I was right about dishwasher pods and now I can prove it [video]
87 comments
·November 4, 2025spondyl
analog31
It's a volatile surfactant. Thus, it allows water to drip off your dishes before drying, so you don't get spots, but also doesn't produce a residue of its own.
emtel
Pods work great for me, and I love not having crumbs of powder under the sink, or a bottle of liquid detergent with encrusted drips down the side. It's just gross.
They are more expensive, but I buy them on sale at Costco for about $16/100, so at $0.16 per load I really don't care if powdered detergent is only $0.03 per load or whatever.
There is clearly a revealed preference for pods among consumers for these things, and "proving" that everyone is wrong for liking them is just not a very interesting exercise imo.
383toast
summary:
The creator argues that most dishwashers are designed to use a pre-wash dose and a main wash dose of detergent, a fundamental often ignored by single-dose pods, and presents independent ASTM testing confirming the new powder matches or exceeds the performance of a leading premium pod. The video also features a detailed demonstration using temperature logging and peanut butter to stress the importance of purging cold water from the hot water supply line before running a dishwasher, particularly in North America, to ensure the water reaches the optimal enzymatic temperature needed for effective cleaning. This is further reinforced by showing how adding pre-wash detergent dramatically improves the initial cleaning phase, especially with fats and oils.
losvedir
This has been his stance for a long time. He has a lot of dishwasher videos for some reason!
One thing I can't get a good answer to is whether the "prewash" step is universally the case or not. I have a good Bosch dishwasher and there's no compartment for a bit of pre-wash detergent. I don't even know if my dishwasher cycle has a pre-wash step. I would assume the dishwasher manufacturer knows what's best.
The owner's manual gives advice about not pre-rinsing the dishes because the food bits actually help the wash cycle, so I'm wondering if it works differently from the two-step process in this video.
woodpanel
Pods have become so ubiquitous that many companies ditched that powder compartment altogether. But you don't need one anyways just pour it into the cabin.
The video explains why there always is a pre-wash step. Regardless of whether it comes with a pre-wash-powder compartment or not. I will try his solution.
tmsh
Interestingly the Gemini summary is nowhere near as good. But when it is... how helpful will that be! So many things with a very good summary will save so much time / avoid having to dive into unless truly in need of the details.
But the quality of the summary - and maybe the ability to expand it if slightly more details are required - and the low latency with that - are all super important. In that sense, AI can potentially save a lot of time in getting the right information quickly.
suprjami
Thanks for the summary.
American dishwashers don't have their own heater? All dishwashers I've seen in Australia only have cold water supply.
mrandish
Some US washers don't but many do. However, US washers tend to not heat water as quickly or to as high of a temp. The video cites two reasons: 1. US power being 110V vs 220v. 2. US dishwasher heating elements being limited to 800 or 1000 watts because many are designed to potentially share one 20A residential circuit with an oven and/or fridge due to possibly being retrofitted into a kitchen built before built-in dishwashers were standard and manufacturers not wanting to create different models for retrofit vs new installs.
masklinn
> share one 20A residential circuit
15, dishwasher manufacturers can't assume the dishwasher is on a 20.
beerandt
3) manufacturers placing energy star improvement quotas over safety in programming the cycles.
Rebelgecko
American dishwashers are typically hooked up to hot water. Some will have heaters but they're not that powerful and they may only run for the main wash cycle
brianwawok
Not true. Dishwashers get cold very often.
devilbunny
They do. I didn't realize this until my natural gas supply company decided to replace my meter on a Friday. Without alerting me ahead of time so that I could, you know, plan to be gone while my house had no hot water.
Whenever natural gas supply is turned off in the US, for any reason, only the gas company can turn it back on. And they can't do so if there's a leak at all. You have to call a plumber to come out, detect the leaks, and fix them. After that, you can call the gas company to come back out (but not on a weekend) to turn it back on. And a same-day request for service requires someone to be home ALL DAY after it's called in.
And this is how I ended up showering at work for three days that week after not having had one over the weekend.
null
Freedom2
> Whenever natural gas supply is turned off in the US, for any reason, only the gas company can turn it back on
Doesn't match my experience. My colleagues and I are able to turn on or off the gas supply to our houses at will.
ajb
My parents used to have an old cooker which rather than having a spark button, had individual pilot lights for all of the hob burners and the grill. My mother was forever worried about whether one of the damn things had gone out (which they occasionally did). I think if you switched the supply off, switched it on again, and someone has left their house for a week, it might build up a significant amount of gas. Although they are supposed to be small enough not to. Presumably there were hardly any of those left now, but they can't assume they're all gone.
mvdtnz
Sorry how is this story relevant?
thomascountz
As an American expat, I will use this story to explain some of the indignities of living in America. Thank you for sharing.
vel0city
A dishwasher cycle is usually only going to run for a specific period of time. Its more effective it if starts that time closer to the proper temperature rather than relying on waiting for the heater to get the temperature up to that time. Especially on the pre-rinse cycle, where the heater may or (probably) many not engage.
midnitewarrior
They do, but they are generally confined to 10 amps, so they do not heat quickly.
