CHRISTINE: From the New York Times, you’re listening to The Wirecutter Show.
CAIRA: Hey everyone, it’s The Wirecutter Show. I’m Caira Blackwell.
CHRISTINE: I’m Christine Cyr Clisset.
ROSIE: And I’m Rosie Guerin and we work at Wirecutter, the product recommendation site from the New York Times.
CAIRA: Each week, we bring you expert advice from our newsroom of 140 journalists who review everyday products that will make your life better.
CHRISTINE: This week’s episode of The Wirecutter Show is called Dishwasher Disputes, Settled
ROSIE: Caira and Christine.
CAIRA: Uh oh.
CHRISTINE: Oh. She’s using her adult voice, I feel like.
CAIRA: Her serious voice.
ROSIE: Today on the podcast, we are discussing the appliance responsible for a great number of divorces in America. Any guesses?
CHRISTINE: I really have-
CAIRA: The refrigerator.
CHRISTINE: …the refrigerator. No, I think it’s got to be something like the washer.
ROSIE: It’s obviously the dishwasher.
CHRISTINE: Oh.
CAIRA: Oh duh.
ROSIE: In my experience, every marriage consists of two distinctive people and you’re either one or the other. You’re either the white glover or you’re the raccoon, okay? Stay with me.
CHRISTINE: I’m here.
ROSIE: The white glover loads a dishwasher like they’re in a high-end antiques shop, meticulous, organized, everything in its place. And then, there’s me, the raccoon. The raccoon takes its little paws with its little opposable thumbs and tosses those dishes in any empty available space it sees. Efficient, inspired, creative.
CHRISTINE: Infuriating.
ROSIE: Top rack, bottom rack, the air quotes silverware basket. We don’t discriminate. So in my experience, again, in my experience, the white glover tends to take umbrage with the raccoon while the raccoon is simply happy to be sharing a life with the white glover and now somehow, I’m no longer talking about dishwashers.
CHRISTINE: You know what? It’s funny because I know that this is a big deal in a lot of people’s relationships.
ROSIE: Sure is.
CHRISTINE: It’s not in my marriage, but I think that’s because we maybe are on the spectrum somewhere between the raccoon and the white glover. We’re well-matched.
ROSIE: You must have something that’s a metaphor for your marriage.
CHRISTINE: Yeah. I mean, yeah, there’s probably other things and we’ll talk about those in other episodes. But yeah, I don’t know. Caira, do you have this issue in your life?
CAIRA: Oh yeah. I fight with myself all the time about the dishwasher that I don’t have.
CHRISTINE: Oh, just for yourself. Right, right because you don’t have a dishwasher. Right.
CAIRA: But when I’m in other people’s homes, including my partner’s, I feel like as long as the dishes are clean, nobody’s fussing.
CHRISTINE: Yeah. I think I’m just so grateful to have a dishwasher because I lived without one for about 15 years, my first 15 years living in the city. So just having a dishwasher is just like this joyous, wonderful thing in my life.
CAIRA: And so you guys are not going to be fighting over who’s loading it because you’re just too grateful to have it.
CHRISTINE: We’re just like, “Oh my gosh, we don’t have to do it. That’s great.”
CAIRA: But in all seriousness, today we’re actually going to dive deep into dishwashers. How do they actually work? How can you get yours to work even better?
CHRISTINE: And we’re going to talk about detergents. We’re going to talk about all that and more with none other than Andrea Barnes, Wirecutter staff writer covering all types of cleaning appliances. You may remember her from our first episode on laundry. She’s a total gem and is going to be able to definitively tell us, Rosie, how you are supposed to load your dishwasher.
ROSIE: I can’t wait.
CAIRA: Did you win this fight?
ROSIE: Not a chance. We’ll be right back.
CAIRA: Welcome back to The Wirecutter Show. Our guest today is Andrea Barnes. She’s a staff writer at Wirecutter who specializes in reporting on large appliances like washers, dryers, and dishwashers. It’s like the Holy Trinity. Andrea was our first ever guest on The Wirecutter Show back in August when she talked with us about laundry and we’re so happy to have her back. What an honor.
CHRISTINE: Hey, Andrea. Welcome.
ANDREA: Hi.
ROSIE: All right, Andrea. Good to see you. First question, the question on everyone’s minds. How do dishwashers work, 101?
