My friend and Don’t Look Under The Rug® team member, Jenna Schario, is sharing her struggles with cloudy dishes today on the blog. It was too good to pass up, so enjoy:
I didn’t grow up with a dishwasher. I spent my childhood on a farm washing dishes in an old, double sink that sat below two windows looking out at the garden. When your cracked the windows just right a cool breeze would come through the screens, giving the washer relief from the soapy hot water that was constantly spilling everywhere. We didn’t have a mechanical garbage disposal either, but that topic is for another blog.
Needless to say, I didn’t learn how to actually use a dishwasher until I was in my twenties. Up till then, I had been well versed with the process of soaking, scrapping, scrubbing, and neatly making an assembly line of drying racks and towels to accommodate the wet dinnerware. My husband on the other hand grew up being the family dishwasher, and he quickly introduced me to the best appliance in the kitchen (according to him - LOL)!
Now many years later, my dishwasher and I are best friends — spending time together most every day. However, when I started to get a white haze on my glasses I was both aggravated and confused. Here’s what usually happens: I’m in my kitchen and I go to the cabinet to grab a glass for my friend who is over for dinner. But instead of a smooth (normal) exchange, I quickly make a weird, jerky dance move to put the glass back without looking like a complete idiot. The glass was cloudy, and no body wants to drink out of that! My healthy relationship with my dishwasher was fading fast.
Thank God Amy has a fix for cloudy dishes! No more creepy dance moves because my glasses come out lovely, and I can get back to saying nice things about my dishwasher. The cleaning trick is to use a powdered lemonade or other drink mix where the first or second ingredient listed is citric acid! You don’t have to spend extra money on those pricy lemon cleaning products, just simply add Tang or Country Time Lemonade! Wooohooo for saving money!
Amy Bates from Don't Look Under The Rug® shares answers to common questions on how to get the most out of your dishwasher's cycle.
So, why Citric Acid?
For any of you who love to geek out on the facts, Science Daily and LiveStrong.com provide these insights. Citric acid…
- Exists in a variety of fruits and vegetables, but it is most concentrated in lemons and limes, where it can comprise as much as 8 percent of the dry weight of the fruit.
- Is a natural preservative and is also used to add an acidic (sour) taste to foods and soft drinks.
- For canning foods at home, it is a good additive to prevent bacterial growth.
- In biochemistry, it is important as an intermediate in the citric acid cycle and therefore occurs in the metabolism of almost all living things.
- It also binds with minerals, making citric acid useful in several commercial applications. For example, your body absorbs minerals in supplements more readily when they're attached to citric acid. As a cleaning product additive, it binds with minerals in hard water, which improves the effectiveness of the soaps and detergents.
- Serves as an environmentally benign cleaning agent and acts as an antioxidant.
Happy Dishwasher! (and as Amy would say) #happycleaning!
- Jenna Schario