So far, so good. One load washed. Squeaky clean, no fuss, no bother, glasses sparkling. The dish-loading is quite different: but we’ll figure it out. They also recommend Finish additive—and when Jane and I thought this over, and thought over the local water, this sounds like a good idea. It’s, for one thing, got a light to tell you you’re out of Finish in the dispenser; and for another—if lime deposit is going onto your dishes, it’s also sticking to surfaces in your pump — We’ve taken apart enough aquarium pumps to know this little item. So…….we are going to meet this machine halfway and get the additive and use it. I will say, glassware sparkles with this stuff.
And it’s sooooooooooooooo nice to know you can clean the filter screen and not have stuff going into the works.
Also—it is 1-2 inches shallower than our GE, which means it actually fits INTO the cabinet, and does not just bare machinery sides out into the kitchen. Our GE looked like heck, and we had to create a fake edge, because this was built in by afterthought—a set of shelves and a drawer removed to accommodate it, and since our George Jetson 1950’s vintage cabinets have a slanting face for the drawers, this means the dishwasher showed machinery on its sides. Now it doesn’t. It gives an actually finished look to the place.
Next year I think the Project is going to be replacing the kitchen floor our old dishwasher ruined…it still has a little raising on its joins…with a nice woodgrain laminate. Jane and I will negotiate — I want maple woodgrain laminate matching our counters, and Jane wants non-matching, because she grew up in the NW and has a reaction against woodsy looks. I understand this intellectually, even if I am quite the opposite. We can always come up with something we both like, and next year—kitchen nirvana!
All this is assuming THIS dishwasher doesn’t leak!
Yay! We will hope this dishwasher is the leakless kind. My new dishwasher came with a sample of both the Finish rinsing agent and the Finish “Red Ball” detergent packets. I’ve decided to use both, even though the “Red Ball” is a bit more expensive than the “Great Value” brand I was using. As you know, CJ, water from the Ogallala aquifer has mucho lime to deposit on everything. Just shows to go ya, my new dishwasher was deeper than the old one, so it protrudes a bit more than the other one, but seeing as how the old one’s racks were literally rusting to pieces — to the point of rust staining my white dishes! — I can’t complain about a quibbley little thing like that.
I will add this comment, too. The Finish packets were top-rated by “a leading consumer magazine”, otherwise known as Consumer Reports. I use it, although I don’t get sparkling results, and I think it’s a matter of how I load it. After almost 9 months in this house, I’m still trying to figure it out.
So, what does Jane want for counters? Institutional stainless steel? That might work for the counters, but it’ll be darned uncomfortable to stand on for any length of time.
Hooray on the dishwasher front! Did you install it yourself, or did you have the folks who delivered it put it in? Take whatever time you need to find a flooring that works for both of you, since it’s not urgent. My new vinyl tiles looked great when I was done, but I made the mistake of not sealing them immediately, and now they have dirty footyprints that will need to be scrubbed off before I really truly do seal the )!@U&!! floor. A small note: I do NOT recommend carpeting in the kitchen 😛
Congrats on the brand new dishwasher!
Hmm, Cascade and Jet-Dry here.
Hand-washing dishes for a while to come, but this is not too big a deal.
CJ, you might take a look at bamboo flooring. The native color is pretty light but you can get it stained in almost any flavor you’d want. Bamboo maxes out the “sustainability” metric and runs about $2/ft^2.
Happy dishwashing!
You can use white vinegar in place of the Finish additives. You can use it full strength or dilute it 1:3 with water. Finish is mostly water with a little citric acid, alcohol, sodium polycarboxylate, and of course colour, scent, and preservatives. You could probably make your own mix of vinegar, water, and alcohol (not the good vodka, please) without the polymers and it would be just as effective (provided you don’t have huge amounts of calcium in your water).
When you start doing the kitchen, tell Jane she must post photos on her blog so those of us who can’t afford a kitchen reno just yet can live vicariously through yours. 🙂
THanks so much for that tip. We always have plenty of white vinegar: we use it on the marine tank equipment. And we certainly will do some pix when we do that floor next year…Jane DOES have pix of the bathroom remodel over on her site, in the slideshows section, I’m sure!
Oh, no! Use the good stuff! That a god you want to keep appeased as much as any other!
After that bathroom remodel, ummm, the mind boggles. 😉
Bamboo is one of our possibilities, yes!
Joe, turn your hot water on before washing dishes and run it until the sink water runs hot. That’s a major thing. Since our hot water tank is at the other end of the house in the basement, this means it takes a while for the water pressure to deliver hot water to the kitchen, which is the end of the hot water line. The bathroom gets it first.
