My DishDrawer has a Rinse-only cycle but I don't use it. I haven't used Rinse/Hold since the mid/late 1970s. Found that it causes more noxious odor from the dishware and pump sump left with smutzy water. I sometimes may not run the machine for two+ days until a load accumulates, depending upon how much cooking is happening.

It's a water wasting and unnecessary cycle. Today's DWs are all about water saving and can do a complete load of even days old dried on crusty food with less than 3.5 gallons of water---and with zero pre-rinsing. There is no functional need to use a rinse and hold cycle, so bye-bye to it.

GreenDesigns is correct. I often leave dishes in the DW up to a week before I do a load and no problem at all. I just scrape but don't rinse and everything is fine. Rinse and hold is a waster of water and electricity.

I have the Bosch SHE65P06UC and it has rinse/hold. I bought it about two years ago but I think it's still available. I've had some trouble with the electronics. Not sure if that's a model specific problem or we just got a dud.

I want it to keep the yuck factor down.

A full load might take me up to a week (or more, but I'll run it after 5 days irregardless of how empty it is). I normally don't pre-wash/pre-rinse dishes before loading a dishwasher, but the idea of the stuff sitting there, funky, for that long bothers me. Maybe this feature didn't make sense for some people, but for others of us it was perfect.

thrauli: That particular Bosch is discontinued. Even the Bosch I bought last year lacks this feature, as does the new one I just bought this week.

Sean, I agree! Sorry, Weissman, but my response is "ew ick".

I believe my KA said it uses 0.8 gal of water on its lowest cycle. That's less than hand-washing the same set of dishes so I've been known to -- gasp -- run the dishwasher *not full* given these stats!

aliris19 ... your dishwasher may take 0.8 gal of water per fill, but an entire cycle consists of multiple wash/rinse periods. If there are four water changes for a full cycle (example: prewash, wash, rinse, rinse), that's 3.2 gals total.

I use my rinse cycle when we have an incident and need to rinse the dishwasher. Since it's a drawer dishwasher we don't worry about building up stink. It runs plenty.

And yeah, I agree that enzymes aren't gonna eat dishes when they run out of food. Dissolving food and dissolving dishes is a slightly different chemical reaction.

My newest Bosch uses 2.4-5.9 gallons depending upon how dirty the dishes are for a full cycle. I pulled the manual for my older (2001) Bosch and it uses 1.2 gals for a rinse cycle. So wasteful, maybe...but then there's the issue of not having enough dirt & grime to keep the detergents from killing your glassware.

/putting on my microbiologist hat/ Chemical reactions have a level of energy needed to start them, called activation energy. For spontaneous reactions, the activation energy is lower than what's found in the environment. For non-spontaneous, you have to put more energy in (such as using a match to cause paper to burn). Enzymes just lower the activation energy required. It's like the difference between one person pushing a car vs. two people pushing a car. In practice, enzymes just speed up reactions. The chemical reactions would occur anyway, just at a much slower rate without the enzyme.

So the question becomes what chemical reactions are being done by the detergents? All of the manufacturers warn that too much soap (stated by the manufacturers as 'too little dirt on the dishes') means it'll damage your glassware. Obviously there's something in the glass structure that the detergents attack.

The real solution is to use less detergent, which means less detergent being purchased. So you can understand why the detergent manufacturers don't like this option. It's also why so many detergents now come in pre-measured (read: too large) packets, tablets, and pouches and warnings about not having enough dirt on the dishes.

sorry aliris but there's never any yuck or stink in my DW. Many of us have learned not to pee in the sink or take dumps in in the dishwasher :-)

Dry crusty dishes do not stink. Wet dishes with food stuck in the depressions and in the sump DO stink.

^ Exactly.

Dadoes ---- shhhhh I was afraid of that! It was sort of something I didn't really want to know. ;) (not really; thanks).

Weissman: Goood Boy!!!! ;) [even if there's no stink, there's still decomposition going on and them bug's got poop too you know].

fori and Sean -- so you agree the frankenstein-argument to the enzymes is silly? I got roundly corrected about this last time. I wasn't really convinced by the convincers, but it wasn't worth arguing about. And I did try to make an effort to leave more grime on dishes before they get washed and truthfully, the whole load does seem to come out a little cleaner. Not sure how controlled that test is.

So Sean - I am still super confused about this stuff. Dishwasher detergent consists of detergent or soap, and enzymes, right? The soap, I learned in school, essentially solubilizes fat molecules; it busts open cell membranes. You're saying then (?) that the enzymes make that reaction happen with less energy, or earlier. (As I recall, enzymes are proteins that bind to a substrate and in so doing lower the activation energy of a reaction with that substrate). What would any of this have to do with etching of glassware? There aren't any cell membranes to bust apart in glassware, right?

So the image that's getting put out there, or at least that I took away, is that every, say, unit of detergent has a certain amount of energy available for degradation. And if it doesn't encounter, say, a food 'unit', it will instead degrade a 'glassware' unit worth of material. This is just such nonsense....well, or at least it seems so to me. What am I missing?

So leaving more food makes these enzymes reproduce? Or merely bulk up to take on more food? At some point do they become organisms? Are they...sentient?

Am I really too lazy to get up and see what is in my dish detergent? Why yes! I am!

There's a definite difference between soap & detergent, but I've honestly not bothered to look into it.

Chemical reactions aren't solely biological. Acid eating a piece of metal is a chemical reaction, as is burning. No cell walls involved with either of those. Enzymes don't necessarily have to bind to the glass. They could bind with the detergent's active ingredients, making them far more active than in their native state.

All the enzymes are doing is increasing the activity of the detergent. For a real-world example of this, give a group of toddlers a box of sugar to gorge themselves on. Then let them loose in your house. If you don't keep them occupied, there's a good chance your glassware and other valuables around the house will get damaged. :)

Damaged or etched? ;)

But haven't you heard? Controlled experiments have shown that sugar has no bearing on children's activity-level (kinda reminds me of the claim that Capital Culinarians simmer just perfectly). The rest of us are majorly skeptical of course, having racked up quite a bit of empirical observations of our own. But your point is well-taken.

For general purposes, soap is made with a natural fat-bacon fat, olive oil, coconut oil etc. Detergents are made petroleum products.

I weep for all the glassware that was etched before enzymes came along to take the blame.

The high-end KitchenAid's have a rinse only cycle. I bought a lower-end model and there is a rinse cylce mentioned in the users manual as they use the same manual for all models.

It is quite discouraging. That is probably my favorite feature. I also load dishes hit the rinse to clean the majority of food off and continue to do this until the dishwasher is full. Do these manufactures only eat out and have no idea what people who cook dinner do?

I have a Bosch 800 and a Bosch 500 and both have this feature that I use quite often!

I never use it. I scrape off the worst of the debris and the dishwasher is perfectly capable of dealing with rest, same day or three days later.