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I was right about dishwasher pods and now I can prove it [video]

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Re: I was right about dishwasher pods and now I can prove it [video]

#401

Post by db48x »

stavros wrote: post #396
rpdillon wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, and bad design is all around us every day. Learning about how your equipment works is a good idea!

I agree, but telling an overworked parent because their dishes are dirty because they didn't take the time to deeply understand the mechanism of their appliance doesn't tend to go down well.

If a machine doesn’t function correctly or well, then fixing it requires blaming some part of the system that can change for the better. The dishwasher cannot change; it’s just a machine. It could be replaced, but that might be expensive. Much cheaper for the operator to change what buttons they press on the dishwasher instead.

If that requires reading a manual, or carefully timing the actual length of each wash cycle, or making a recording of each of those wash cycles so that you can work out how long they fill for and how many pre-washes and rinses that they each do then so be it.

Re: I was right about dishwasher pods and now I can prove it [video]

#402

Post by WorldMaker »

magicalhippo wrote: post #277
arjie wrote: post #130

I love that there are people who will go into this much detail on stuff. It's really cool that they do. But the whole thing is that if you follow some sequence of steps, powder will clean as well as or better than pods for a third the cost. All right, this isn't a significant portion of my expenses so I'll pay the 3x cost since my dishes come out clean anyway. I wish the description of the video was like an abstract.

> But the whole thing is that if you follow some sequence of steps, powder will clean as well as or better than pods for a third the cost. YMMV. Based on the earlier videos, I did switch back to powder, and I did follow the steps of putting some powder in the main compartment for the pre-wash. And i did try several powders. Yet, none of the powders were anywhere near as good as the tablet we use. It also doesn't cont…

> It also doesn't contain any nasty chemicals, unlike several of the powders

At least in the US my experience has been the reverse of that. Several of the companies seem to have used the pods as an excuse to increase the number of chemicals that require chemical burn labels on the packaging and switch "Best By" dates to very literal "Use By" dates. With those pods, there's a thin water-soluble plastic that is also prone to melting at the posted expiration dates as all that is between you and second or third degree chemical burns.

No thanks. I worked food service in High School and had more than enough Chemistry classes in college to have too much healthy respect for chemical burn notices to trust any of the pods at this point. (Especially as someone who lives alone and will almost never use an entire package of pods before "Use By" dates.)

I haven't tried powders, but I did go back to liquid detergents even though there's only about one option left on store shelves where I shop which have now devoted so much space to the wasteful plastic tubs of the pods.

Re: I was right about dishwasher pods and now I can prove it [video]

#403

Post by burnished »

dangus wrote: post #384
dpoloncsak wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I wanted a summary of Citizen Kane, I would expect it to include the ending, yes.

The value in the content is experiencing it. The moment some long form content comes out we are all TikTok kids who want a five second summary. Never mind the fact that YouTube provides a compete transcription that you can copy/paste and dump into an LLM, making this entire thread, as I mentioned before, pointless. The people asking for a summary are lazy people who want to be spoon fed trivia dopamine hits.

Tangent but it is funny to me that we focus on tiktok but the news is as bad or worse in terms of super fast tidbits interspersed with ads, tragedy, and local weather

Re: I was right about dishwasher pods and now I can prove it [video]

#404

Post by russdill »

MarioMan wrote: post #284
emtel wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that energy efficiency requirements prevent this. Dishwashers have a fixed energy budget they are allowed to expend, which may not be enough to heat cold tap water up to the optimal cleaning temp.

That’s pretty wild, since the energy needed to get it up to temp would still need to be expended on the water heater side. There are no real energy efficiency gains unless they can somehow engineer an effective cold water cleaning.

Many hot water heaters use gas which may be cheaper than resistive heating depending on where you live. Additionally, there are now water heaters that use a heat pump which will be more efficient than either.

And of course they'll be setups that use solar heating or are programmed to heat by time of day.

This is all down in the weeds though because a dishwasher does not use very much water.

Re: I was right about dishwasher pods and now I can prove it [video]

#405

Post by jancsika »

arjie wrote: post #130

I love that there are people who will go into this much detail on stuff. It's really cool that they do. But the whole thing is that if you follow some sequence of steps, powder will clean as well as or better than pods for a third the cost. All right, this isn't a significant portion of my expenses so I'll pay the 3x cost since my dishes come out clean anyway. I wish the description of the video was like an abstract.

> All right, this isn't a significant portion of my expenses so I'll pay the 3x cost since my dishes come out clean anyway.

It's good to know there's another HN poster out there like me who doesn't mind using Electron.

Re: I was right about dishwasher pods and now I can prove it [video]

#406

Post by MarkusWandel »

I guess I'm just a dishwasher neophyte. My old one was crude, loud, dried hot, and got the job done (to hot, dry dishes) in one hour. Rinse aid wasn't even a word in our household (we don't have hard water here - no water spots). But don't put in a rice cooker pot with rice residue in it - it'll be baked on so hard that you need a 1h soak to get it off.

