Cloudy Glasses From a Kenmore Dishwasher: Film, Etching or Scale

Kenmore dishwasher not cleaning properly: first find out what the haze is

Two completely different problems produce a glass that comes out of the machine looking foggy, and telling them apart decides everything that follows — including whether spending money is worth it at all.

The test. Stand a cloudy glass in a bowl of white vinegar for five minutes and rinse it.

If it comes out clear, the haze was mineral film sitting on the surface. It is reversible, it will come back if nothing changes, and everything below is about changing something.

If it looks exactly the same, the glass is etched. The surface itself has been eaten, microscopically, and there is no product and no repair that brings it back. Etching comes from soft water combined with more detergent than the load needed and a hot cycle — the detergent, having no hardness to work on, works on the glass instead.

If it is film: where the mineral is landing

Cloudy glassware is the visible end of a process happening in three places inside the machine.

On the heating element, where scale acts as insulation. The element works longer to reach the same temperature, the cycle stretches, and the wash never gets as hot as the program intended.

In the spray-arm jets, where it narrows the holes. Narrow holes mean a weaker, more scattered spray, which means less mechanical cleaning, which shows up as patchy results on the top rack first.

On the seals and moving parts, where it holds grit and shortens the life of things that are supposed to slide.

None of that is dramatic and all of it is cumulative. On this county's water it is a maintenance item rather than a curiosity, and the interval printed in a manual written for average water is the wrong interval here.

The four free things, before any product

Turn the spray arms by hand. Both of them, all the way round. A pan handle through the lower rack or a tall item on the top stops an arm dead, and half the load then gets no water at all.

Look at the jets. Hold an arm up to the light. Blocked holes are visible, and a cocktail stick clears them.

Fill the rinse aid. It is not a luxury: it changes how water leaves the surface, and a machine with an empty reservoir leaves droplets that dry into exactly the spots being complained about.

Run the kitchen tap until it is hot before starting the cycle. The machine draws whatever is standing in the pipe. Start with a tank of cold and the first wash is wasted heating it.

Then the loading, which nobody wants to hear

Bowls that nest hide each other. Tall items on the top rack block the upper arm. A cutlery basket packed handles-up so tightly that nothing reaches the middle. And rinsing plates spotlessly under the tap before loading, which sounds thorough and actually starves modern detergent of the food it needs to work against.

Scrape, do not rinse. Leave gaps. It is free and it changes results more than any product does.

What we do about scale

Descaling to the manufacturer's own procedure, which addresses the element and the jets rather than the visible interior. On a machine that has been on this water for years without one, the difference in the first cycle afterwards is usually obvious.

Where the wash is still poor once the machine is clean, the questions are water temperature at the appliance, the spray arms themselves, and whether the wash pump is delivering the pressure it should. That is a measurement, and it is the point at which this stops being a maintenance page.