ANDREA: Well, I can tell you how they don’t work. A lot of people think that they fill up to the top with water once you close the door and that’s not what happens. Yeah, this is actually something that people have said to me.
CHRISTINE: Fill up completely from bottom to top?
ANDREA: Like an aquarium or something.
CAIRA: Wow.
ANDREA: Does not happen.
ROSIE: Like taking a bath. Like a bath for your dishes.
CHRISTINE: Yeah. Deep soak.
CAIRA: Every cycle.
CHRISTINE: Deep soak dish.
ANDREA: So yeah, so basically when you load your dishwasher and you put the detergent in and you start it, a few gallons of water will come out and sort of pre-rinse the dishes. Then the detergent will dispense and then more water comes out, two or three gallons. And then for the next, depending on how long the cycle is, so it could be like 30 minutes, it could be two hours, the water is circulated through the spray arms and sprayed onto the dishes and then it goes back down into the drain and then is pumped out and put over the dishes again. This is probably about 70% of the cycle and then the end, it will be rinsed again before if you have selected drying, the drying cycle.
CHRISTINE: So it’s just that water is just recirculating over and over again.
ANDREA: It is, and it wasn’t always like that. This is a somewhat new phenomenon. One of the comments I get a lot from people when they’re buying dishwashers or they install a new one is they’re surprised by how long the cycles are and it’s because of Energy Star regulations and certifications. Dishwashers are using less water, which means the cycles have to go on for longer and the water needs to be circulated for a longer time.
CHRISTINE: So I think people always assume that a dishwasher is just awesome because it is convenient. But if you have the choice, why use a dishwasher instead of hand washing your dishes and silverware?
ANDREA: So dishwashers definitely use less water. Modern dishwashers usually use around three to six gallons for a normal cycle. If you want to compare that to hand washing, let’s say an average faucet in your home when it’s running is running one and a half to two gallons of water per minute. Most people are going to take longer than two minutes to wash dishes, right?
CHRISTINE: Right.
ANDREA: So when you start doing basic math, you are definitely saving water with a dishwasher.
CAIRA: Is it more sanitary to use a dishwasher as opposed to hand washing too?
ANDREA: It depends. Yes, overall, absolutely yes. It’s more sanitary. If you wanted to run your water really hot with hand washing, you could probably kill a lot of bacteria, but in general, you’re definitely going to have more sanitary dishes running them in the dishwasher.
CHRISTINE: All right. I have a highly controversial question. I think it’s the thing that nobody believes, which is that we actually recommend that you don’t rinse your dishes before you put them in the dishwasher. So you should scrape, but you shouldn’t rinse them. But I’ve talked with people before about this and they just refuse to believe it.
ANDREA: Yes. I don’t know who started this rumor to have dishwashers not do their job, but that’s why the machine exists. It’s called a dishwasher, not a dish sanitizer. It’s also pretty cool. It’s one of the older American appliances. It was originally invented in the 1800s by a woman and if you-
CHRISTINE: Of course it was because women were probably washing all the dishes, right?
ANDREA: …exactly. It’s really cool. A lot of where women enter in the science world, a lot of it is through home ec. The dishwasher is not an exception to that. So if you consider that this dishwasher is nearing 200 years old, the concept of it, I’m pretty sure that your dishwasher can do its job if it’s at least a decent dishwasher. So there’s two reasons to scrape and not rinse your dishes. The first is that the point of the dishwasher is to wash dishes and it’s designed to do so. The second is that modern detergents work better with a little bit of soil. So if you don’t put any foodstuff or soil into your dishwasher, you run the risk of harming your plates and your glasses. You can see frosted glass. You’ll see etching on items.
CAIRA: So when you say scrape, you mean just if you have food scraps on your plate, you’re supposed to put those in the trash and then put your dish directly into the dishwasher?
ANDREA: Yes.
CAIRA: What about…I’m guilty of sometimes letting dishes sit in the sink for too long and then you have that crusty ring on your dishes and it’s kind of like you have to pick at it to get it off. Is that a situation in which is reasonable to completely wash it off or do you trust your dishwasher to get that as well?
ANDREA: It depends on the dishwasher, but I would say if it’s hard to wash off by hand, don’t expect your dishwasher to be able to do it without a little bit of extra effort. That might be a time to soak a dish before you put it in.
