Soap gets in your eyes!!
WOW! This soap box derby really brings back memories for me! We got our first dishwasher back in 1967 and it was a KitchenAId KDS-15. All the rage with the heating element in the tank and the 180 degree SaniCycle. And it cleaned very well once you learned how to load it properly and all done in less than an hour! I hate to say that you could barely talk in the kitchen but it was slaving over your dishes so it was always forgiven for being too noisy. I even wrapped it in fiberglass and it was noisy.
But all those brand names were tried over and over by us because our water was so hard. I wonder if there are any members here who lived in Woodhaven or Ozone Park in Queens, NY who remember the "Woodhaven" water we used to have?
This water was so horribly hard that the joke was that if you forgot to use pipe joint compound on a pipe it would only leak for a few minutes as it wold seal itself up because of the lime in the water. Let me tell you, it was no lie! It was not uncommon to see stalctites hanging from leaking pipes in some people's homes.
When we would go to remove the dishes from the dishwasher , the glasses were sanitized but all looked as if you had dipped them in milk becasue of the lime. They would wipe clean if you polished them, but why should we have to? We tried all kinds of combinations including adding CALGON(not calgonite) to the soap and even those exzyme active presoakers that they had come out with. Nothing really helped. Eventually the City of NY condemned the water company which was buying water from NYC anyway since they had started to have salt encroachment into their wells. The water quality improved slowly while they connected all the mains together and you could actually see the lime deposits disappear from the inside of the DW and the glasses started to look clear again.
But Yes, we used the brands listed above as well as every store brand out there locally. I loved the Electrasol since it seemed to have alot more bleach in it and at least would clean the coffee stains and fruit stains off of the porcelain tank better than any other brand.We did the Vinegar washes that Kitchenaid today is so fond of recommending to remedy every wash problem out there but it was the change in the water that did the trick.
One side note: When the cuty proposed taking over the utility, they had community meetings in our area warning us that the soft city water was incompatible with the galvanized piping in our homes and that they would not be responsible for leaks and damages resulting in the water change. Boy did I know alot of people who had leaks in their water lines in their homes.The water even cleaned up those joints that had no thread sealant in them! I saw instances where the water just rotted thru the piping as it washed all the deposits out and left paper thin pipe in its wake.
But today, we have better chemisrty and Rinse dispensers are standard on almost every machine so results are better. Great Value from Walmart gets good reviews in the testing magazines along with the Cascades (powders of course, outperform the liquid gels all the time) and while I think the Great Value is good and cleans the food stuffs well, I find that it leaves tea and coffee stains. Cascade in its standard version with Shine Shield, does a fantastic job even without using Jet Dry in my area. My utility in Palm Coast basically softens our water prior to distribution so most detergents and soaps work fine. I dont like the gelpaks as I like to dispense soap when it should be used in the prewash and wash and a drying agent in the final rinse where it belongs.And there is no way I would use a gel pak that doesn't self dissolve anyway!
Thanks for the memories!
