Rinse Cycle

After spending nearly a year hand washing the dishes multiple times a day, I no longer take for granted the invention of the dishwasher. I marvel at the convenience and every time I load and unload it, I am in awe of its ability under the right circumstances to get dishes clean without me needing to scrub and dry.

I’ve written before that I’ll experiment with different ways of loading the dishwasher to optimize loading and unloading, as well as cleaning. I’ve evolved from placing dishwasher pods (I know, sacrilegious to the dishwasher enthusiast community) in the detergent receptacle to placing two at different locations in the basin.

While in the past, I’ve used the “set it and forget it” approach, I’ve now split the process into two parts: an initial rinse cycle followed by the normal wash. In between these parts, I’ll remove and clean the filter for the dishwasher. The rinse cycle seems to be much better at removing debris from the dishes and depositing them on the filter than even the normal cycle. The gunk that gets removed means that it won’t be around and circulating from the basin during the regular wash.

The problem with this advice is that it’s so particular to my circumstances. The model of my dishwasher, the type of dishes that I use, the time of day I run the wash, the reason why I use pods vs powder detergent, etc — all of these create a scenario in which, for me, using the rinse cycle and then cleaning the filter works much better than someone who has a different set of variables.

This is where technologies like generative AI might be able to scale advice. Can you read all of the literature out there on washing dishes and dishwashers and be able to reason what might work for a very narrow use case… at scale? You can with generative AI. This may require some focused prompt designing to make advice more useful and less prone to bad suggestions.