“I hate housework! You make the beds, you do the dishes and six months later you have to start all over again.” – Joan Rivers

It’s hard keeping up with housework when you’re a busy mom. There are a lot of solutions that you can use to help – Chore Charts for the kids, a daily or weekly routine for yourself – and I’ll be sharing some tips next week for setting up both of these ideas! But one thing that anyone can do to make things easier is to take a few easy steps to make sure that you’re doing things as efficiently as possible. Let’s start with your dishwasher – when your dishwasher works well, it is one of the BIGGEST time-savers in your kitchen! So I’m going to share 5 great secrets that I use in my home to make sure my dishwasher gets dishes as clean as possible.

5 Secrets to Cleaner Dishes

• 1. Make sure that your water is hot enough– Many people lower their water heater temp’s make it safer for babies, or to save on their energy bills. But if your water is not hot enough, the dishwasher can’t properly clean or kill germs on your dishes! Most manufacturers recommend at least 120 degrees to clean your dishes, and 155 to sanitize and disinfect your dishware. If your water isn’t hot enough to kill germs, then you’re not getting clean dishes!

• 2. Rinse before loading – Your dishwasher has trouble handling big pieces of food or junk, so rinse well before loading. You don’t want to have food bits getting stuck in your dishwashers drain – it’ll give you problems, trust me! No need to “clean” dishes first, just rinse them well. Easy peasy.
• 3. Load properly – While my boyfriend insists that it doesn’t matter how you throw it all in, it gets clean no matter what – it just isn’t true, lol. Here are a few tips – cups and glasses on the top row, bottoms up. Plates on the bottom, facing the same way. I’m an organizer, and like all forks, spoons, and knives in separate bins – if you do this too, make sure you put some facing up and some down, so they move around well. Proper loading ensures that water can get in between each dish to clean well, and makes putting them away easier too!
• 4. Use the right detergent – Detergents really do work differently in different homes. There are a lot of variables, such as type of dishwasher, hard water or soft, etc. I prefer to use the All-In-One Tab style detergent, because it’s super easy for even the kids to just drop one in, and start a load. A couple of tips here – if you use powder detergent, and see clumps left over after a load, it’s probably because moisture has gotten into your container. The moisture can cause the crystals to stick together, and not dissolve properly in the dishwasher. So make sure to keep it stored in a dry place, closed tightly!
• 5. An often missed trick – Rinse agent! So many of my friends skip this step, thinking that it doesn’t really do anything, or isn’t worth the extra few bucks. But it is key to getting sparkling dishes! Here’s why – when you use detergents alone, food and yucky residue can redeposit on dishes during the rinse cycle. But a rinse agent helps the water run off of the dishes faster – so no yucky spots or scum, and they dry faster!

What do you think?

Do you have any helpful tips to add? If you do – share them in the comments! I’ll pick one of your great comments on January 7th, and reward it with a FREE package of my favorite secret weapon – a bottle of Finish Jet-Dry – so you can see for yourself what a HUGE difference it will make in your dish washing routine!

“If you have to dry the dishes
(Such an awful boring chore)
If you have to dry the dishes
(‘Stead of going to the store)
If you have to dry the dishes
And you drop one on the floor
Maybe they won’t let you
Dry the dishes anymore”
― Shel Silverstein, A Light in the Attic

{Disclaimer: I wrote this review while participating in a blog tour by Mom Central Consulting on behalf of Finish and received a Finish Jet-Dry product sample to facilitate my review, a sample to giveaway, and a promotional item to thank me for taking the time to participate. Photo credit:  JohnMooreServices.com.}