Adding salt to dishwasher

[EleanorFarjeon]

Deathly dull, sorry.

Old dishwasher died after 11 years of abuse, new one coming tomorrow.

I was reading through specification for new model which mentioned salt dispenser.

We never once put salt in our old dishwasher. We always use 3in1 or some such tablets, do you still need to use salt if you use these all in one tablets?

(We have water softener but dishwasher doesn't use softened water.)

they have even been approved by the Good Housekeeping Institute so must be ok

Just top up with salt and rinse did and then a quick shake of 1 in 1 powder. No issues with dissolving eye and much cheaper than using expensive 3 in 1 and RA and salt.

Seriously it's all a con.

ALDI ones are GH approved as well and a Which Best Buy.

LackaDAISYcal, I phoned up and complained, they sent me some vouchers to compensate.

My printer was a Which "best buy" bloody thing costs a fortune in cartridges so i've actually fallen out with Which magazine's opinion of things. Probably fine if you are a pensioner occasionally printing out a crossword.

oooh, might try complaining to Cath Kidston then; some vouchers for there would be lovely

Oh dear BlueSky; not good!

Well after three weeks out of action waiting for a part, my dishwasher is finally fixed. WooHoo . Service wash is done so it's all clean and sparkly and new again, and the salt reservoir is duly filled up!

Isn't it horrendous when the dishwasher doesn't work - we take these things for granted now but it makes life so much easier.

I had a lesson in how things used to be earlier in the year when my fridge was misbehaving too - buying food each day was a real pain in the bum.

I am just confused now about tablets and salt. Dh says sticker on new dishwasher says to use salt.

But I am on my 3rd glass of wine.

When we got ours the manual said to use solo salt, rinse aid and dishwasher detergent.

It took me 3 days to realise solo is not a previously un-heard of brand of dishwasher supplies.

Just add the salt and it'll all be ok.

I think I will, to be safe.

Yeah I would. You may find your model won't run if it doesn't have salt (ie. the warning light being on will stop it). A dishwasher repair man said to me about six months ago that salt is the most important thing towards a long-lived dishwasher.

As someone said, buy dishwasher salt; it's bulkier and cheaper.

Our dishwasher manual said to check whether you have soft water or not (I think it came with test strips) and use salt depending on whether or not you need it. I would be pissed off if our dishwasher refused to function without salt as we don't have limescale so it's completely unnecessary.

Hate to say this, OP, you probably killed your old dishwasher by never adding salt.

It wears your machine out faster to not use salt unless your water is very soft. Our dishwasher manual said to check with local water supplier to see how hard our supply was, and then they had a table to set something so that the right amount of salt was dispensed per wash.

Yes, usually you set a release function to tell the machine how much salt to use. It's unusual not to need any, even if your water us soft, because salt maintains the dishwasher.

I think our old dishwasher was such a cheapo make, it wasn't high tech enough to tell us to add salt. DH says the water it uses is softened, ie from the softener.

Anyway, dw salt ordered. Thanks for advice.