Don’t think much of dishwashers? Blame your landlord. With the right care, a dishwasher is a messy person’s savior. The benefits of a dishwasher far outweigh any annoyances.
I’m putting a real post on this blog just to respond to the AGAINST THE DISHWASHER but I’m hoping this blog will be a place where I can generally rant about bad cleaning advice (stop telling me to use vinegar for everything!!!!). It’s not that I’m a clean person. No, not at all. I am human entropy. Every room I move into I leave a trail of disorder in my wake. This is why I need a dishwasher.
I lived for many years without one. And hated every moment. Somehow when I get near a sink I manage to destroy everything within a 3 foot radius with splattering of both clean and dirty water. I am not good at stuff like that. I leave the kitchen worse than it was before. Everything takes me five times longer than it should.
Dishwashers are great. They have so many benefits, including preventing me from destroying the kitchen. Contrary to popular opinion you don’t need to rinse anything before you put it in the dishwasher, just remove any large debris and stick it in. Don’t believe me? Look at your dishwasher’s manual. If you even have one.
That’s the problem, you even have a dishwasher, it’s probably one that your landlord purchased in 1990. They use it to mark up the rent and don’t maintain it unless you are incredibly lucky. You’re probably better off buying your own mini dishwasher than renting a marked-up apartment just for the appliances. The bonus with those are that you can run small loads and not have to deal with trying to muster up a full dishwasher, especially important when dealing with roommate chaos.
As far as maintenance I’ve encountered all manners of horrors in rental dishwashers. For one, if you have both a garbage disposal and a dishwasher, if they are installed improperly (without the right air gap), you get garbage disposal odors in your dishwasher. I sadly know this from experience. The other thing is dishwashers need to be cleaned. And anecdotally I feel like most people don’t know that? Especially in Chicago where we have cursed hard water that will make any dishwasher perform terribly if it’s not regularly treated with an acidic descaler. I hate to admit this, but dishwasher cleaning is one of the rare chores where vinegar actually is a good solution, though I prefer odorless citric acid or if I’m lazy I just buy Dishwasher Magic.
Also try to find a copy of the manual if you can. Some dishwashers have filters you need to take out and clean. I’ve never encountered this and I am thankful because I can’t imagine the previous tenants would have ever done such a thing and it would have probably been a eldritch horror. I have cleaned the gasket (the rubber seal) and that is often pretty gross and can cause odors. Get an old tooth brush and get all that gunk out.
The other problem I encounter is “natural” dishwashing detergents. I’m sorry but I’ve tried like 10 and they never work, so I use the most poisonous looking pods I can find (the Finish ones that look like Tide Pods) and pray using less water makes me less of an environmental criminal.
So in conclusion:
- Find out if your dishwasher has a filter and clean it.
- Clean the gasket.
- Use a dishwasher cleaning product regularly, especially if you have hard water.
- You actually have to use rinse aid, otherwise your glasses will look very terrible.
- Don’t rent an apartment just for the dishwasher, it’s probably bad.
I do whole-heartedly agree that it’s way too hard to find out if the dishes in a dishwasher are clean. I remember growing up we had a magnet that you could switch from dirty to clean, but none of my dishwashers have had magnetic-compatible surfaces. It is very weird. I’ve tried stick on things but the cats take them away.
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