About dishwasher soap

You've Got	A typical stack of post-meal dishes	Dinner dishes from a couple of days ago, plus some pots and pans	Baked-on dishes, lots of food soilage	Barely dirty dishes	Greasy, oily dishes
Setting	Light Wash	Normal	Heavy Wash	Quick Wash	High-Temp Wash
Why	This is what your manual refers to as “light food soil”— and it’ll usually clean just fine on the “light wash” cycle. Test it for a few nights, and see how your dishes come out.	Designers know that reviewers will test the “normal” cycle, so they build it to be rather powerful, capable of handling fairly severe soilage.	This super-long cycle exposes dishes to moist heat for hours, giving food plenty of time to swell and fall off.	This cycle is just like the light wash, but with less time for dishes to soak.	The same as a normal cycle, with a final rinse of 160°F water to decimate any remaining grease and speed up drying.
How Long's The Cycle?	80 minutes, 3 tub fills	1 1/2–2 hours, 4 fills	2 hours, 5 fills	40 minutes, 3 fills	1 1/2–2 hours, 4 fills

5. A Word About Dishwasher Soap

When you use your dishwasher, hot water pours into the dishwasher tub, heating it to approximately 120°F to 140°F, and then shoots through spray jets to rinse off loose or stuck food. “Detergent is not released until the second or third fills, after the prerinses, when most of the heavy food soil is gone,” says dishwasher engineer John Dries. Who knew? “But what remains is really tough, stuck-on food soil, and the detergent is key to helping get that off.”

The engineers interviewed have run thousands of test loads, and they use regular old powder detergent (sometimes the simple stuff works best). But now that manufacturers are reformulating detergents to comply with phosphate bans, detergent performance is far less reliable. Dries suggests experimenting with different products until you find one that works. (Tablets are faring best at the moment.) And store boxes of powder detergent closed—exposure to air causes clumping.