…hang the dishwasher? 🙂 Remember the rage, a few years back, for cleaning out the dishwasher with Tang, the fake-food sugared orange drink mix? Ever wondered how that worked?
Welp, after much scrubbing and cleaning and vinegaring of the stinky freakingbrandnewDishwasher, I got the weird smell out. For awhile. But within a week or so, it was back.
The machine doesn’t seem to be dirty. In fact, I began to wonder if it was the water — the city adds some very strange chemicals to the water as the weather starts to warm. This is a new odor, but every now and again we do get a new odor. Sometimes even the dogs won’t drink the water. Then I have to fill their dish with filtered water for days on end. But after much sniffing around, I decided that probably wasn’t the issue.
In a moment of desperation, I decided to try this folk remedy. Looked it up on the Web; found a few handymen holding forth on YouTube, explaining how much to dump in. Took a drive to the Safeway, which carried the stuff, oddly enough, down at the end of the aisle full of fake drinks.
A small plastic bottle of ominous-looking orange powder costs about three bucks.
You empty the dishwasher, and then you sprinkle about a cup of the stuff — about half the small Tang container — around the floor of the washer. Turn the kitchen faucet to hot and run it till the water coming out is is hot as it’s going to get. Set the dishwasher on the sani-cycle. Then turn it on and let ’er rip!
After a couple of hours of this, the Bosch came to the end of its cycle and sat there in dignfied silence.
Opened the door, stuck my head in, and took a whiff.
It smelled very much like…well, orange Kool-Aid.
Better than how it smelled before, anyway.
After the first washing of dirty dishes, the machine still smelled a little of artificial orange flavoring. (Do astronauts really drink this stuff? REALLY???? And it takes a research grant to figure out why they’re ailing when they come out of orbit?) But that scent dissipated within a day, and we went along for several days absent the weird odor.
By now — about three weeks later — the odor seems to be coming back slightly, but not bad.
You’d expect to clean out the filter thingie in the bottom of the washer about once a month, if not more often. It does collect a little grease, which may be the source of the smell, although…I’ve never had any other washer create a smell from its filter, and I’ve had a few dishwashers in my life, including an earlier model of the Bosch. Nothing like a little upgrade to make your life more pleasant, eh?
So if you dumped in a cup of Tang each time you washed the filter (I soak mine in hot detergent water laced with about 1/3 cup baking soda), you’d use one package of the stuff a month, adding an extra $3.00 to your monthly housekeeping bill.
No doubt you can get the stuff cheaper if you shop in venues other than Safeway. Plus it’s the sort of stuff that coupons are made for — I’ll bet you can get the small size for two bucks, if you look around.
Probably a dumb question, but is the dishwasher waste hose hooked up properly? during a poorly planned kitchen reno years ago, I ended up with the dishwasher installed several paces away from the sink whose drain it is hooked up to. It worked fairly well until the waste line got hopelessly plugged with a calcium deposit. I plumbed a new line in, and decided to tap into the kitchen waste line beneath the trap for the sink. I figured it would be okay, since I installed a dedicated p-trap for the dishwasher.
Nope. Due to some Bernouillian fluid dynamics I don’t understand, the waste line “burped” little puffs of raw sewer gas into the dishwasher, resulting in a bad smell in the thing. Turns out, the dishwasher has to be the “northmost” thing on any household drain system; while the dishes cool, the air inside the thing contracts and tends to suck in gases from wherever it can.
So your dishwasher should drain into the sink drain well above the sink’s p-trap. I fixed mine and it’s been fine since. I’ve got a Bosch from about ten years ago.
It could be. The plumbing under the sink is pretty crowded; the last plumber who visited was not happy with it, but he didn’t fix it.
The other day a plumber visited the Scottsdale Bidness Assn. We all liked the guy, and our contractor member was impressed by his professionalism. As soon as I have money again (only another two days!!), I’m going to call and ask him to come look at the lash-up under there. He opined, though, when I described the issue, that the line may just need to be rooted out.
It doesn’t smell like sewer gas. Actually, it doesn’t smell like anything I’m familiar with, so I can’t find words to describe it. “Musky” is about the best I can conjure.
And there’s nothing wrong with Tang! I’ve been drinking it since I was a kid and I’ve never felt gooder. Can’t be proper white trash without a big ol’ jug in the fridge! makes the best popsicles too.
Now, I would argue that you can’t make a truly world-class popsicle without the use of Kool-Aid. Preferably not the sugar-free type…
I can’t imagine that Tang is more than citric acid, fake orange flavor and sugar – wouldn’t dumping some vinegar into the bottom of the dishwasher and running the same cycle be simpler and accomplish the same thing?
We grew up on Tang – it didn’t kill us 🙂
heh heh heh heh…didn’t killya…YET. 😉
It does seem to work better than vinegar. But..????? I’ll bet a cup of concentrated powder contains more acetic stuff than a cup of liquid vinegar.
Well. Unless orange dye has some magical properties that we have yet to understand.
Check out what one of my Honored Neighbors has to say on the subject, off the FaM comments string:
Honored Neighbor to FaM:
There’s orange bacteria the the Phoenix metro water….take some, let it sit out for awhile…..U’ll see. Got to be bacteria cause a drop of bleach kills it.
Funny to Honored Neighbor:
Holeee ess aitch ai! So that’s what that is. Found it inside a plastic thing that collected some water in the dishwasher.
Honored Neighbor to Funny:
Yeah, I see it often in my shower and made it impossible to keep an aquarium going so we gave that away.
I didn’t see it in Glendale where we lived. And don’t see it at my parent’s house on the west side.
Seems to be a metro Phoenix thing. I heard a brief mention a year or so ago that there was this orange oxygen starving algae that contaminated the rivers.
But good luck getting Phoenix City Water to admit to anything wrong! I suppose I could collect some take a picture and send it to the news station…..
But I have been busy saving the world as we know it so I had to put this one on the end of the list of things to right.
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Ahem. Yes, dear reader: this is a real exchange. And we think we live in a First-World country? Interesting.
Interesting! In the late spring here, the grout and caulk and edges of the tub all start getting very pink in between cleanings. After a few years of this someone told me that it is the dead algae in the reservoir from winter that causes this. Ew! Never noticed it in the dishwasher but no doubt it’s happening there as well. Ew!
And hubby and I loved that Roger Miller clip!