CHRISTINE: To that point, are there other times when it might be better to rinse your dishes? I just feel like sometimes like an old dishwasher or you’re at somebody’s house and they don’t have the best detergent or something.
ANDREA: Yeah, so that’s a good question. I would say that this falls more under a machinery difference. Most cars are going to get you from point A to point B, but every car is different and I would say dishwashers can also have sort of similar quirks. So if you have an old dishwasher, you’ve tried everything, you’ve rinsed the filter if it has one, you’ve tried better detergent and it’s still not cleaning dishes, I would say maybe that’s the case for rinsing. I would also say if you’re rinsing your dishes already, you might want to save up and buy a new dishwasher.
CAIRA: Oh no.
CHRISTINE: Okay. All right. That’s the bad news.
ANDREA: I know because at that point, you’re doing the work twice, right?
CAIRA: Well, if you’re telling us that we shouldn’t be rinsing your dishes before you put them in the dishwasher, I’m assuming that means that there’s a lot of buildup in the filter eventually. Wouldn’t that end up breaking your machine?
ANDREA: It depends on how liberal you are with your scraping, right? I think sometimes people get confused. When you say, “Don’t rinse your dishes,” they put a Thanksgiving dinner into their dishwasher and then they’re surprised they flood it.
CAIRA: A whole meal.
ANDREA: If you were to do things like that, not only would your spray arm start distributing debris everywhere, but you also would have potentially flood your dishwasher from clogs. So don’t do anything like that. But even leaving a fair amount of food once you’ve scraped off, so when I say a fair amount, I’d say a tablespoon of yogurt completely spread on a plate and dried out. Something like that would be totally fine and you put it in your dishwasher, enzymes break down the soils. So really, the things that get stuck in the filter are going to be things that take a really long time to break down. It’s going to be corn, lettuce. I mean, in dishwasher testing, if you look at any of our articles about it, we really put these dishwashers to the test. And I can only think of one instance where after a full ridiculous dishwasher load that no one would ever wash where something happened to the filter and it was really more an issue with the dishwasher, so yeah.
CAIRA: Okay, so then how often would you recommend people clean their filter and the whole machine itself?
ANDREA: I would say rinse it monthly?
CAIRA: Yeah.
ANDREA: Yeah.
CAIRA: Monthly.
CHRISTINE: What do you mean “rinse it?”
ANDREA: So the filter is underneath the bottom spray arms. So you find the bottom spray arms and you pull them off and then you sort of twist. What you’ll pull out is this little mesh looking basket, kind of tap it off. In your compost bin or your trash can and rinse it off in hot water and you’re good to go. You put it back in. You actually don’t even want to clean it that well because, again, the enzymes work a little better with a little soil.
CHRISTINE: Oh, so we all have a little bit of permission to be a little sloppy.
CAIRA: A little grimy.
ROSIE: Finally off the hook.
CAIRA: But you still have to do it monthly. I feel like we all passed over that.
ANDREA: I mean, look, that’s me telling you exactly what you should do, but realistically-
CAIRA: Do you clean it monthly?
ANDREA: …well, no, but I have a partner who does, so…
CAIRA: Oh okay.
CHRISTINE: Delegate.
ROSIE: …get yourself a partner. So that’s the filter. Do you have to be cleaning the machine itself because I feel like I’ve seen, and by seen, I mean, have been-
CAIRA: Victimized?
ROSIE: …suckered into from TikTok, putting a upright cup of white vinegar on the top of the rack or throwing in a half a lemon and just running a cycle with the idea that maybe that will clean the drum and the inside and the filter?
ANDREA: So that is something you can do. In general, remember as much as I cover cleaning, I also cover appliances. So I’m going to tell you what an appliance person would say. Citric acid. So I would say if you’ve rinsed your dishwasher filter and you’re still seeing some debris and you’ve checked for blockages or whatever or something just smells weird and you can’t figure out what’s going on, I would say to run a cycle with Lemi-Shine or Affresh.
ROSIE: So now, I want to know how you test these because we talked about testing washers and detergent when you came on for the laundry episode. How are you out here testing dishwashers? Paint us a picture.
ANDREA: It’s funny because in many ways, as much as I love laundry testing, dishwasher detergent testing is kind of my favorite, but-
ROSIE: Ooh, why.
