How to care for and feed your dishwasher

Thursday's New York Times contains their weekly Home and Garden section. It's always worth the peruse. Always. In that weekly section, there's a recurring column called The Fix, where a Times staffer fields a reader's question.

This week's installment of The Fix was written by Arianne Cohen, and she tackled the question, "Why isn't my dishwasher cleaning my dishes?" Ms. Cohen did a great job with the answer and parts of her column were news to me. Adding to my store of appliance knowledge is something I'm always happy to do and I'm going to excerpt some of her more interesting points here.

“Pre-rinsing dishes is a big mistake,” said John Dries, a mechanical engineer and the owner of Dries Engineering, an appliance design consulting company in Louisville, Ky. “People assume that the dishwasher will perform better if you put in cleaner dishes, and that’s not true. Just scrape. Pre-rinsing with hot water is double bad, because you’re pumping water and electricity down the drain.”

It’s actually triple bad, according to Mike Edwards, a senior dishwasher design engineer at BSH Home Appliances in New Bern, N.C. “Dishwasher detergent aggressively goes after food,” Mr. Edwards said, “and if you don’t have food soil in the unit, it attacks the glasses, and they get cloudy,” a process known as etching that can cause permanent damage.

It’s also important not to use too much detergent, he said.

How much do you need? That depends on how much food soil there is, he said, not how many dishes. “If you have a light load,” he said, “don’t fill the detergent cup all the way.”

Powder detergent is preferable to that in liquid or tablet form, he said, because it leaves dishes cleaner. But store it somewhere dry, not under the sink, where it can absorb moisture and form clumps.

That's an interesting note about pre-rinsing dishes. Who knew that when a detergent doesn't have enough to do, it goes all renegade.

Mr. Dries offered a final tip: stick with the normal cycle. It’s the one consumer organizations conduct all their performance and energy tests on. “Manufacturers know this, so it’s the cycle that the most work went into,” he said.

The pots-and-pans cycle is rarely necessary, except when you have baked-on foods, he said, nor is the heat-dry function.

“A trick you can use is called flash dry,” he added. As soon as the dishwasher shuts off, open the door. “Dishes are at their hottest point and give up water moisture the fastest. Within 5 to 10 minutes, your dishes are going to be completely dry.”

I love this kind of insider information. The bit about all of the engineering of a dishwasher getting poured into the normal cycle is really go to know too. And flash drying, who knew?

Revisiting the sink revolution

Last week, I wrote a quick piece about about the Affluence seamless sink. Within hours of that post's going live, I received a very thoughtful e-mail from Dan Sullivan. Dan Sullivan is the inventor of the seamless sink and he's also the CEO of Affluence, the company who brought the seamless sink to market.

Dan gave me his phone number and asked me to call him, so I did. What followed was an hour-long conversation with a man whose passion for his invention is contagious, let me tell you. What an inspiring story and what a great human being. Dan walked me through Affluence's website and we reviewed everything, sink by sink.

When I wrote about the Affluence originally, all I saw was the streamlined look of a seamless sink. Granted, it's an impressive feature, but it's only a third of the story.

All disposers have a clunky black stopper. In a double bowl sink, which is what most people have, there's a strainer basket on the sink side and stopper on the disposer side. Because that's the way thing just are, no one thinks that they don't coordinate. At least I never did. But in an Affluence sink, the strainer and the stopper are identical. They're identical because the drain opening and the disposer opening are the same size. Brilliant! It makes the already improved appearance look even better.

See what I mean? Now go look at your sink. If you have a double bowl set-up, take a look at how bad your stopper looks. Awful, isn't it? As I'm showing here, there's help available.

The final third of the story is how the Affluence seamless sink re-thought the act of disposer installation. Plumbers hate installing disposers. It's a labor-intensive exercise that invariably ends in bleeding knuckles. But watch this video as Dan himself installs a disposer on an Affluence sink.

All of the parts for this installation come with the sink too, so there's nothing extra to buy. Again, brilliant!

I understand completely why the Affluence Seamless Sink won the Best of Competition Award at KBIS this year. And Dan, you made a believer out of me.

A clarification for Brenda et al

I've been talking about mosaics a lot this week and last night, the great and powerful Jamie Goldberg (of Gold Notes fame) asked me a question about ending a sheeted mosaic neatly. I tried to describe my preferred way to deal with that, the Schluter Edge. I think my explanation lost a couple of people. I mentioned to Jamie too that I like seeing offset, brick patterns set vertically rather than horizontally. This seems to have thrown people for a bit of a loop as well. Here are some photos from my archives that will illustrate what I'm talking about.

Here's what I mean by a Schluter Edge.

Schluter is a brand name and Schluter makes some really great metal trims for bridging the gap left when abutting materials are of differing depths.

Here it is from a little closer.

Now, A Schluter Edge isn't the only way to end a tile backsplash. In the trade, mosaic tile manufacturers makes something that's usually called pencil, or pencil edging. Here's some pencil edging at work.

The back splash material here is a blend of travertine and marble and the pencil edge is travertine.

Make sense? Cool.

Now, most sheeted, offset mosaics come looking like this:

The ragged edges interlock and hide the seams between sheets. This works great until you want to either finish an edge cleanly or change the orientation of the pattern to a vertical one. Setting a sheet like this vertically entails cutting off its ragged edges and automatically wasting a lot of the material. I say that's a small price to pay for an effect like this:

Or this:

Here's a closer shot of that same backsplash tile.

It's a personal preference that makes tile setters hate me, but little things like this are what make a kitchen looked designed and not just installed.

The Natalie Blake collection from Ann Sacks

A little more than a week ago I reported on the tile mosaics of a ceramics artist named Natalie Blake. The offerings of Natalie Blake Studios are beautiful and original and I'm not the only one who noticed, believe me.

No less than Ann Sacks has picked up three of Natalie's designs and they are now available from Ann Sacks showrooms and authorized dealers nationwide. The series Dahlia and Nautilus can be used individually or as a vertical or horizontal mural. The third series, Botanical, is available in 20 colors and can be used individually or as a group.

Natalie's utilizes an old art form called S'graffato, that's Italian for scratched. She doesn't use molds or dies, rather each tile is sculpted and then the design is hand-impressed in the surface. Her offerings are beautiful and unique, almost like a three-dimensional wood cut.

Here's the Dahlia as a vertical mural.

Here are some details from the Dahlia.

And here's the Nautilus, also set as a vertical mural.

Here are some Naurilus detail photos.

Here are some of the individual tiles from the Botanical series.

Adobe

Yellow

Apricot

Honey

Ivy

Here's a great new series from Hakatai

My great pals at Hakatai are rolling out a new glass mosaic series called Bohemia. Bohemia features a semi-transparent glass tile mini brick set in a traditional offset pattern. The individual mosaic pieces are a half-inch thick and due to their near transparency, these mosaics will have a depth and sparkle that won't quit once they're installed.

In looking over these new patterns, they remind me of an old art class technique. Under the tutelage of the great man who taught me most of what I know about art, we used to mix oil- and water-based paints together on a heavy sheet of paper and let them interact. The result was a randomness that bordered on the impressionist and it was a terrific lesson in standing back and letting art happen.

Hakatai has captured that inadvertent, random impressionism and preserved it forever in glass. Beautiful!

Nutmeg

Chanterelle

Mallard

Mirage

Azul

Sargasso Sea

Loam