The new one (Bosch 500 series) takes three hours on its default "auto" cycle. No prerunning the tap to get hot water for the first fill, no worries about rice cooker pots. It runs for so long (quietly!) that everything gets soaked properly and comes off, sparking clean, no problem. Both the consumable (brands) that came with the machine as samples - the tablets and the rinse aid - are stocked in large packages at Costco at a per-wash cost that's negligible. I do put in rinse aid because drying is a weakness in this machine compared to the old one. That, and you can't run two loads in the same evening after a party. Prewash? Who cares, the dishes come out clean.

And that's kind of the whole point isn't it? Not to have to geek out with your dishwasher. Just fill it, get it started and expect to have clean dishes in the morning.

Re: I was right about dishwasher pods and now I can prove it [video]

#407

Post by WorldMaker »

Spare_account wrote: post #324
kiwijamo wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on the cycle for some. Mine one doesn't do a prewash for the 45mins QUICK cycle. But the ECO cycle does follow the normal prewash-then-wash process as described in the video. Hence I normally use the ECO cycle and put the correct amount of powder in both components. However in a hurry I sometimes just use the QUICK cycle and only use the main component as I know there is no point in adding more. The manual…

I'm fascinated at the number of people on an ostensibly techincal website who don't learn how their equipment works. You've summed up in a few sentences exactly how mine works, but there are dozens of commenters in this thread who appear to be unaware of the basic funcationality of their dishwasher. All I would add to what you've said is that when my Bosch does include a pre-wash in a cycle, it checks how dirty the w…

Yeah, I think there's some interesting related trends involved to. I still feel inclined with every new appliance to read the full manual, but I know not everyone has that kind of time or attention, especially if "I can just watch a YouTube video of it" is an option.

On the other side, you see appliance companies responding to that and shrinking their manuals of useful content because they assume you might just go watch YouTube videos instead. Some of the better ones might even include a QR code or 3 to officially produced YouTube videos, though so far that still seems rare.

Even in this video is the surprise reveal that something that used to be very common in manuals, full cycle timing diagrams, was "hidden" on a data sheet attached inside the door itself. Admittedly, it's great in that case to know that should that model be taken to repair that a repair shop might find that data sheet easily without having to search manufacturers' websites, but on the other hand some of those diagrams would be quite useful to me if I was the user of that machine.

Re: I was right about dishwasher pods and now I can prove it [video]

#408

Post by beAbU »

losvedir wrote: post #83
383toast wrote: post #2

summary: The creator argues that most dishwashers are designed to use a pre-wash dose and a main wash dose of detergent, a fundamental often ignored by single-dose pods, and presents independent ASTM testing confirming the new powder matches or exceeds the performance of a leading premium pod. The video also features a detailed demonstration using temperature logging and peanut butter to stress the importance of purg…

This has been his stance for a long time. He has a lot of dishwasher videos for some reason! One thing I can't get a good answer to is whether the "prewash" step is universally the case or not. I have a good Bosch dishwasher and there's no compartment for a bit of pre-wash detergent. I don't even know if my dishwasher cycle has a pre-wash step. I would assume the dishwasher manufacturer knows what's best. The owner's…

> He has a lot of dishwasher videos for some reason!

He is known as Angry Dishwasher Man for a reason.

Re: I was right about dishwasher pods and now I can prove it [video]

#409

Post by mlsu »

dangus wrote: post #367
red-iron-pine wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah but it doesn't tell you the point. i don't have 40 minutes to watch a long-form video essay about detergent. give me the gist, which based on context is that powder works better and is cheaper

This whole thread is kind of infuriating. The gist you took away is not quite right because of course you didn’t watch it. Why does everything have to be summarized? If you want to see the content watch the content. Technology Connections videos are interesting, entertaining (to nerds at least) and a lot of effort goes into them. Watch them at 1.5 speed if you’d like. Or don’t watch them at all. But the “give me a tr…

I want my whole life to be optimized, so that I can consume far more but get nothing out of any of my consumption. Anything that requires art, ingenuity, and human effort can be compressed to a simple bullet point summary.

I don't care that Technology Connections is the perfect blend of campy midwestern technical pedantry, substantive detail, great editing, understated humor. It must undergo machine digestion, its humanity stripped, before being fed to me as a flat slurry. This way, I can optimize my consumption of slurry without ever encountering any of that pesky 'human spirit.'

Because that is optimal.

Re: I was right about dishwasher pods and now I can prove it [video]

#410

Post by tonymet »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #123
tonymet wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue of letting consumers choose the worse product is that the good products get pushed out of the market. Grocery floorspace that was once primarily staples and whole foods is mostly now junkfood. Proper razors have been replaced with disposables. Skincare & toothpaste products contain sodium laureth sulfate , which lathers well, but causes mouth sores and skin irritation. Letting consumers choose usually ends…

> Skincare & toothpaste products contain sodium laureth sulfate , which lathers well, but causes mouth sores and skin irritation. This is only true for sensitive individuals. Billions of people use these products every day and have no issues.

Don’t worry about that canary falling over , he’s just hypersensitive
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