Apparently pre-rinsing confuses the dishwasher or something. Not doing it leaves me with residue all over the other dishes though 🤷
Apparently pre-rinsing confuses the dishwasher or something. Not doing it leaves me with residue all over the other dishes though 🤷
I tried the powder thing. Couldn’t get the hang of it. Back to pods and I’m more than satisfied. I trust Alex implicitly, it’s clearly an “operator error,” but that’s where I’m at.
I’d be curious to know how you’re washing in a way that makes you feel pods are better.
I used to be a pod person (ha), but after alwx’s video, I experimented and found that by adding powder to the door (along with the actual soap part, obv) and running the hot tap before starting the load makes them come out great (most of the time - oatmeal is my nemesis).
The hot water was the big thing for me. I don’t see a noticeable performance difference between the pods and the powder, but the pods are easier with a small enough cost difference over time that it might as well be zero.
But the hot water is clutch.
I did the usage cost at my house, The powder was less than half the cost for what I use and my local prices.
But half of what? Half of cheap is still cheap.
Half of cheap is cheaper. Shit compounds when you have a handful of these savings.
Bingo, I buy dry goods in bulk. Soap, rice, flour… cost so little to produce even buying the smaller bulk packages can save a significant portion of your grocery bill. The only stuff I buy from the grocer is perishables and frozen.
A $7 box of pancake mix costs about $1 to make from bulk ingredients.
A 1.30 box of rice-a-roni costs a little over 0.50 cents to make.
Mac and cheese, same deal,
If you can stash a few large bags, or split the cost with your neibors/fam you can cut out a huge chunk of your food cost, end up with stuff that’s healthier and tastier and not locked in to 1 of 4 flavors.
Making pancakes looks like this:
get out a spoon, any small/medium spoon. n heaping spoonfulls of flour, n-2 heaping spoonfulls of sugar, a pinch of salt, 2 if you’re making a more than a few cups. 1 level spoon of baking powder. (2 if you’re feeding an army) Add water and stir until it comes off the spoon in ribbons. Too much water? add a level spoon of flour and mix until it comes off in ribbons.
For waffles, add some oil, another spoon of baking powder, a few drops of vanilla extract.
rice-a-roni is just rice and spaghetti, lightly browned in oil the boiled off with bullion, maybe some light veggies.
50% is 50% it scales linerally.
82 Cascade pouches at bulk cost me $30 75 oz of Cascade powder costs me $6
that’s $0.09 per wash for powder and $0.37 cents per wash for pouches.
I don’t really consider $30 to be cheap… and it turns out it’s 1/3 as much not 1/2
How often do you use your dishwasher?
I use mine about 2-3 times a week, so if we go with 3 that’s saving like 40 bucks a year, assuming perfect measurements and no spilling of the powder. That’s not enough of a difference to fret over.
You could spend that saved $40 on the powder, and now you’re sitting on ~4 years worth of detergent.
Do the same for washing clothes.
Buy foodstuffs in bulk when able.
Same with personal soap/shampoo/etc.
Now you’re sitting on few hundred $ in savings a year.
I don’t need 4 years’ worth of detergent taking up space. I’m happy to have a little box of pods I replace occasionally when I go to Costco.
Yeah, I could spend a bunch of time and effort maximizing my savings. But I spend 50 hours a week plus a commute earning money, and that’s all the time I’m devoting to it. When I’m off the clock I’m done trying to make or maximize income. I spend that time living. It’s worth $40 a year to me to not deal with powder.
Daily, occasionally twice a day
It was purely me not getting the hang of the amount of powder. I also have a lot of plasticware (kids), and so it amplified the residual issue.
The problem is that I have zero issues with pods. I out in pod, turn on, close door, and that’s that. It’s the lack of problems, and the fact that powder requires some fine tuning, that had me lose interest in it.
And I basically scrape food matter off plates and load them in. Only time I ever rince is when we have lots of tiny food matters on plates and it’ll be a pain in the ass to scrape each individually into the garbage, where a jet of hot water will blast them into the strainer ezpz.
So yeah, I’m running the dishwasher daily, and for me I need the path of least resistance.
I used powder for years and it worked okay. However I was always cleaning my filter and the inside of my dishwasher seemed a bit grungy. On a whim I decided to try one of the most expensive pods. The difference was night and day. My dishwasher looks much better, and now when I clean the filter there’s barely any gunk. Some of the pods definitely have more effective product (enzymes?) that the powder doesn’t have.
Were you using the expensive powder?
I was using Cascade Complete powder.