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Comment by pottertheotter | Hacker News Reader

I take his stuff with a grain of salt because I found the dishwasher detergent recommendation to be a bad idea.

A while before the TC video came out, I had an appliance repair person working on my fridge and asked him what he thought the best detergent was and he said use powdered, not the packs. So we switched to that.

Not long after our dishes were never getting cleaned. I thought it was a problem with the dishwasher so I took apart the filter, cleaned all the sprayers, etc. but nothing worked. Was thinking we needed a new dishwasher until one day we ran out of powdered detergent but had a couple packs left over so my wife used one.

Bingo! Our dishes came out PERFECT. We haven’t had a single problem since.

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What kind of powder are you using? Some really cheap powders are basically just sodium carbonate and silicate, with some enzymes, and no actual detergents. These won't work well if your load is "too clean", as it needs some grease to saponify in order to generate detergent.

The medium/high quality stuff contains more/better detergents, water conditioners, and sometimes rinse aids. The packs are just powder formulations pressed into a pellet.

I mostly used Cascade Complete powder (there was a point early in the pandemic when I had to grab whatever was on the shelf) and use Cascade Platinum packs.

A couple months back we ran out of packs and had some powder leftover, so I ran a load with the powder. I ended up having to run the load again once we got the packs.

When you used powder, did you add detergent to the prewash cycle?

TC did make an apology video after the first detergent video.

I usually put some in the prewash area.

Quite the contrary for me. I suppose your powder detergent might be of lower quality than the packs one, or is not as concentrated and you need to use more of it?

I used Cascade Complete powder and Cascade Platinum packs.

Did you get the powder from Amazon perhaps? I'm pretty sure we got fake detergent on Amazon before and it caused our dishes to not clean properly.

Also if you have a water softener you should typically use less powder.

We definitely get a better wash using the right amount of powder, but had to adjust the levels ourselves.

Powder should be better, but dishwashers can be weird, so whatever works best.

I, too, had to adjust the amount of powder. Roughly 1/2 of recommended dose goes onto tray, and an additional 1/5 directly into the washer for prewash cycle.

Did you change brands or types when you switched to powder?

I used Cascade Platinum packs before and after trying powder. When using powder I primarily used Cascade Complete (there was a short time early in the pandemic when I had to grab whatever was available on the shelf).

I tried the 'add detergent to the pre-wash-cycle' part. While it seems to make sense, it also caused a lot more rust spots on cutlery. The detergent is just too aggressive that way.

the goal is to use the cheapest not the most expensive... my miele tablets were destroying my duralex picardie big time, so I now use the cheapest powder and if I feel like the stainless steel don't shine bright enough (maybe once a month) then I use one miele tablet...

The packs are just powder pressed into a cube with some colorful liquid added to a little pocket to make it look high tech.

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