WheatMillington
Same in NZ, never seen a dishwasher with a hot water connection.
Titan2189
If you check the manual you might find that you can hook the single inlet pipe up to the hot water tap.
reaperducer
American dishwashers don't have their own heater?
Some do, some don't.
The ones that do vary in ability by overall dishwasher quality.
The ones that don't are hooked up to the kitchen's hot water line.
This is considered more energy efficient because a home's hot water heater (whether electric, gas, or another fuel) is better at heating the water in a bulk capacity than a tiny heater in the dishwasher.
The downside is that the cold water between the big water heater and the dishwasher has to be purged first for it to be really effective. If your hot water heater is in the other side of the wall, no problem. If it's six rooms away, problem.
WheatMillington
Hot water from the house supply isn't that hot though? My dishwasher gets MUCH hotter than the hot water supply... and I don't think the heater is "tiny" I think it's a rather substantial element. The dishwasher also doesn't need to heat up a "bulk" amount of water, just the amount of water used for washing the current load of dishes.
tguvot
i have miele dishwasher with detergent powder cartridge that allows dishwasher to dispense it at will. it never used during pre-wash cycle in any of the programs that dishwasher has.
RealityVoid
I've found it harder and harder to find powder dishwasher detergent in my country. I think they intentionally pull them off the market, I used to buy a large Finish container and now I can barely find a place that sells _any_ sort of dishwashing powder.
NamTaf
I, too, went through like 18 months in the UK with the big stores not selling any until one reintroduced it recently. Alternatives on the internet were like 3+x the price, at least. It was incredibly frustrating. I now stock up and have 2-3 boxes of the stuff, in case it does vanish again.
Doubly frustrating since mine is a small, single-drawer dishwasher, so pods are even worse since I can't break them down. It leads to me having way too much detergent in the dishwasher and I end up with residue on the dishes.
bcraven
The big Sainsbury's near me never stopped doing this:
https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/sainsburys-conce...
And this has worked for me too:
https://www.waitrose.com/ecom/products/essential-dishwasher-...
gattilorenz
Or… use a (dirty) knife to split a solid tab; put 2/3 in the dishwasher compartment and 1/3 just in the dishwasher.
valeena
I thought about it but wasn't sure if it would really do the trick. I kinda don't wanna buy more detergent right now because I'm stuck with a lot of pods
ErroneousBosh
I wonder if that's why my now something like nearly 40-year-old dishwasher is so bad for leaking, on certain cycles? Maybe the pods foam up too much, because it seems hell of a foamy inside.
At some point, I'll maybe post up the pics of repairing the door hinges - previously it was leaking badly because the chunky metal hinges had cracked and bent, pushing the door up enough to not squash the bottom lip seal. Unobtainable parts now, but if you have a welder...
If you don't use a JTAG cable and a MIG welder on the same project in the same day, can you really call yourself "full stack"?
basscomm
> Maybe the pods foam up too much, because it seems hell of a foamy inside.
Dishwasher detergent doesn't make suds. Dish soap does. Are you sure you're using the correct stuff? Or prewashing the dishes for some reason and not getting all the soap off?
NoPicklez
Anecdotally we started using these dishwasher sheets and the dishwasher started erroring during the cycle and also leaked slightly. On observation when it errored it looked very foamy inside.
Simply changing back to powder completely stopped the error and the leaking and this was in a 1 year old dishwasher
ash_091
MIG is for hobbyists. Real programmers use TIG.
ErroneousBosh
I haven't got space for a TIG. However a couple of weeks ago Hofer had an inverter gasless MIG about the size of a Commodore 64 power brick, not including the spool of wire. Can't say I wasn't tempted to get myself a hot-glue-gun-for-metal kind of tool.
bluGill
> gasless MIG
I hate when people use that term the G in MIG stands for Gas. If you are not running a Gas (argon, CO2...) it isn't Mig. There are flux core wires that are commonly used and called Mig, but they are not Mig (unless there is also a gas flow - this isn't uncommon) and have very different weld properties.
smileysteve
At 40 years, there is an expectation that the rubber and most plastic components have become embrittled. The hinges likely only wore out after the spring had reduced function (and lack of lubrication)
After your weld, I hope you consider replacing all rubber with silicone, and add lubrication to at least an annual list.
ErroneousBosh
The plastic and rubber bits are absolutely fine.
The hinges broke because someone leaned on the door with their full weight while it was open. The grease on the hinge pins was perfectly okay too.
