Washing Your Dishwasher

Welcome back everyone!  I hope everyone in the U.S. had a fantastic Labor Day weekend.  I know I did.  I was sad to come back to work this morning, but also glad to get back into my regular routine.  The past week and a half has been a little crazy for me.  First we were gone for a weekend at church camp.  Then I left to go to New York for business for most of last week.  Then when I got back to KC I was exhausted.  Traveling really wears me out.  After a couple good nights of sleep I felt back to my regular self again.  Benzo and I spent a big part of the holiday weekend purging our stuff.  We were maniacs going through everything, sorting out things to give to charity and things that are just trash.  I hope to write more about that later this week.

I can’t believe I haven’t blogged in a week!  Normally I’m more likely to blog on the weekends because I have extra time.  But I was on a roll with the purging and didn’t want to stop for anything.  When that train gets going it’s best to just ride it out to the end.

I do have one quick thing I wanted to share today.  Yesterday when I was unloading the dishwasher (one of my MOST detested chores), I noticed that my dishes weren’t that clean.  In fact they were still sort of scummy.  Ew!  Now that could be for any number of reasons, but I decided I better “clean” my dishwasher to see if that would help.

Clean the dishwasher….?  Isn’t that an oxy moron?  Doesn’t the dishwasher get clean every time you wash dishes?

Well yes and no.  Yes there is soap and hot water swirling around in there.  But there are also food particles that can get caught in the sprayers and the drain and soap scum that can build up on the surfaces.  Every so often it is good to run a cleaning cycle with an empty dishwasher. 

All I do is remove the racks and wipe down any obvious soiled areas on the door or the inside with a damp dishrag.  Then inspect the drain and the sprayers for any blockage.  Remove anything you might find such as food particles, pieces of chipped dishes, etc.

Then run the empty dishwasher on the hottest setting you have with a cup of white vinegar (no soap).  I do this one of two ways.  I either pour the cup of white vinegar in the bottom of the dishwasher, or yesterday I put a dishwasher safe cup full of white vinegar in the top rack.  Either way works and I don’t know that one way is better than the other.  You can also turn off the dry cycle since you have nothing in there to dry.

Voila!  That’s all you have to do.  The next load of dishes I ran came out sparkling.

White vinegar is a cleaning powerhouse.  I buy it by the gallon and use it for several other things as well.  Do you have any interesting uses for white vinegar?