ANDREA: …only in scoring? In actual prep, it’s the worst.
CHRISTINE: Like scoring? What do you mean by scoring?
ANDREA: Yeah, so I’ll-
ROSIE: Like the music you listen to while you’re…
CHRISTINE: Or is it like three people standing with cards with numbers on them, giving scores?
ANDREA: I’ll explain it. But to start before we get there, so basically there are a lot of industrial tests for dishwashers. The one we use is the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, AHAM. The dishwasher test basically takes different materials that they know can challenge dishwashers and they are run through cycles to see how they test.
ROSIE: So what are we talking…like Ritz crackers?
CHRISTINE: Is it like mac and cheese?
ROSIE: Egg?
ANDREA: Egg is a big one. Egg yolk. One of my favorites actually is raspberry jam to test for debris because…
ROSIE: The seeds.
ANDREA: …a lot of things break down when you start washing them, but you know a raspberry seed when you see one. If you have any wisdom teeth left over…
CHRISTINE: If you ever had a child.
ROSIE: I feel like how are they breaking down even in our own bodies? This is a separate episode.
CHRISTINE: They don’t. They don’t.
ROSIE: Are we made of raspberry seeds?
CAIRA: I don’t want to think about that.
ROSIE: Anyway, go on.
CAIRA: Do you guys do the crusty, flaky oatmeal that’s been left in the bowl over a day?
ANDREA: We do and it’s really interesting to see. You really start to see trends with certain dishwasher detergents and where they really excel with certain types of foodstuff through testing. Some are really awesome at getting oatmeal, but mysteriously, nothing else. When we test, so we have a full dish load, so it will usually be about 10 place settings, which includes bowls, plates, salad plates, and we put different foodstuff on them in quartiles. So we kind of change it up depending on the year, but one year, we did creamed corn, raspberry jam, avocado, and egg yolk. And for most of those dishes, we have them dry over a few hours, but then for three of them, we call them our impossible plates and we microwave them for a couple minutes.
ROSIE: I was going to say, are you like Jackson Pollock painting them on and then just letting them crust?
ANDREA: Kind of. Yeah. It’s not for the faint of heart. Every year when we do dishwasher testing, I don’t eat dinner because it just gets so gross. So the first thing we do is we run that full load with tomato juice coated glasses and wine stained and lipstick stained wine glasses. We run a full load first on the normal cycle. The normal cycle is the cycle that dishwasher companies are tested on. So this is the most energy efficient cycle and it’s the easiest way to find out pretty quickly how good a dishwasher is. It’s also important to note that we don’t expect perfect performance from any of these dishwashers with this test because most people aren’t putting this level of stuff into their dishwasher. When that cycle’s done, we open the dishwasher and we keep track of how dry things are, what kind of debris is left on handles, and then we literally score the dishwasher. So I and members of my team will sit and read off a number for each stain.
CAIRA: One out of 10, one out five?
ANDREA: The highest you can get is five and that’s bad.
ROSIE: Five is bad.
CHRISTINE: Oh, so five is bad.
CAIRA: Five is bad.
CHRISTINE: You want a lower number.
ANDREA: You want a low score.
CAIRA: So what exactly are you scoring for?
ANDREA: We go by the size of debris or the size of leftover stains. So if something is smaller than a dime, that would be a one, some things, and then it goes up. If it’s two quarters, that’s a five. So we go by coins.
ROSIE: There we go. There we go.
ANDREA: We score that and we always throw in some curveballs depending on trends we’re seeing in testing. But I love this form of testing because it’s very straightforward compared to laundry.
ROSIE: Are you also testing for things like the duration of the cycle or for how well it filters or is it really just performance, the main central thing a dishwasher is supposed to do, clean your dishes.
ANDREA: So how good the filter is going to be a part of how well it cleans and that’s why we have the raspberry seeds and coffee grounds and things of that nature. And probably the biggest test for that too is the tomato juice debris because again, it’s very easy to tell if you have a raspberry seed that is somehow mysteriously now on the back of a plate, you can really judge how the filter works. So the filter is definitely part of it. So most of these dishwashers run on sensor. When you’re putting a full meal’s worth of dishes into the dishwasher, the sensor is going to elongate the cycle. It is going to lengthen the cycle. So we don’t pay that much attention to dishwasher cycle length except for express cycles and how effective they are.
