About a year ago, I started noticing that my dishwasher detergent wasn't working very well. There were sometimes food residue left on dishes and my acrylic "glasses" were suuuuuper cloudy. So I started adding some vinegar into a dish on the top rack and that helped to clear up the residue on my cups, but I still wasn't entirely satisfied.
Enter Pinterest, aka. the World Wide Web's newest black hole. After searching around for a bit looking for dishwasher detergent recipes and then reading the reviews that different readers left, I settled on this one because there are only 3 ingredients and NO prep or pre-mixing needed. Sounds good, right? And you know what else is good? It works GREAT! And it's really, really inexpensive- like pennies per load.
If you want to join the cool club and make your own, here's what you need:
1 teaspoon oxygen bleach (Oxiclean or a generic brand)
1/2 teaspoon liquid Dawn dishwashing soap (the blue one)
1/2 cup plain ol' vinegar
Put the Oxiclean in the soap dispenser and add the Dawn. Close the lid.
On the top rack of your dishwasher, in among your dirty dishes, place a dish with the vinegar.
Run the cycle.
Be amazed.
If you don't want to take my word for it, click the link above for more information, instructions and lots of reviews.
Some notes:
*although my glasses were MUCH less cloudy after the first wash, they were completely sparkly after a few.
*I tried just splashing the vinegar in the bottom of the dishwasher and also adding it to the rinse aid slot- this didn't work.
*Don't worry about putting liquid Dawn into your dishwasher. It's such a SMALL amount that it won't suds very much and ruin your dishwasher or overflow into your kitchen.
*Sometimes the silverware doesn't seem to get very clean- I'm not sure why it works better sometimes than others, but for now I'm going to put the handle side down and maybe this will help. Also, I pre-wipe the extra sticky things like the knife from the peanut butter or the spoon from an avocado. {My regular detergent had a problem with these, too, so it's probably a problem with my dishwasher, not the cleaning agent}
*Sometimes the silverware doesn't seem to get very clean- I'm not sure why it works better sometimes than others, but for now I'm going to put the handle side down and maybe this will help. Also, I pre-wipe the extra sticky things like the knife from the peanut butter or the spoon from an avocado. {My regular detergent had a problem with these, too, so it's probably a problem with my dishwasher, not the cleaning agent}