It’s a nuisance, but it’s a good hot water heater, and we do look at it from time to time: and have everything in that side of the basement up on blocks, plus we have a floor drain, so we won’t come home to a swimming pool…
And it’s not as bad as our third floor apartment Baltimore vintage 1768, where we used to joke that you didn’t get hot or cold water out of our tap (which would shake and rattle as water began to rise through the system) until the Rube Goldberg device connected to the tap rang the bell that woke the hamster that powered the pump to get water to the farside third floor.
I do, and I put the dishes facing the jets, so it’s possible that I’m overloading the machine. Sometimes they don’t quite get there. I’ll find crusty films on the insides of the bowls on the top shelf. But I’ve also found it on the bowls in the bottom shelf, too. Go figure…..
Every summer drag a hose down there, turn the water on, and shove it as far down the drain as you can. Make sure your drain is really a drain, and wash out some of the detritis in there.
The hamster was tired after all that running since 1768. Or maybe he was busy singing along with the 1776 musical?
One hamster if by land, two if by sea, three if by petal-sail? 😮
Less mundanely than dishwashers… did you know that NASA is working on developing a warp drive? Yes, quite genuinely and seriously.
How NASA might build its very first warp drive
thanks for that link green Wyvern, sounds like an elegant theory – fascinating! 😀
I saw that—it works rather as I conceived my own warp drive working. You create a field and use the vexation of an annoyed universe to move you along.
Only important to Star Trek geeks, the illustration they used in the article is a Vulcan ship from Star Trek Online! I suppose if anyone could build a warp-capable ship, it would be the Vulcans.
How amazing. A theoretical “warp drive” they think might work, before we have built a manned Mars mission or a Lunar colony, with only a small Station in Earth orbit. So if they could get this thing to work, we might skip a long era of interplanetary sublight spacing and move to early interstellar FTL travel.
The other implication: Suppose you put a crew module, a rotation cylinder, inside that warp engine donut’s perimeter, and cargo containers, sensor pallets, armaments, and whatever deflector shield generators to keep debris from holing your ship. Now suppose instead of a rotation cylinder, your crew module is another donut/toroid, like a station, around a core. All of a sudden, you have “mobile space stations” and “starships” all in one. Don’t like where you set up your station? It’s a starship, move it. That would at least work for smaller stations or ships. Admittedly, a station and a ship are two very different purposes or functions with very different needs. But the principle is there.
So early spacing might be like “Wagon Train to the Stars” after all.
Or RV’ing. Or one of those truckin’ CB movies.
Or “Trailer Park to the Stars.”
The mind boggles. :LOL:
Wow, this is great stuff to think about!
Oh man, the leaking dishwasher. My girlfriend’s house came with a new dishwasher that leaked so she never used it. I came along and we started to fix it. Find leak, fix it, run the machine, find new leak, fix it ,run machine again, find another leak, fix it yet again run the machine. Success.
Now the problem is that the dishwasher doesn’t clean the dishes. So craigslist yields a Bosch-new-being sold by rich woman whose new house has Bosch and who doesn’t like Bosch. Crazy, right? So she wanted it out of there and we took it for $125. Works beautifully and has for the past 5 years.
If you like that story wait until you hear about the Wolf stove.
Phil Brown
I wish we had a crazy Bosch owner nearby. 😉
It is nice. The dishes are coming out very sparkly. It also has a total power-off besides just a start button, which saves a little electricity, too.
Would you share the brand of the dishwasher? (I should get new everything–eek!)
WRT letting the water run until it’s hot, it’s a major annoyance that (I think) zoning laws force the hot water heater into the garage, where it’s as far as possible from the kitchen and master bathroom–especially with the required water flow limiters.
Walt, it’s the Bosch Ascenta, runs around $600 or so. You can get them at Lowes.
CJ and Joe, thank you!
I think we got it for 581, counting a senior Lowe’s card discount. I’m liking it a lot. The only downside is that it is a little smaller and I haven’t figured how to load it to best advantage yet, but it’s getting things sparkling clean. And that adjustable-height top rack means flexibility for taller glassware or, say, a broiling pan in the bottom rack.
Howdy, Our new Maytag leaked all over the first time we used it. I’d spent $30 and had a metal shop fold some sheet metal into a shallow pan so if it ever did leak, it would drain onto the kitchen floor. Pan fits right under the new dishwasher. Old dishwasher ruined the basement ceiling below.
That’s not a bad idea at all. When we do replace that floor, we will think about that.