To Rinse or Not Rinse - Dishwasher Story

[niclonnic]

My take

Pre-rinsing is done 50/50 in my current household. I have a Frigidaire Gallery dishwasher, model # FGID2466QF4A; it came with the house and has features such as an OrbitClean spray arm and Sahara Dry. This dishwasher works well for the most part; however there are certain dishes that won't come out fully clean: bowls in the bottom rack (particularly those with chili and hard, stuck-on food), overly oily items (like pots and pans), wooden spoons with stuck-on pasta bits (in the top rack) and forks with food trapped in between the tines. Plates, pasta bowls, knives and spoons on the other hand, DO get fully clean, along with just about everything in the top rack. And yes, I do use Finish Jet-Dry as my rinse aid.

I use Finish Powerball Quantum tabs; I was previously using the more basic Powerball tabs, but then upgraded in hopes of improving performance. Despite the company's claims that pre-rinsing is not necessary, the detergent still won't fully clean the aformentioned dishes, leaving hard food spots and oily residue on them. Even when I step up to the more heavy-duty wash settings, such as setting the wash pressure from "surge" to "scour," and the temperature from "heat" to "hi-temp," the dishwasher's performance is not any better.

As a result of its inadequate wash performance, I've developed trust issues with this Frigidaire; nowadays I just want to pre-rinse EVERYTHING before running the machine. As a matter of fact, my mom does the exact same thing, as she doesn't trust the GE dishwasher at her apartment. Even prior to my parents' divorce, she pre-rinsed everything before loading it into the Kenmore (GE) dishwasher at my old house.

 

[qsd-dan]

It comes down to design, water hardness, and detergent.

I can go crazy with my modified KDS-18, a tiny bit less with the Powerclean Kenmore.

Less so with the Maytag reverse rack.

Even less with the Point Voyager, especially the top rack. The top rack has weak performance but the jet design/configuration is ridiculous. There's a really bad dead spot in the center of the rack which becomes obvious by looking at the wash arm. The engineer who configured those wash arm jets should be fired. Does anybody actually test their designs anymore before kicking it out to the public?

 

[maytag85]

“Does anybody actually test their designs anymore before kicking it out to the public?”

Unfortunately, companies no longer care to work out the bugs since they let oblivious consumers, stupid over the top regulations (the feds get ever more drunk with their overreach), bean counters (to hell with bean counters) who don’t know anything.

Consumers really are anti-customer, make it difficult for us who want quality and such.

It always amazes me what was able to be done many years ago, but now it’s near next to impossible.

 

[ryner1988]

Putting to the side the fact that a certain individual obviously retrieved this ancient thread (seems to be a trend with said individual), I actually have first-hand experience that how much pre-rinsing you have to do definitely depends on external factors.

I had to pre-rinse everything in my old Frigidaire machine. I'm talking there couldn't be much more than a light smattering of soil on a plate or it wouldn't come clean. I tried everything, different detergents, rinse aids, etc. Then the door latch on the machine broke so that it ran while open. I knew it wasn't supposed to do that, but I took advantage of the problem to observe what was happening to create such miserable results. There was very little spray going on, I think one or both of the wash arms was broken, and also my soap pods weren't breaking open every time to release detergent. Mineral buildup had just gotten to a point where everything was rusted, clogged, and just gross.

I now have a new dishwasher, a GE/Haire/some Chinese-built contraption, but it doesn't much matter because boy howdie this thing runs circles around the old Frigidaire, even back when it worked properly. I've put everything from plates that had lasagna served on them to filthy baking dishes in this thing and they've come out perfectly using just the auto sense cycle. I just scrape large pieces of food into the garbage disposal or trash can and I will occasionally lightly rinse dishes that have large gobs of tomato sauce, sour cream, etc on them but mostly nope, in the machine they go as is and I don't even run it every day, more like every three days or so. I use Cascade platinum pods because they perform well in hard water, and Finish Jet Dry rinse aid. Near perfect results every time. It's amazing the difference a good, well-working dishwasher makes.

 

[daveamkrayoguy]

Yes, rinsed a plate that only had Bell Pepper Seeds--Naughty

no, don't rinse!

 

--my daughter sure got a lot of reprimanding from me because of her doubting the dishwasher would wash away pepper seeds, so I told her how we put even harder stuff through there and it all comes out super clean!

 

--end of story...

 

 

 

-- dave