"." wrote in message ...
On 7/11/2011 7:49 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:
"Joseph wrote in message
...
In ,
"Ed wrote:

"Joseph wrote in message
...
In ,
"Ed wrote:

"Joseph wrote in message
...
In article3_adnZIC3Jot5YfTnZ2dnUVZ_gGdnZ2d@earthlink .com,
wrote:

"Joseph 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.

For some background, see
http://www.appliance.net/2010/states...n-dishwasher-s
oap
-1988

Joe Gwinn

If you have a swampy smell, there is some sort of decaying matter
causing
it. I do not know about Bosch, but in my Kenmore there is a coarse
grate
above the macerator, a slight finer grate next to the macerator
blade
,
and
a fine screen to filter recirculated water. All of these can trap
chunks
of
food, especially fibrous stuff. I have to take it apart and clean
them
now
and then.

I did look - they were all clean, mostly because I pre-rinse the
heavy
stuff right into the disposal.

Joe Gwinn

FWIW, we're having exactly the same smell problem with our
dishwasher,
and I
haven't be able to figure it out for months. Now that you've filled
us
in,
I'm going to try some TSP in that machine, as well as in my clothes
washer.

Bingo! It takes two maybe three washes to achieve full effect. I
assume that this is to clean out the hoses et al. I started with a
far
heavier dose, but had some lime deposits that were later cleaned off
with
Bon-Ami and a rag.

Also, I came upon the following article:

http://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/89/8904cover.html

Well, that's darned interesting. Reading about the complications of
finding
substitutes reminds me of the things those Oakite engineers were
talking
about.

So, I have a load in the dishwasher, and my box of TSP is handy. I'll
give
it a try. Thanks for all the info, Joe.

Welcome.

Do you think it's time to storm the EPA?

g I have mixed feelings about it. I appreciate their problem. They're
charged with reducing pollutants of many kinds. As a long-time fisherman
and
outdoorsman, I remember what it was like before we had the EPA. The
Delaware
River was a uniform gray on the bottom and the carp, which were almost
the
only fish living in it, were gasping.

Now we have shad again, and blueback herring, and even trout as far south
as
Lambertville, NJ. Atlantic Salmon have been netted in the Delaware Bay --
not quite ready to brave the river, but hanging around and hoping it will
keep improving. They left nearly two centuries ago.

We lost one of the most beautiful and unique trout waters in the world
when
the acid rain killed most of the trout in the Adirondacks. That reached
crisis levels when I was in my early teens. It broke my heart. I haven't
been back for decades, although I hear it's somewhat better since stack
scrubbers were applied to coal-fired plants in the Midwest, which is
where
the acid rain came from.

So I try to look at it case-by-case. It's not easy.


The basic problem is that they don't know when to just stop, declare
victory, and move on.

There's truth in that. Sometimes they have to keep at it or it's bound to
regress. Sometimes they paint with too broad a brush. The job they've
been
charged with seems almost impossible, but they've had big successes.


Joe Gwinn


look at it this way - would you rather have healthy rivers and cloudy
drinking glasses or nice clean drinking glasses and dead rivers? I
choose the former.

I agree, which is why I put up with it. But in this hyper-individualistic
society, the kind of broad rulemaking that EPA has to engage in, just to do
its job, is going to grate a lot of people the wrong way. Sometimes it
grates all of us the wrong way.

For example, let me describe how I made dry-fly dope in 1959. Dry-fly dope
is the stuff you put on a floating trout fly to keep it floating.

First, take a quart of carbon tetrachloride and pour it into a mayonnaise
jar. You should do this is good light, like on your kitchen table. Then get
out your box of Gulf Wax (paraffin wax) and your pocket knife and start
shaving the wax into the jar of carbon tet. Keep doing this until the carbon
tet won't dissolve any more wax. Take a good half-hour doing this so most of
it has a chance to dissolve. Then shave in some more wax, until there's wax
in there that won't dissolve.

Put the lid on the mayonnaise jar and put it on the kitchen counter for a
day or two. If the rest of the wax dissolved, you're done. If you're fishing
in cold weather, put the jar in your refrigerator and let some wax
precipitate out, as it will. Then decant the jar into another jar, which
will be your cold-weather fly dope.

So you now have a ten-year supply of the most effective fly dope anyone has
seen before or since. No problem. Hell, you breathed more carbon tet just
stopping into the dry cleaner to pick up a suit. Who knew?

Some of the antagonism to bureaucratic rules is that kind of thing. It's
just an unwillingness to accept that the old ways of doing things are
harmful, even if you never saw any evidence of it yourself. How many people
are alive who breathed carbon tet? Most of us. People in the Midwest didn't
see no steenking acid rain coming from their power plants. That all fell in
the Northeast. Hrumph.

But the EPA's wetlands rules, while well-intended and basically a good
thing, have led to some laughable cases that cost people a lot of money for
nothing. Woe be unto you if your drainage ditch is considered to be the
branch of a named creek and it backs up onto your property in the
springtime. You've got a wetland, and you can neither build on it nor drain
it. g

That's the cost of living in an ever-more-complex society, one in which we
ignored pollution for so long that we had to mitigate it just to get the
environment back to some semblance of health, and in which the prevailing
attitude is extreme individualism and property rights. We may like the fact
that the law is blind and applies to everyone equally, but an EPA regulation
that does that is tyranny. Hrumph.

I'll take the EPA, in the balance, but not without some frustration. I was
born with hyper-individualism, too. And I really *like* carbon
tetrachloride. My precious, dwindling supply, which I keep next to my
four-pound bottle of mercury, has saved my bacon on some really tough
tapping jobs in hard steel....but maybe we shouldn't go there....

--
Ed Huntress