I am not familiar with salt in a dishwasher, but I’m glad you bumped this up. I never did find a removable filter and the manual didn’t describe one either.
Do you know what the salt is supposed to do?
I don’t think so. The salt won’t do anything but stays there if you don’t use the machine, it will not harm your machine. I live in France and that reservoir is located at the bottom of the machine, to be honest, there is no way to get rid of all the salt in my machine once I pour the salt in that hole.
In France, water is hard in many region and there can be a lime buildup in your machine or on the glasses. Adding salt would soften the water during the wash.
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Thank you! The salt is sodium chloride? I’m going to think about how that helps with hard water. I think we have hard water too.
Yes, they are granulated, crystalline sodium chloride.
I believe you use liquid form of clear rinse additives?
Dishwasher salt is not directly mixed with your dishwashing water.
It is used to regenerate an ion exchanger device. This device binds/replaces the Calcium and Magnesium ions which results in soft water. The replacement are sodium ions, so your water gets a little bit saltier which does not harm the dish washing result.
The capacity of this exchanger is reached eventually and it has to be regenerated. This is done with high concentrated NaCl (salt) water. It is done after a dish washing process, when the internal electronics calculated that it is needed. So when you added salt for the first time, nothing will change - it is user dish washer who has to initialize a regeneration cycle AFTER the next wash. High end dishwashers have a water softness probe which calculates the number of wash cycles the exchanger can withstand, the softer the water, the more wash cycles before regeneration.
I am sure your dishwasher had a red light in the front stating that salt is missing - it tries to regenerate then after every wash cycle.“All in one” tabs do not use salt, they use phosphates (bad for the environment) to soften water or zeoliths.
Water softening by ion exchangers is much better for the environment than phosphates, and you get absolutely clean glasses (with the expense of a higher construction cost of a dish washer, the exchangers are not among the cheapest parts).
In Europe water seems to be much “harder” (containing more Calcium and Magnesium) than in the US, so ion exchangers are in every dishwasher in Europe.
That was perfect; thank you! Right now we use a dishwashing product that is a liquid container in a dissolving bag. I think it’s “Cascade”.
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Thanks. We are down in the Midi Pyrenees, and the water is plenty hard, so salt it is!
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I do all this regularly ever since the repair man came. We were having things smell like fish and I just couldn’t figure it out.
He taught me to clean the filter, the grey flat filter, then to take toothpicks to the sprayer.
What hasn’t been mentioned here is cleaning, really cleaning, the little lip under where the door and machine meet. You wouldn’t believe what cooking for 11 means to the importance of cleaning that area.
We use our appliances so much I am very intimate with them and very familiar with the need to keep them clean.
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We just got a new Bosch, and because we use it so often we’ve been cleaning out the filter every month, per the manual’s recommendations.
Sometimes I scrape and even presoak, because I don’t trust a new machine to get everything off on its own.
