycle
Edit: And both make sense respectively. Since in the US you mostly build with drywall, it’s cheap and easy to add a vent for the dryer. In other parts of the world where they build concrete walls, it’s not so easy, so if you choose to move your dryer room in the future it would be a pain in the ass when the dryer needs to be connected to a vent. So it’s much more useful to collect the lint and water in the dryer than to vent it out of your building
I live in North America.
My dryer has a lint trap.
My vent line needs to be cleaned regularly to clear lint.
Lint traps are not 100% effective and if you haven’t checked your dryer vent for lint recently, you should. If the heat from the dryer builds up enough, the lint can very easily start a fire.
Be safe out there folks.
Do you guys not vent your air externally?
Do you just vent the wet air back into the home?
If not you should get your dryer vent cleaned, your lint trap (which we have in ours also … ) is a first stage filter and does not catch everything.
Hope this helps you not burn your house down!
I had a dryer for a while that vented into the room. It didn’t just spew damp air though. There was a condenser and collector tank for water that had to be emptied between runs.
My dryer is connected to the water drainage pipe. Just like the washing machine. 1
Neither. The dryer either collects the water or it is connected to the sewage and dumps the collected water.
Meanwhile, I know people that should just not use a dishwasher bcz they can’t load it properly. Honestly, dishwashers are bloody useless. Washing by hand is faster and cheaper.
The trick to having the dishwasher work is to run the tap on the sink until the water is hot. Using powder or liquid dish detergent instead of those sub-optimal expensive tablets also helps, as does leaving sauces on some of the dishes or cookware (only scraping off solid chunks of food)
Even cheap dishwashers clean very well (assuming no clogged filters or mechanical faults) if you follow the above steps.
Dishwashers may not be as fast as going by hand, but the idea is that you free up time requiring active attention by using the appliance. Dishwashers also use much less water for a cycle than 99% of hand washing setups.
lol
That’s a good point, if he’s closing it every time it might be some kind of odd blindspot in processing, but still not stupid or incurious.
It’s a shame that the dishwasher the landlord installed has a shitty soap compartment that sometimes failed to open during the wash. When I tried to take it apart to see what the issue was, I couldn’t get it back in. So now I just chuck the puck in.
My parents were really adamant about not leaving any food on plates, so it really doesn’t make a difference to me.
Same. If I use the compartment it has like a 50% success rate. So I Chuck it in and it works well enough
Technology connections would like to know your location
Such a good episode! Or…entry into his YouTube series? Idk what to call it. Just “video” seems wrong.
One of the most useful videos on YouTube that EVERYONE in the world should watch.
- The money saved. I bought a pack of tablets for 10$ a month, now its 15$ a year for the powder. That’s 6.300$ saved in a lifetime
- The amount of waste reduced since there is no individual packaging of the tablets
- The dishes are cleaner than ever
- NO downsides. It’s less work to pour some powder than it is to grab a tablet. Well at least almost no downside: It’s hard to find powder, there are like 15 different tablets in the supermarket and maybe 1 package of powder.
Still, this video improved my dishwasher-life soooo much.
A cheap liquid also works just fine.
I watched the video and was not really convinced
- 5€ pack of tablets lasts about 3 months for me
- The tablets I buy don’t have a wrapper. They are covered in a clear, plastic like material that dissolve in water
- Can’t comment on this
- Tablets are zero effort compared to powder
Powder is objectively cheaper though.
- Powder is still cheaper. Just less cheap for you since you probably don’t use your dishwasher that much, but it’s cheaper
- The dissolved material is still waste material, the waste is just in the sewage and not in your bin
- I just add this point because of the formatting
- This is subjective, but I think it’s slightly less work. You either have to make sure your hands are dry to not dissolve the wrapper or you have to throw away the wrapper. Either way it’s not a lot of difference
That though his episode about can openers also has had improvements to my life
why I always read the manual like 2 or 3 times
Mix both worlds. Like I have learned from a very investigative YT video. He tested and measured dishwashing in many different ways, and came to the result that a) tablet in that place in the door is the thing to do, but also b) a bit of dishwasher powder into the little compartment right next to it under the flap. This is for the first cleaning stage, and since we use this trick, our dishwasher runtime (which is dynamically depending on cleanlyness of the dishes) has gone down by about 20 minutes.
