Don’t damage your dishwasher

Maybe you’ve seen this trick do the rounds: when you’re out of dishwasher tablets, you can use a little bit of dish soap and baking soda. This sounds ideal since you usually have dish soap around anyway. That way, you can still run your dishwasher without having to run out to buy new tablets. Well, you’d best go out and buy those tablets anyway. Experts are now saying you shouldn’t try the dish soap trick if you want to protect your dishwasher (and your warranty).

Just keep using those dishwasher tablets if you don’t want to damage your machine.

Hack

This hack, which is going viral on the internet, gives you an alternative to your familiar dishwasher tablets. The hack is meant to come in handy when you’re out of tablets but do have dish soap and baking soda at home. If you use a tiny bit of each, your dirty dishes will be cleaned, but you won’t cause a flood. At least, that’s the idea. Experts are doubting whether this is actually a smart thing to do.

Difference

There’s a big difference between dish soap and dishwasher tablets. Dishwasher tablets are composed in such a way that they can break down oil and grease, which is why they often contain a bit of bleach. Dish soap is a lot milder in that sense since you have to handle it with your bare hands. Dishwasher tablets are also much stronger because they need to do the same amount of work without the help of any sponges or brushes.

Dish soap

The dishwasher instruction manual clearly states that you’re not supposed to use dish soap in the machine. Yet this happens more often than you’d think. Even a little bit of dish soap is enough to cause a tremendous amount of foam inside the dishwasher because of all the movement that’s going on inside of it. The dishwasher isn’t able to drain all of this foam and it doesn’t exactly make your dirty dishes much cleaner either. In fact, a newer model of a dishwasher can even just turn itself off because its sensors notice something is going wrong.

Risk

The risk that’s connected to this hack is that you can damage your dishwasher so much it’ll actually break because it’s unable to get rid of all of the soap bubbles. Using dish soap can also cause a greasy film to be left behind inside the machine and the pipes. Using something other than dishwasher tablets can void your warranty, so you don’t want to break your machine this way. Just use tablets!

Read more: Smart cleaning: you can use dishwasher tablets for these 5 things around the house

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Source: TheKitchn | Image: Pixabay