Ariston used to be a quality company.
tguvot
i replaced few years ago dishwasher that was at this point of time 20 years old (GE). When it was removed from below countertop plastic connector on top of dishwasher (water hookup) fall apart into dozen of small pieces.
platevoltage
One of my favorite YouTubers. Watch every video.
ZeroGravitas
I watched the video, but may have missed this, but shouldn't the testing have shown that the powder was substantially better?
Or did they not test the "putting some powder into the prewash" thing and so it was just "powder released all at once" vs "tablet released all at once".
Even there I'd expect some mild improvement from the powder mixing more easily than a plastic wrapped tablet (though maybe if the content inside is liquid this factor is reversed?).
Does this mean the big corps do have some chemical advantage that cancels out the crappy delivery mechanism?
Or does it mean that a mechanical spray prewash step isn't meaningfully improved by chemicals in most circumstances?
I was more alarmed by the wrappers being plastic. I had assumed they were some clever biodegradable thing but they're not.
smiley1437
The pods cost about 6x as much per load as powder.
So, even if they had equal cleaning performance, economically the powder would come ahead.
As it turns out, the 1/6th-as-expensive powder does an even better job than the pods, making the powder an even more obvious choice
(Unless you really value the handling convenience of using a pod and were willing to accept poorer results at a higher expense)
nikita2206
I believe expensive pods do have a chemical advantage, in the form of some enzymes that help break things down.
ixwt
The powder in the video has enzymes as well.
mvdtnz
Given the stupid pods are way more expensive I think it's enough to show that there's no benefit.
jeffbee
I was a long-time adherent of powder for all the reasons in the video. I used the Seventh Generation powder that is widely available, or once was. One day I couldn't find it, so I got Cascade Free & Clear Pods. I was completely blown away by how much better the pods work. And they work faster, too, because my dishwasher cycles are based on water clarity and they end sooner if the detergent is working faster. So I permanently switched, nevermind the cost difference.
Perhaps part of the issue is that the presenter in the video is using a somewhat primitive machine.
Izkata
I used pods and tried out powder after one of his previous videos on this, it was pretty terrible even following his advice and using rinse aids.
I like chocolate milk, made by mixing chocolate powder (Nesquik) into milk, and somehow everything except pods manages to leave a film of the chocolate powder over everything. I haven't watched this video yet, but my suspicion is he's using bad pods - ones that really are just packaged detergent without the extra chemicals they often include in the pods nowadays.
eszed
I thought that the multi-solution pods - they're usually have differently-colored, for I presume marketing reasons - have pockets with different dissolve rates, so that the solutions are dispensed in sequence. I've not tested that, though.
masklinn
Alec actually looked at that in a previous video of the dishwasher series. There is no "different dissolve rate" or "dispensed in sequence".
PetitPrince
It would be probably very difficult to engineer a good dissolution rate that takes into account the different length and water temperature of the pre-wash cycle of the many many different dishwashers out there. So no, as the video in the sibling comment shows, it's just fancy marketing.
jogu
He has another video talking about pods specifically:
tguvot
i used multiple dishwashers in multiple countries. blomberg, ge, bosch, miele, lg. used pods for as long as they exist (with exception of miele that has detergent cartridge that is good for two dozens of cycles). the only times when I had problem with dishwasher performance it's when either dishwasher had physical malfunction, dishwasher arms were blocked by some object or when i forgot to put pod.
is my experience of dishwashers extraordinary ?
jogu
His stance is less that pods don't perform, and more that powders perform just as well and are less wasteful.
tguvot
pods are about convenience. exactly same reason that i got dishwasher with detergent cartridges and washing machine with build in container for detergent.
but if we talk about powders, they can be very different with different performance. There are commercial powders (for restaurants and such where dishwashers run on very short cycles) that I afraid to put in my dishwasher and there are eco powders that are made from unicorn tears (tried once, they cleaned dirt but leave stains on clear glass). i went through sds of a bunch of them. most of them have same similar basic ingredients, but in different proportions
1718627440
How is fiddling a thing out of a box more convenient than putting a spoon in a box? I don't get that argument.
eitau_1
I can't remember if it was main video or second channel one, in which Alec states with confidence that big brands make powder worse on purpose to push their higher margin pods.
The opinion is based on his experience (horrible residue left by big-name powder in contrast to store-branded great-value powders being problem-free) and lab results.
Hah! I had watched this just last night. I have a Fisher & Paykel Dishdrawer so this prompted me to check the instruction manual and sure enough, I had been putting Rinse Aid in the pre-wash area. I don't even really know what Rinse Aid is honestly but it's fun having some things be a black box. Turns out the correct spot is turning a knob, pulling it out and pouring it down a hole containing a glowing red light. I had assumed there was just some sort of circuitry down there and doing so would be a horrible idea. Thanks Technology Connections!