The Perfect Recipe for Saving (Ab)Used Dishes (Sponsored)

Working at home, I put my dishes through a lot. I drink a pitcher of tea every day, and bake meals for the week to save me time on lunches. My dishes get really, really bad. Tea pitchers turn brown inside, and I sometimes ignore the leftover potatoes that didn’t quite come out during the last wash, and just put the pan away anyhow. I don’t like this. More importantly, my wife dislikes it.

To be fair, she’s had these dishes longer than I’ve known her, and she doesn’t like what I’ve done to them. That’s totally understandable. But the dishwasher just doesn’t do it, and neither does hand washing unless I go through a time-consuming process of boiling vinegar and orange peel, and scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing. I’ve been searching a better cleaning solution for a long time. I found it, and I feel like a cheater; it’s that easy.

Stay with me, here. This is a sponsored post, but I’m still a GeekDad, and I’m playing you straight, not writing an ad. If I get a little squee-ey, it’s because I’m excited to share. I’m going to compare my grandmother’s cleaning trick to Cascade’s Platinum ActionPacs.

Here are my wife’s pitchers. I use them all. the. time. Every day, actually. The beautiful brown specks in there? I call that color Earl Grey’s Revenge. As part of my breakfast routine, I brew a pitcher of tea, which I drink over the course of the day. #CaffieneLife and all that. After both hand washing and running through the dishwasher with regular detergent, these pitchers still look like this.

Now, I’m going to show you the results of two methods. The first is Cascade’s Platinum ActionPacs, and the second is my default: boil vinegar and citrus peel, soak dish in boiling acid, let cool, then scrub.

For the machine, I loaded it per Cascade’s YouTube instructions. No soak, no scrub, just load with a Cascade Platinum ActionPac.

Now, here you can see the clean that I got out of one wash with the Cascade Platinum ActionPac vs. the vinegar soak. First, they both look so much better. But if you look closely, you will see that the vinegar method left some brown-ish residue near the lip of the pitcher. The ActionPac didn’t leave that residue, so it’s the clear winner. Extra points for no scrubbing or soaking, and my kitchen not smelling like hot acid from boiling the vinegar.

I also ran our tea mugs through the wash with the Cascade Platinum ActionPac, and the results were hard to argue with. Mugs are always harder to clean than glass, so I was excited to see the results. This is after one wash with the ActionPacs, which made my wife and me scratch our heads. My daughter was less impressed with that than with the fact that the dishwasher itself was cleaner. I think it’s safe to conclude she’s convinced.

Like I said, it’s like cheating. But that’s what makes it the perfect solution. It’s simple, quick, and easy. To try it yourself, check out our two giveaways below. You only have to enter once to be entered in both giveaways, so give it a shot. In the meantime, go to Cascade’s website to learn more about dishwashing science. Also, print a Cascade coupon to try their products for yourself.

Starting today, and running through December 21st, you can enter our Cascade giveaway. Contest open to households in the US. Winners will be notified December 22nd.

Five winners will receive a one year’s supply of Cascade Dishwasher Cleaner.
Five winners will receive a pack of Cascade Platinum samples.