CHRISTINE: What about the rack? I actually have gone through two dishwashers in my apartment.
ANDREA: What?
CHRISTINE: Because my landlords are awesome and they replaced one or actually two that broke, so I’m on my third.
CAIRA: Wow.
CHRISTINE: And the newest one that we have, it has such a great rack. It’s just superior. The other two that we had had, we kind of realized we did not like the rack layout. Is that something that you consider?
ANDREA: Yeah, absolutely. So actually, one of my favorite dishwasher sources is a professor of robotics engineering now and when I first interviewed him, I was really curious how he transitioned from working at Whirlpool designing dishwashers to robotic arms and it was actually…he designed the collapsible tines, the joints on dishwashers. So he really walked us through what we want to look for in terms of recognizing quality in baskets and tines and racks and we take a lot of that into account. But sometimes, it’s you can just tell by handling something like when you pull the rack out. Some of them feel really wobbly and like they’re going to collapse and others, you can just tell are going to hold your dishes well.
CAIRA: So Andrea, I think this might be the most controversial question of this episode, maybe of Wirecutter Show’s entire history, but tell us. What is the correct way to load a dishwasher?
ROSIE: Iyanla fixed my life. Andrea fixed my marriage.
ANDREA: So to me, the most important part of loading your dishwasher is making sure that the spray arms are going to hit any of the dirty parts of your dishes. So that means don’t load your bowls facing up. It means to make sure that your forks and spoons are either loaded in the third rack or the utensil basket in a way where they will also be hit. In testing, we play around with different placements of utensils and you’d be surprised that actually a lot of times, those yogurt spoons or oatmeal spoons that you think the dishwasher stinks, it’s actually that you had it tilted a certain way and nothing was getting on it. So I would say that. You want to load forks and spoons, handles side down and then knives, blade side down. You also want to leave out certain items, so you do not want to wash wood items in your dishwasher. One, because you can ruin the wood and two, because you could also risk putting a splinter through your filter and causing avoidable problems, let’s say that.
CAIRA: I’d always thought that if you put bowls on the bottom rack face down, then maybe it would stop the spray arms from reaching the top rack. Is that a real concern to have?
ANDREA: Do you mean large mixing bowls?
CAIRA: Yeah, anything that’s larger than your average soup bowl.
ANDREA: I mean, don’t put two sheet pans on your bottom rack and block everything, right?
CHRISTINE: Well, that’s a good question. Should you be washing things like metal sheet pans or metal pots and pans?
CAIRA: The big ones.
ANDREA: I’m going to let that be a personal choice. I’ve experimented with it when we dishwasher test. It’s just not something that I would do all the time.
ROSIE: What about the edges of your racks? Is there a strategy to where you put things actually on the racks?
ANDREA: Yes. So the edges, especially the corners, if you think about the way a dishwasher works, the spray arms are circular in a box, so there are dishwashers on the market that can really get those corners. I’ve tested them. They’re great. That’s not most dishwashers.An example would be a really dirty Bloody Mary glass or a ramekin filled with brownie batter or something like that. It might not get totally cleaned depending on…so I wouldn’t put those there. I’d put them more toward the middle of the top rack.
CAIRA: Oh, so the middle of the dishwasher is the best real estate to get cleaned
ANDREA: If the machine’s good, yeah.
CAIRA: Sweet.
ANDREA: Some dishwashers have dead zones. It’s really interesting.
CAIRA: Just know your dishwasher.
ANDREA: Yeah.
CAIRA: Okay.
ANDREA: And I would say that if you consistently have dishes that are coming out, you’re being realistic about how much you’re scraping off, I would take a look at the manual and make sure because every dishwasher is a little bit different, but also, most dishwashers have multiple ways you can load the top. So it might be there’s another way you could place things that would be worth a try.
CAIRA: I was always told by my mom, love her, that you should never run your dishwasher and then leave the house because something could happen. What are your thoughts on that?
ANDREA: I think that’s good advice. I do not run my dishwasher when I’m not home.
CAIRA: I was really not expecting you to say that.
ANDREA: Really?
CHRISTINE: That is the curve ball. I thought you’d say it’s fine.
