"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
Over the last year or so, my Bosch dishwasher (installed in 1999 or so)
started to smell skunky, although it still seemed to clean OK if not as
well as when new. This slowly worsened, and I started haunting the
appliance repair sites.
The main suggestions were to not use so much soap (helped slightly), run
a cycle with a cup of vinegar in the water (worked for two days), and
(quite oddly) don't rinse the plates off before putting them in the
dishwasher. All in all, the washer had worked just fine for years, and
none of these are a solution, so kept looking.
Then I happened on an article in an electronics trade rag (Bob Pease's
column in "Electronic Design" magazine, 5 May 2011, page 104) pointing
out that all the phosphate had just been removed from dishwasher
detergents, and this was causing problems. Hmm. Phosphates were always
considered essential when I was growing up. What changed?
Using phosphate and dishwasher together as a google search term soon led
to the answer, with tale after tale of dishwashers that no longer work,
of people buying new dishwashers to no avail ... could this be the
reason?
What changed is that the EPA forced the makers of household dishwasher
detergents to eliminate all phosphates, despite the fact the phosphate
fertilizer is still used by the ton. (Restaurants can still get the
phosphate stuff.)
Anyway, the suggested standard solution is to add your own phosphate,
and it takes very little to solve the problem - phosphate was about 5%
of the mix in the pre-EPA days. In my Bosch, the usual soap load is
maybe a tablespoon or a bit more of Cascade, to which I add literally
one pinch of Trisodium Phosphate. Swampy smells are gone.
There is however one thing to be careful of: Not everything sold as
"TSP" is in fact Trisodium Phosphate these days. I have some "TSP" that
was sold to me as Trisodium Phosphate but in fact is Sodium Silicate,
which will not work, and may cause damage (the package warns about
etching glass). So, read the box carefully. If it does not come out
and clearly say that it is Trisodium Phosphate, it probably isn't. It's
best to buy Trisodium Phosphate in a real paint store.
I was discussing this here with Dan just a couple of weeks ago. My last box
of TSP, which I bought less than a month ago, is 70% real TSP. It doesn't
say so on the box but you can learn that by searching for the MSDS. The
brand I bought is Savogran, which I bought at Home Despot. I mentioned in
that discussion that I prefer to buy TSP at a real paint store, as you say.
When Oakite was my client, years ago, and we were proposing that they bring
back old Oakite powdered household detergent, my conversations with their
tech staff tended to be about chelates, phosphates, and other exciting
stuff. g By that time, phosphate had been taken out of laundry detergent
and they told me to add about a tablespoon of TSP to each load, which I did,
and still do for tough laundry jobs. It does make a visible difference. I
added two tbsp. for my son's baseball and soccer uniforms.
But I'm also a member of the Delaware Estuary project and I've read the
research on phosphates, and the EPA's reasons for forcing it out. The total
phosphate load on waterways in this area is a combination of commercial
agriculture runoff, residential lawn runoff, and (in the past) phosphate in
residential laundry outflow getting through sewage treatment. Apparently, it
runs right through.
When phosphate was taken out of laundry detergents, there was an almost
immediate improvement in oxygen levels in the Delaware River. Algae levels
declined sharply. By contrast, consumer education about avoiding overuse of
lawn fertilizer seemed to have little effect. Employing methods in
commercial ag. to reduce runoff did seem to help, however.
So it is a real issue, and, although I haven't seen anything about it for a
couple of decades here, taking it out of laundry detergent did seem to help.
I asked the guys at Oakite if the new stuff was as good, and they said that
it was not. But they said it could have been. The reason it wasn't is that
detergent manufacturers took advantage of the opportunity to make cheaper
detergent and they knew their competitors were all doing the same -- and
blaming it on the lack of phosphates. They said there are better ingredients
than phosphates today but they aren't cheap. However, the cost of the
chemicals in detergent really is trivial. It's the advertising and the
packaging that cost real money.
--
Ed Huntress
For some background, see
http://www.appliance.net/2010/states...ishwasher-soap
-1988
Joe Gwinn