How does a machine know whether the dishes in it are clean?
Ask the machine, I don’t know, but it works.
Are you referring to Technology Connections video on dish washers? This video
Obviously.
Yeah exactly, that guy above you is a fucking idiot who brought nothing to the discussion. I’d hate to be related to them, or even use the same brand of cigarettes
how was that obvious? do you know how much information is on YouTube with 29 different ways to do something?
Tongue in cheek
Nope, the one I’ve seen is way older than just six months.
If so, it’s a bad summary. The video advocates against tablets
because they don’t do prewash, if you’re putting a tablet in main wash and powder in prewash, should be fine.
Its not that uncommon that some people don’t know how to use every day stuff correct and use them wrong. One thing I’ve noticed that a lot of people use wrong are thermostatic radiator valves. Its not a simple valve and the numbers don’t indicate on how far open the valve is, its a temperature setting. I’ve often told people to not set it to 5 and rather set the target temperature and 3 is about 20°C, so room temperature. At work all engineers don’t get it and we stupid little IT guys with a smaller degree get it right.
To be fair, they aren’t that accurate. Its pure mechanical and the sensing happens in the thermostat but when it closes the valve, the radiator is still full of hot water. You need to find the correct setting for your room and so on. With electric ones, you can fiddle with the settings, to be more accurate.
Also, they measure right next to the heat source and the markings can’t compensate for better or worse insulation. It makes (almost) no sense to put temperature markings on them.
My dishwasher was caked in that white film that denotes very hard water when I got it. Came with the house. Literally did not clean anything put in it. Found some stuff online called Afresh. Comes in tablet form. Tossed one into the machine ran an empty cycle and now it works like it should
I think you’re talking about lime scale.
I’m pretty sure the afresh just descaled your dishwasher.
Many dishwashers have a dedicated spot for a “rinse aid” like jet dry, and I’m pretty sure that is just a prevention method for this exact problem.
IDK, I’m not a scientist or anything.
Rinse aid is what we call a surfactant. It disrupts the surface tension of water, which in turn lessens its ability to cling to surfaces.
You know how when you get a smooth surface of glass or plastic wet, there will be a lot of beads of water that just cling there and don’t go anywhere? Unless they grow big enough to start finally running down the side? That’s surface tension in action. Adding the rinse aid will reduce water’s ability to bead up like this on dishes. Instead, water will be more likely to run down the surface in unbroken sheets instead of beading up.
The primary intent is that more water will simply drip off the dishes due to gravity. This does make dishes come out dryer after a drying cycle, and/or decreases the time the drying cycle takes or the energy it requires to get the same effect. But the main reason wanting water to drip off of dishes is to prevent limescale on them.
When water evaporates, only the water disappears into the air. Anything that was dissolved in that water gets left behind. If your water is hard, that will mean there’s a bunch of calcites that will stay behind as a whitish powder called limescale. So if you wash dishes with hard water, let the rinse water stay beaded up on them, and dry it out via only evaporation, you get some limescale buildup on them in the form of so-called “water spots”.
If instead you add rinse aid, more of the water will drip off the dishes, taking all the dissolved calcites with it. Less water has to evaporate, fewer calcites are left behind on the dishes, so less limescale and fewer water spots. Thus why many brands of the stuff show photos of crystal-clear glass on the box. A water-spotted glass will be cloudy and speckled. Rinse-aided glass will–supposedly, anyway–be clearer.
I’m not a scientist either, but from what I remember from reading the manual; rinse aid helps with drying the dishes, makes it so that water don’t stick to them as well. Added dishwasher salt is what helps with lime scale. My dishwasher has a separate salt container, and I then tell the dishwasher how hard my water is and it will add the appropriate amount of salt to the water.
