ecover dishwasher tabs?

[randomama]

any good? feel i ought to switch from finish but scared...
any thoughts?

I have never used finish but I think Ecover tabs are excellent

thanks. gonna go for it. being silly really but our dishwasher is a temperamental thing.

they are ok, but you also need salt and rinse aid or glass gets a grey deposit...

I was always reasonably happy with them till our dishwasher broke down, and the chap who came to fix it said (without looking in the cupboard!) "Ah you are another one of those who use Ecover aren't you?"

Apparently though the dishes were always fine, crap was building up in the pipes after the filter (which you can't clean). That was in an area with really hard water though, which might have contributed.

No problems except guilt, now that we use "normal" ones.

I didn't like them TBH. I use the Ecover rinse aid though & that's fine.

ugh. ok. think am gonna stick with finish and guilt after all, and compensate by buying some Method cleaning stuff and some eco carpet shampoo.
thanks all

We've used the tabs & rinse aid for years. We got some Finish once as the supermarket had run out & I didn't notice any difference.

Interesting what mustdash says though... I've had the current dishwasher for 3 years & no problems yet!

I found them crap - sorry.

Ecover and the like may put fewer synthetic chemicals into the sewage system when you use them, but they need far more processing up front than "normal" brands. The overall environmental impact is not that different.

Food for thought...

Totally forget about them if you are in a hard water area.

We have hard water & find they work fine.

bike that's really interesting, how did you find that out? Are all "Eco-friendly" detergents the same?

I am a civil engineer, and work with someone who used to do Environmental Impact Assessments for the big detergent manufacturers, including Ecover. My FIL is a Chemical Engineer, with 40 years experience of working in sewage as it were, and has also described this too me.

Surely traces of Ecover tabs on your plates are going to be less harmful to your health than traces of Finish, though? And if you use a dishwasher cleaner, doesn't that sort out the pipes?

Not sure I agree taugenichts. Hopefully the cleaning tabs get rinsed away, but that theory is why I use the Ecover rinse aid.

I imagine that if any residue is left, then it must be at levels acceptable to be used in food/drinking water standards, for the product to be marketed as suitable for dish washing.

It's a bit of a myth that "natural = harmelss". I wouldn't want to eat arsenic, chromium, crude oil, nicotine, all sorts of poisonous plants, alcohol = all contain harmful chemicals, but all natural.

Equally, table salt, vinegar and water could be expressed in chemical terminology. Pint of 3-carboxy-3-hydroxypentanedioic acid anyone? Or would you rather Vitamin C? ... also used in detergents to aid foaming.

I think it's about credibility. I read tons of stuff about products with dodgy ingredients - and used to work in the field - and have never heard anything but good about Ecover. In the end you can't research everything yourself, but I don't believe a brand like Ecover could get away with being as harmful to health as other mainstream brands.