ANDREA: And the reason I’m going to say no is because so many dishwashers still use a heating element and heating elements can get very hot and you never know what could happen. Now, this is also being extremely cautious, but yeah, I wouldn’t do it.
CHRISTINE: Well, I agree with your mom.
CHRISTINE: So just to recap real quick. The best way to wash your dishes in a dishwasher is to scrape them, not rinse them. You should be loading your dishwasher appropriately and we do have a guide that talks about this on the site, right?
CAIRA: We do.
CHRISTINE: So we will share that in the show notes. You should be washing your dishwasher every once in a while. You should be cleaning the filter, cleaning the interior.
Andrea, you also wrote a piece about that that we will include in the show notes.
CAIRA: So now, we’re going to take a quick break and then when we’re back, we’ll get the final word on dishwasher detergent, liquids, powder, pods, all of it. We’ll be right back.
CHRISTINE: Welcome back to The Wirecutter Show. Our guest is Andrea Barnes, Wirecutter staff writer and dishwasher expert.
CAIRA: So Andrea, let’s talk detergent. You’ve tested over 35 of them but we really want to dig in deep. So dishwasher detergent, what’s in it and how does it work?
ANDREA: So the main cleaning agent in dishwasher detergent is enzymes, which are biological molecules that exist in your everyday life and like to break things down. So certain enzymes in detergent break down fat, starches. The other things that are in the good dishwasher detergent would be some form of bleach. Usually, oftentimes, it’s oxygen bleach, so we’re back to oxygen bleach again.
CHRISTINE: Which we talked about a lot in our laundry episode.
ANDREA: Yes. And some form of salt. So dishwasher detergent, when the cycle starts and the water starts running in your dishwasher, it used to be that the dishwasher detergent dispensers had two dispensers. I don’t know if anyone remembers this.
CHRISTINE: Oh, I remember. Yeah.
ANDREA: Yeah. So it doesn’t do that anymore, but basically, the dishwasher detergent starts to dissolve as it’s activated and runs through the wash system. It starts to break down the different food soils, which then provides more room for the surfactants and bleaches to clean the dishes.
CHRISTINE: The Wirecutter pick for our favorite detergent is Cascade Free & Clear Action Packs. Now, these are pods. I remember from our laundry episode, Andrea, you’re not a big fan of pods for laundry because you can’t pretreat laundry with pods. Why are pods winning for the dishwasher?
ANDREA: This goes back to my favorite topic, chemistry. So basically, when you mix bleach and enzymes in a liquid form, you actually deactivate the enzymes. So when you have a liquid detergent, you either have a mostly bleach detergent or a mostly enzymatic detergent. Now the whole point of the enzymes is to start breaking the soils down to let the other parts of the detergent do their job, so when you take one of them away, you have less of a clean. So powder detergent, in that sense, it’s superior because you can mix things in a solid form that you can’t mix in a liquid form.
With our picks, you kind of have the best of both worlds because you have the solid powder combined with liquid, but they don’t actually combine until the cycle starts. And actually, we’ve done this, we’ve done these dissolvability tests, and they’re really cool. The way our picks dissolve is you see the powder start to break down into the glass and the top liquid part takes a lot longer to break down and the liquid part is usually some sort of liquid enzyme and some sort of cleaning booster. That pushes it above just your typical powder washing, which is how they became picks.
CHRISTINE: Andrea, something that we didn’t get to cover in our laundry episode, but I know that some listeners wanted us to ask you is pods, are they environmentally terrible? I think people think of them as wrapped in plastic and it’s just going into the water creating a microplastic issue.
ANDREA: Well, first of all, okay, so I’ve interviewed, no joke, 11 scientists in the last two years to get to the bottom of the answer to this question.
CHRISTINE: Wow.
ANDREA: Not one of the polymer scientists I spoke with believes that pod film would count as a microplastic because it’s liquid.
CAIRA: What?
ANDREA: So there’s that.
CHRISTINE: What do you mean it’s liquid? Because when you’re holding a pod, it feels like a little plastic wrapped ball, right?
CAIRA: Definitely feels solid.
