Brevity is the soul of wit – how time, temperature and detergent choice impact the cleaning performance in domestic dishwashers

In addition to high cleaning performance, many consumers pay special attention to low energy and water consumption in automatic dishwashers. Eco programs are designed to effectively clean normally soiled dishes with low energy and water consumption. However, Eco programs are relatively long and consumer acceptance of programs lasting longer than 2 h is not very high. The vast majority of short programs for lightly soiled dishes consume equal to lower amounts of energy and water than Eco cycles on average. In this study, we investigate the effect of different dishwasher programs on the cleaning performance for a variety of soils using four different market detergents. The results show that the detergent has a major influence on the cleaning result, especially for short cycles and that for certain short cycle/cleaner combinations similar good results can be achieved as with Eco cycles. The data collected were also used to train predictive models to make forecasts on cleaning performance for unknown program parameter combinations, and to examine the multivariate relationships of the program parameters and the cleaners in more detail.