"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:
"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.
I have the same Savogran stuff. Is the 70% new? Powdered products for
home use often have such things as anti-clumping ingredients in them.
Anyway, it does work.
Look at the product number on the box, and then go he
http://www.savogran.com/Information/msds_index.htm
Mine is 10621. The MSDS says 75 - 80% TSP.
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.
So far, the washing machine has not been a problem, although we do seem
to be getting far more tiny lint than before.
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.
There is a big difference here. For the clothes washing machine in the
old days, we used a cup per load, or more. Even then, dishwashers used
far less detergent, because they use a puddle at the bottom of the tank,
versus filling the tank to the top. Now days, the detergent volume is
far less.
On the Bosch, one uses something like 20 milliliters of detergent for
ordinary loads, this being the volume of the well at the lowest marker
line. The pinch of TSP has to be less than a gram.
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.
If this is true, and it certainly could be, I sense a market opportunity
here.
You'd think so, but having written ad copy and having done the account work
for a couple of supermarket products, all I can tell you is that the
business costs of those things is very strange. You pay for shelf exposure,
so you need to pass a volume threshhold before you can afford to market it.
That's what held up Oakite on bringing back their powdered household
detergent, which started out around a century ago as nearly pure TSP and
then was dropped when liquid detergents took over. It would have cost at
least $10 million to get it off the ground, and the projected volumes were
not high enough to justify it.
It did have a market as a niche product and I was working on selling it
through hardware stores, which is a much cheaper marketing proposition. But
they had other products in the pipeline and they decided to go with those,
which promised higher volumes.
--
Ed Huntress
Joe Gwinn