ANDREA: Yeah, it’s water-soluble. So that said, obviously, that doesn’t mean it disappears, right? I wouldn’t go throw a pod into the ocean personally, but pod film is something called polyvinyl alcohol, which is a close relative to a different material called polyvinyl acetate, which is also known as glue. If you look at a patent for Elmer’s glue slime kits, there’s polyvinyl alcohol in it. It’s actually something that we encounter every day. It’s in eye drops. If you like to wear sheet masks, it’s in sheet masks. It’s in mascara. It’s in a lot of things.
CAIRA: I don’t want it to be in these things.
CHRISTINE: It’s not a petroleum based film.
ANDREA: It is petroleum based. Some of it.
CHRISTINE: It is petroleum based.
CAIRA: But what I’m hearing is that it’s not a lot of a bad thing, but it is made of a kind of a bad thing, but it’s so marginal that it doesn’t matter. What actually is the answer here?
ANDREA: I think that a really good dishwasher detergent, if you looked at the results of our testing and saw the difference between a chambered pod that we recommend versus a regular powder or liquid detergent of any kind, you’d be amazed. And in that regard, to us, it really can be that you don’t have to rinse your dishes. You’re saving water. It’s a personal choice. If it weirds you out, absolutely don’t do it. But don’t think that there aren’t other petrochemicals hanging out in any of the detergents you’re buying.
CAIRA: I get that. I do get that.
ANDREA: And I think for us, when we think about this, there have been studies on the impact of polyvinyl alcohol. So again, I wouldn’t say go throw a bunch of it into your ocean or start eating it for fun. But I think in this case, based on what we know now, that the benefits can outweigh it.
CAIRA: So Andrea, what about rinse aid? What even is it? What does it do and is it necessary?
ANDREA: So rinse aid is another surfactant and basically what it does is it prevents water from being little droplets and puddles. It breaks into a sheet so that it dries faster, which can lead to less spots on your glassware. Whether or not you need it really depends on how fastidious you are. I know a lot of people who don’t use it, but they are designed to have rinse aid in them.
CAIRA: So if I have a mediocre dishwasher and I don’t really care if my wine glasses has spots, then I can skip it.
ANDREA: Yeah, absolutely.
ROSIE: Can we close the loop on loading? I am the person who finds every single empty space in the dishwasher and I throw things in, I think the word maybe is akimbo.
CAIRA: How does your partner feel about this?
ROSIE: Oh, not great.
ANDREA: Well, this is the premise of the whole show, right?
ROSIE: This is the whole premise, yeah, but I just want mostly for you to say that I am right and I win.
ANDREA: I’ve been part of this great debate and you know what I think the most powerful thing to do is? If you’re the akimbo loader, just let the other person do it. Fight back.
ROSIE: The perfect answer.
ROSIE: Andrea, I have two final very unsexy questions about manuals and warranties. Do you actually have to read your dishwasher manual?
ANDREA: What’s not sexy about a dishwasher manual?
CAIRA: Everything.
ROSIE: You know what? I take it back.
ANDREA: I guess, how stubborn are you?
ROSIE: Very.
ANDREA: Okay. So back to the great dishwasher debate. I do think that manuals are a great way to settle household disputes personally.
CAIRA: It’s the litigation book.
ANDREA: It’s your witness. Although the risk there is that you might lose, especially if you live with someone who studies the dishwasher manual.
ROSIE: Read it in secret first and then decide if you want to bring it in.
CHRISTINE: Definitely come prepared to that conversation.
ANDREA: Sure. Everyone should read their dishwasher manual. Will they? So there’s definitely a case to be made for reading any appliance manual. You’ll get the basic rundown of a specific machine and you’ll likely learn something new about the specific appliance you have. This includes learning how you should clean it, basic maintenance. You might even learn something about it that makes your life a lot easier. Sometimes, people don’t realize that the dishwasher can connect to an app that makes it possible for you to monitor your dishwasher cycle more easily or sometimes, it will tell you exactly how often you need to rinse your filter and every dishwasher is a little different. A lot of the tips that we talked about are here and also, again, great material for settling household disputes.
ROSIE: Manuals for continuing education.
CAIRA: And marriages.
ANDREA: Yes.
ROSIE: And then how about warranties? What should people know or bear in mind about warranties?