Feel free to correct me if I got it backwards.
I couldn’t possibly correct you because I don’t know enough to know what I’m doing myself.
Since neither of us are scientists, we might have to patiently wait for someone to come along who is, that can straighten out facts here.
Just RTFM?
I read somewhere that around ⅓ of people (at least in my country) are effectively illiterate. They can read but they can’t really understand what they read. They can’t solve logical tasks and would fail for example to take medication according to written instruction. It does explain a lot.
Call communists, they are good at illiteracy elimination.
Even of the literate people, far too few bother reading instructions. People who can read and interpret law texts, but they still click away a pop-up unread when setting up a new phone for example. The only people who I’ve only ever had a good experience with when it came to diligently reading and following instructions + escalating the problem when the instructions were unclear, were professional accountants.
Is your country the USA?
This is a way broader phenomenon than just the US, though granted the US educational system might skew things a bit in a negative direction versus most other supposedly “Developed” Nations.
IMHO, in general very few people have to really think things through in their life or work and most people can live life in what’s pretty much an auto-pilot of habits most of which were picked up in childhood, teen and early adult years, and such people simply don’t have any “training” on figuring complex things out by themselves and will have trouble understanding complex subjects.
Further, the instructions for advanced domain stuff (for example Medicine and some kinds of Tech) are often riddled with domain specific language that people without a broader vocabulary won’t understand.
I call all the autopilot people “Listers” aka, they need a list of steps. If anything happens that the steps do not account for, they get stuck and cannot proceed.
I work in IT support and the number of times I’ve gotten a call from a lister who hit a random, benign dialog during a routine process, called me, and I only clicked “ok” to resolve the concern… Well, it’s too damn high.
The fact that we don’t teach people critical thinking and problem solving in standard (and generally mandatory) education, is baffling to me. Education has become a list of things to memorize in order to pass.
Don’t get started on UI updates to their most used programs.
I think that’s less due to low intelligence or poor education it’s just being completely out of their depth. I could probably do a car engine rebuild if I had perfect instructions that tell me EXACTLY what to do (and the right tools). But as soon as I got off track I’d be pretty clueless.
that people without a broader vocabulary won’t understand.
That’s why dictionary exists.
If you’ve ever tried to read a foreign language book when your knowledge of the language is merely basic and tried to use a dictionary to solve the problem of many words being unknown, you’ll know how frustrating that becomes and fast - one actually learns faster at the beginning by just keeping on reading even if not understanding a lot of things.
Further some of the “words” are often not words but acronyms, so not likely to be in a dictionary, plus a lot of domain specific words aren’t in general dictionaries either (good luck finding the names of certain chemical chains and their properties in a general dictionary when trying to understand the booklet in a box of medicine).
Last but not least often even the explanations for some words require understanding of some concepts that people do not understand (most people probably know what “analgesic” is, but how many know what “antipyretic” - a not to far away concept given how many common medicines have both - is?).
Things which are supposed to be simple can turn into veritable dives down the rabbit hole to fully understand for those outside that expert domain if they were not simplified for ease of access to the general population, so it’s hardly surprising if many people just chose to blindly use something as advised without even trying to understand it (which, let’s be honest, it’s probably the correct way for most people to used things like for example medicine if the source of the advice is a medical doctor).
Don’t get me wrong: people should be more curious and more often trying and figure things out beyond the merely “how to use”. At the same time, the information that comes with from expert domains in things targeted at non-experts should be as much as possible reduced to common language (though even that is a balance, since a ton of things required several layers of explanation to fully explain to non-experts).
foreign language book when your knowledge of the language is merely basic
There are dictionaries for this too.
one actually learns faster at the beginning by just keeping on reading even if not understanding a lot of things.
Yes and no. I used to do this, but when I sat down with dictionaries and translated one giant chapter of fanfic without skipping unknown words and preserving all jokes, I greatly improved my understanding of foreign language.
so it’s hardly surprising if many people just chose to blindly use something as advised
Many people don’t even have RTFM skill, so they can’t follow advises they didn’t read.
