The Cascade Vs. Electrasol War

Ivy says:

Recently I was sent both Cascade Complete liquid dishwasher detergent and Electrasol liquid dishwashing detergent to test side by side to see which one was a winner. For full disclosure, let me tell y’all a few things:

1. I haven’t used Electrasol in years because I thought it did a crappy job of cleaning my dishes.

2. I have a dishwasher that is a total piece of junk and should probably be thrown to the side of the road. Seriously, if you leave one speck of food on your dishes, you can rest assured that it will still be there when you go to empty the dishwasher, no matter what kind of dishwasher detergent you use.

3. It was Cascade who sent me this dishwasher detergent. They told me to be completely honest, so I will. If Electrasol had sent me this detergent, my review would be the same. No other compensation was given for this trial- just a full sized bottle of Cascade and a full sized bottle of Electrasol.

All that said, let’s forge on with how Cascade and Electrasol did with my dishes.

I decided to play with it, doing first one load with Cascade and one load with Electrasol. Because my dishwasher is such a piece of junk, I did the dishes as I normally do them and rinsed the heck out of each dish beforehand. Cascade did its normal fabulous job, and surprisingly, Electrasol did a good job as well.

“Hmm,” I thought. “I might start using Electrasol again. This isn’t so bad.”

Then I put it to the real test. I let the kids do the dishes. This changed things immensely. When my kids (14 year old son and 7 year old daughter) do dishes, I hear a whole lot of water running, but they are pretty haphazard about how well the dishes are rinsed. Sometimes all the food residue is rinsed off, but more often than not, they leave food on at least some of the dishes.

Cascade, again, did a fine job. A few specks of food were left on the dishes, causing me to have to rewash them, but nothing major.

I figured Electrasol would do the same job. Not so. The kids were “kind” enough to put the dishes away for me this morning, resulting in a big surprise when I went to get a bowl so I could eat some cereal. I pulled a bowl out of the cabinet and -bang!- it was still dirty. Not the usual speck or two that’s left, but that ugly nearly baked on, deep down funk. I set the bowl aside and pulled out another one. It was really funky as well. I ended up pulling out nearly every dish I own and hand washed them.

This leads me to a few conclusions. First, I really need to save up and buy a new dishwasher. The whole point of having a dishwasher, theoretically, is to save time. How much time, really, does it save when you have to completely rinse each dish beforehand, then load and unload the dishwasher?

Second, I believe I’ll be hand washing my dishes until I can get a new dishwasher. I think it’ll save water and it will definitely save a lot of time. Total time spent washing dishes by hand with my daughter after dinner tonight: 15 minutes. And it was a fun 15 minutes, at that.

Finally, in the case of Cascade vs. Electrasol, Cascade wins. At least it does in my household, with my crappy dishwasher. I gave the rest of the bottle of Electrasol to my mom, who has a good dishwasher and says she notices very little difference between Cascade and Electrasol. So, if you have a good dishwasher or you like to spend a lot of time rinsing dishes, either might be fine. But for me and my dishwasher, it has to be Cascade.

Or, I’ll just hand wash the dishes. Ha.

Teach Your Kids To Hand Wash Dishes

Ivy says:

Last night, there were several dishes left over after starting the dishwasher. This happens with some frequency, we use a heck of a lot of dishes in our house. Normally, I would just rinse them and set them in the sink to run the dishwasher this morning, but it occurred to me that my 7 year old daughter doesn’t know how to hand wash dishes, and it’s time to rectify that. She actually enjoyed it so much, she wants to hand wash dishes with me from now on.

I think being the dryer/putter awayer is the best place to start with learning to hand wash dishes, so that was her position, while I washed, giving a running commentary on how I hand wash dishes. I always wash my dishes from cleanest to dirtiest with the exception of silverware and knives, which I do first.

I put all the silverware in the water except sharp knives, then I wash each sharp knife and rinse. I showed her how to carefully dry the knives. Then I wash all the silverware and rinse them all collectively. Then I wash the glasses, then the plasticware. Then plates, then pots and pans.

She was shocked that there needed to be some order to how you wash dishes, but anyone who has ever tried to get plastic clean in greasy water can relate- there HAS to be an order to how you do it. It’s funny to me that technology has gotten us so far from the basics, that my daughter has reached the advanced age of seven and hasn’t learned how to hand wash dishes. We don’t own much stuff that has to be hand washed, so the act of filling up a sink and actually doing dishes is a very rare occurrence in our house.

Ever since then, I’ve been thinking about the act of hand washing dishes. On one hand, it uses less electricity and presumably less water. And there’s something satisfying about “I’ll wash, you dry” and then using that time to talk with each other. Yet, I do think dishes are more sanitary when you wash them in the dishwasher, and it’s way, way more speedy.

When it all comes down to it, I think we’ll wash dishes by hand more often.