ANDREA: So we take warranties into serious consideration when we look at appliances and our current top pick, the Miele G5008, has an automatic two-year warranty with an option to extend to five-year warranty. I tell anyone I know who’s buying a dishwasher to buy the extended warranty. It’s worth the cost. You just never know what might happen. If there’s a dishwasher you really want and the warranty isn’t so hot, you can also be strategic about where you buy. IKEA has a five-year warranty. Costco has, I believe, a two-year warranty, so I tell people to buy appliances there all the time.
CAIRA: Okay. Andrea, you’ve been here before so you might not be surprised that before we wrap, we like to ask all our guests one final question. What’s the last thing you’ve bought that you’ve really loved?
ANDREA: It’s actually the League of Kitchens Cookbook, which Rachel Wharton, who’s on the appliance team, was a co-author on.
CHRISTINE: What makes it great?
ANDREA: So it is, well, from a geeky journalist perspective, it’s awesome because she helped write recipes made by grandmas, basically, which so she watched videos of people taking a pinch of something and figuring out exactly…you know when you try to recreate recipes. So she spent months on this at night figuring out exactly what a pinch is.
CAIRA: Stop.
ANDREA: Yeah, it’s really awesome. And it’s all women who aren’t necessarily professional cooks, per se, who teach at this school, League of Kitchens, and they’re from all over the world and the book is awesome. There’s one chapter I’m on right now on eggs and I can’t wait to cook every single thing in it.
CHRISTINE: Oh, that’s so fun.
ANDREA: Yeah, it’s a great book.
ROSIE: Great tip. I love that.
CHRISTINE: Andrea, thank you so much for joining us.
ANDREA: Thank you for having me.
ROSIE: Andrea, back again.
CHRISTINE: That was great. I love that Andrea is nerdy in the best possible way. She goes deep.
CAIRA: She knows so much.
CHRISTINE: She goes in and looks at patents to find…
ROSIE: Her sources are like…
CHRISTINE: It’s great.
CAIRA: Stacked.
ROSIE: …incredible. What are your takeaways from this conversation with her?
CAIRA: Mama was right. Don’t run your dishwasher when you’re about to leave the house. She’s going to love to hear that because I was ready to be like, “You were wrong. That’s just so crazy. You don’t have to worry about it that much.”
CHRISTINE: Yeah. My takeaway is that I sometimes have dirty spoons and bowls and things like that that are just not getting clean in my dishwasher, so I’m going to take a little bit more care, put the dirtiest stuff towards the middle of the rack. I’m going to be a little bit more careful when I’m loading my spoons and forks and everything to make sure that those spray arms are actually going to be able to have access to the dirtiest parts.
ROSIE: I think on top of that, my takeaway is around detergent, that if really, you’re not getting the clean that you need to be getting or you should be getting and you’ve tried to troubleshoot in other ways, you might need to switch detergents and try something else and that the main active ingredient that you’re looking for in these detergents that’s actually really doing the trick is enzymes.
CHRISTINE: Yeah, enzymes. And this is the bonus one. I think that if anyone doubts that they should not be rinsing their dishes, the counterargument is that you can actually damage your dishes. If you’re using enzymatic detergent, it could cause some damage, so…
ROSIE: The more you know.
CAIRA: Yep.
ROSIE: Do you want to find out more than this about Wirecutter’s coverage, Andrea’s reporting, or if you want to check out any of the products or tips Andrea recommended today, go to nytimes.com/wirecutter or, as always, you can find a link in the show notes.
That is it. Caira, Christine, see you next week.
CHRISTINE: See you.
CAIRA: Bye. And here’s what’s coming up next week on The Wirecutter Show.
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ROSIE: The Wirecutter Show is executive produced by me, Rosie Guerin, and produced by Abigail Keele, editing by Abigail Keele, engineering support from Mattie Mazziello and Nick Pittman. Today’s episode was mixed by Katherine Anderson. Original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Alicia Baetube, and Diane Wong. Wirecutter’s deputy publisher and interim general manager is Cliff Levy. Ben Fruman is Wirecutter’s editor-in-chief.
CAIRA: I’m Caira Blackwell.
CHRISTINE: I’m Christine Cyr Clisset.
ROSIE: And I’m Rosie Guerin. Thank you for listening.
ANDREA: Good Racks are nylon. Sorry, now I’m laughing.
ROSIE: Guys, we’re grown adults.
ANDREA: That’s why it’s funny.
ROSIE: That’s why…