At the same time, the information that comes with from expert domains in things targeted at non-experts should be as much as possible reduced to common language (though even that is a balance,
If you don’t, then expert domain becomes common language. How many people don’t know what voltage is?
since a ton of things required several layers of explanation to fully explain to non-experts).
Try to open wikipedia article for something very common. Soon you will end up reading 5 articles about scientific disciplines and 6 articles about mathematical fields.
It’s funny because i learned 6 foreign languages, 2 of which to fluent level and another 2 to good level (and the other 2 to “I manage to get away with it” level ;)), and the approach of using of a dictionary to learn the meaning of the words which I tried at first didn’t work at all well (it was slower and way more frustrating) and what did work best was just exposing myself to the language (in two different ways for two different languages, one by just consuming media of that language whilst the other by living in a country were people spoke the language) and going along with the flow without worrying about the words I didn’t know, so quite a different experience from that.
Anyways, my point isn’t that most people can’t dig down on things by for example going into Wikipedia or that I wouldn’t prefer if they did, it’s that most people either don’t have the time or the inclination to do so, and expecting them to be different is denying human nature.
In my experience with explaining expert domains to non-experts, you have to try and meet them in the middle, which will pull more people in to try and understand it that merely standing fast on my side of the domain language barrier and demand that the climb that mountain to get to me.
That said, some people will never even try, no matter how much effort you put in making it easy for them, and sometimes it’s not even stupidity (which, as something one is born with, it’s kinda excusable, IMHO), it’s just laziness.
I’ve worked with sysadmins all over the world and I agree it’s not just a US problem. Lots of people will remember the exact sequence of steps to accomplish a task, but when something goes wrong they don’t know how to read what’s on screen and adapt to it.
Which other country believes Earth is Flat?
I think the modern flat earth idea started in the UK but I don’t actually know of anyone who believes it, it’s still very much a “village idiot” thing.
Your username 🥺
For the love of God, and all that is holy…
The ones I know have been born-agains.
Which kinda tracks.
If believing one thing with every fibre of your being is your new foundation stone, dismissing another belief that doesn’t contradict your first one can become tricky.
That’s a tiny minority of people and an ultra-specific belief.
I would say that the prevalence of the belief in fairy stories being real (aka Religions, Cults and so on) would be a pretty good indication of just how common and widely spread the Comprehension Handicapped are all over the World.
Fuck it, do both; clean dishes
Dawn dishwasher soap would get hard reading your comment.
yes, double your consumption for no reason
It’s what you’re supposed to do though, you need soap for the prewash otherwise it does nothing.
Don’t do it with pods though that’s an insane amount of waste
True, I’m thinking about the powder or liquid
The pods themselves are a waste. Just get liquid or powder detergent. It’s cheaper and does the job just as well (and possibly even better depending on the dishwasher)
Does nothing is a bit of an overstatement - I agree that it’s working non-optimally without detergent in the prewash-cycle.
Most people use too much detergent. Put the right amount in the wash and pre-wash, it’s probably less than what they used before, and the dishes are cleaner. Too much detergent leaves powdery residue.
Just use powder. Put some in the compartment and a little into the basin/on the door. Now your pre-wash cycle is more effective than ever! Also, powder is cheaper most of the time. And also convenient - no individually wrapped pods!
That’s what you’re supposed to do!
The Technology Connections content everybody is talking about covers it. The main wash’s detergent goes into the little compartment, which is closed, then a little extra goes on top to help with the pre-rinse.
That is the dumbest thing about pods. If you want to use your dishwasher “correctly” with detergent in both the pre-rinse and the main wash cycle, you need to use two pods for one load of dishes!
Either that or open & divide the pods I guess, but then you aren’t really using “pods” are you, lol.
We had a new washing machine that for the first two washes smelled really bad and made a screeching noise as well. Just before sending it back I noticed that we forgot to remove the styrofoam around the drum…
