Hacker News Reader

Comment by esaym | Hacker News Reader

Ok, so what do I use as a rinse aid then? I just dug all over amazon and pretty much everything has akoxylated alcohol or some form of polyoxypropylene laureth. And yes, I've purposely let the rinse aid run out just to see what happens. It wasn't pretty... Anyway to make something more "natural"? Some other ingredients I've seen include citric acid, urea, trisodium phosphate. But not sure if just mixing those together would work out....

View on HN

Use Guinness - it does a great job rinsing the mouth and throat after any meal. After all, Guinness---its not just a breakfast drink.

Plain 5% vinegar will be fine. It will smell funny if you open the door during the dry cycle. But it is safe, non-toxic, and will prevent mineral spots, and help rinse starch.

Install a whole home water filter so you're not washing your dishes in crap water anyways. I don't use rinse aids at all and my dishes come out spotless.

Tossing in a bit of vinegar with each load has worked well for us. We have incredibly hard water.

We have a whole home water softener. Rinse aid does nothing for us. (Similar principle as using vinegar)

You don't need any rinse aid, period.

Did you not read what I wrote? Not sure what point you are making... I don't need to brush my hair, wear clothes, or wash my car either... But those are usually considered "proper" things to do. My first load without rinse aid resulted in spotty dishes. Not too bad, but annoying. By the third, it was worse. By the end of the week, all of the glassware was milky white and you could no longer see through it. You know that feeling you get when you run your finger nails across a chalkboard? Yea, we were getting that feeling by just running your hand across a glass plate.

I ended up buying more rinse aid and then running the milky dishes through a cycle with about a 1/4 cup of coffee machine cleaner (citric acid) thrown in.

Our water comes from a local lake and an underground aquifer surrounded in limestone if you are curious.

Either you are using too much detergent, or you have very hard water. A water softener would probably fix it.

It might be hard to avoid if your water supply is just hard to begin with. Maybe you can use it every second or third cycle.

> citric acid

Citric acid [1]

1 - https://www.thespruce.com/homemade-dishwasher-rinse-aid-1388...

Deep clean your dishwasher along with all filters and whatnot

Maybe get a dishwasher with salt dispenser as mentioned elsewhere in the comments.

https://www.southernliving.com/home/organization/dishwasher-...

Then the problem is the dishwasher or the lack of a water softener. I've never used rinse aid and we do not have spotty dishes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com