Tested: does the towel trick with your dishwasher really work?
There are lots of tips going around on social media. A whole lot of tips. From bizarre recipes to cleaning hacks. What you’re seeing now: a trick that is supposed to make the dishes in your dishwasher dry much faster. Because we don’t blindly believe everything, we tested this trick. Does it really work, or is it nonsense?
Now, I don’t think there’s much chance that a Gen Z-er came up with this trick. Many videos showing the hack have titles like ‘In case your mother never told you this’. Well, my mother certainly never told me this, no. This was completely new information to me.
The big towel trick
What am I talking about? The big towel trick. When your dishwasher has finished washing, you open the door and hang a towel over it. Then you close the door. The towel is supposed to absorb all the moisture from the dishwasher—the moisture that has ended up on your dishes. As a result, your dishes should come out of the dishwasher dry. Ideal if, like me, you don’t have an extra drying program on your dishwasher. I find it incredibly annoying that I take wet dishes out of the machine. I still have to do the work after all.
The test material
You can imagine that I’m incredibly enthusiastic about this at first. But because I don’t believe it immediately, I want to test it first. Especially for this test, I let my dishwasher run an extra cycle. I put a few things in the dishwasher, including the lid of a plastic container. (Apparently the container itself was clean—no idea.) I consider that my biggest and most important test material. Plastic containers and lids are always the wettest when they come out of the dishwasher.
The result
After one hour, the short program is finished. I’m practically lurking over my prey like a hawk, diving toward the dishwasher as soon as it beeps. I immediately hang the towel over the door. I read online that you can take the dishes out of the machine after just 10 minutes. I find that pretty quick. Would it work?
This is the result:
Towel or tea towel?
So? What do you think? I can see a difference. The lid is a little drier than before. Not completely, but drier. Is it really because of the towel? It could be. So I still have to dry it with a tea towel, as you can see. Maybe the water would dry completely if you left the towel hanging for longer. But then the whole idea of the trick is gone: that your dishes come out of the dishwasher super-fast and dry. In any case, I doubt that I’ll get a towel from the bathroom every day to try this trick. I’ll just have to get to work with that tea towel.
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