If your dishwasher needs a food grinder, I would suggest of eating up.
Aside from the usual overlooked cucumber slice, no food worth grinding goes to my dishwasher. Crumbs, ok. Some clingy pasta pieces in a casserole maybe.
Cleaning out the swamp every now and then is necessary because I sometimes have paper fibres stuck in there, if a label wasn’t removed form an empty jar of jam or marmalade. Otherwise, said enyzmes dissolve the stuff pretty nicely. Every week or so I need to run a 70°C machine anyways, to clean pots and the like. This does away with the stuff the enzymes don’t cope with so well. Cellulose, however, is fucking recalcitrant. Thank evolution for fungi, and termites (including their symbiotic critters) - otherwise we would pretty much suffocate from dead plant material…
We ran our dishwasher once with the outlet hose in a bucket because it was having problems pumping the water out. At the end of the cycle, there was less than a washing-up bowl of water in the bucket.
I’m quite familiar with the problem of biofilms due to low-heat washing (albeit mainly from washing machines, not so much in the case of dishwashers). However, bacteria in large quantities on the dishes is, from my perspective, not very likely.
Just FTR, in case of washing machines, a researcher giving a nice talk on biofilms suggested to clean your machine once a month with a 90°C programm on an empty drum. They also suggested adding chlorine-based products to this run if your family had current health issues, including viral infections of the pulmonary system (i.e. a common cold). Their data suggests that washing machines were a major factor in spreading infections in many circumstances, including some cases of MRSA in hospitals. (A problem which was identified, and addressed.)
I did some searching, and found that it was on another channel and it was a re-run from 2015. Unfortunatly the programme is only available for paying customers. But I found this article/promotion of the programme: Skyller du oppvasken før du setter inn i maskinen?
It says that ATP testing of the glasses that ran in a machine with unrinsed dishes had a value of 10.290, which is only 20X above recommended levels.
I have a poor memory for numbers, but a “healthy” tendency to inflate/guesstimate what it must have been, since I am remembering it being really bad
Edit to add: these results are for unrinsed and eco programme together at the same time
And I think that’s what most rinsers do too. I suspect that the anti-rinse contingent starts with assumptions set to the maximum: rinsing under full-blast, constantly running water and scrubbing with soap and a brush to get totally clean.
Aside from the dishwasher not actually able to get dried particles off, there’s ALSO the issue of the dishwasher filters: they get super nasty and stinky and are hard to clean, so I always scrape and rinse.
Um, dried on food is NOT easier to deal with than just a quick rinse beforehand. Seriously, have you ever tried to clean a dish with egg yolk on it that’s been through the dishwasher?
I figure there’s a difference between a quick rinse and just a full scrub down. I kind of figure if I just tell the washer to not heat dry, it’s still easier to deal with a few dishes than all of them.
