Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Dishwasher Woes

I've never been thrilled with the quality of our dishwasher. But we're renters and it's a built-in, so we put up with it. At least we did... until a couple days ago with the bowl pictured above came out of the dishwasher after a 'heavy duty' cycle. Most of the other dishes were clean. Glasses on the top shelf almost always come out with stuff baked into them. Gross. But none of the other dishes ever looked quite like this. Wow.

I've since gone on a googling rampage attempting to figure out what's going on with the dishwasher.  So now I've run a cycle with just citric acid in the dishwasher, I've added vinegar to the rinse agent thingy, and I've checked all the filters and stuff to make sure they're not clogged with food. It's improved slightly, but we still have the problem with the glasses.

Any dishwasher experts out there want to offer some tips?

5 comments:

Leanne said...

EWWWWWW. My only suggestion is rinsing all the dishes before they go in...If they still come out with pieces of food, there is definitely something clogged. Most new dishwashers come with a built in garborator in the drain to grind up food before it goes down the drain, so maybe it's busted (or non-existent)...no other ideas!

Mama Liz said...

older dishwashers suck A-S-S! Ours is the same, we even had a repair man take a look at it. We could them by hand, but we wont!

Lauren said...

Hmmm, are you running other water at the same time your dishwasher is running? You probably don't have a water pressure issue, but I know at our house when multiple water things are running the pressure sucks and the dishwasher doesn't run as well. Also, we sometimes run hot water in the sink right before putting the dishwasher on to get water up to temp. I don't know if either will help, but those are our tricks.

Jennie said...

Leanne - most of our dishes get a light rinse before going in, but I guess we should try a heavy duty rinse? It seems like we're wasting a ton of water!

Liz - exactly! I end up re-washing a half dozen by hand each time we put the dishwasher on anyhow. Although this last time (after trying the citric acid and vinegar) I think there was only ONE(!!!) dirty glass to be re-washed!

Lauren - sadly, living in a hotel means there's always someone using the water. Although, our dishwasher is super close to the hot water tank for the building... so it shouldn't take long to get hot water.

Leanne said...

Another thing....technically, if it always does this, the dishwasher is broken - it's not washing your dishes! So your landlords should get someone in to look at it and see if they can fix it...