When I was 23 I moved into a sharehouse that had a dishwasher, I lived there over a year before I saw it, it had a false cabinet so it blended in. I’d always just washed my dishes in the sink and I keep all my dishes, cutlery and pans separate in a tub in the pantry because I have allergies. I’d never used a dishwasher before.

I googled how to use a dishwasher because I didn’t want to be the 20 year old that can’t do basic chores. I read the user manual and looked for the filters and catchment drains. They were filthy so I cleaned them, then followed the stacking guide in the user manual and ran it with a full load of my housemates dishes.

I was very impressed with how clean they came out.

I mentioned it to a housemate who found it very amusing I’d only just discovered the dishwasher, he warned me that it was old and broken and not a very good dishwasher so the few housemates that use it were actually talking about splitting the cost of a replacement if I wanted to get in on it.

Why? When the dishwasher was working perfectly.

All 7 of my housemates flooded into the kitchen to assess the cleanliness of the dishes because no one believed me that the dishwasher worked.

Turns out in the 7 years the house had been used for student housing since the landlords son took over as head tenant, not a single one of the rotating cast of 8 housemates had ever cleaned the secondary catchment filter, and only rarely did someone remember to clean the main filter.

Turns out the dishwasher works great when you remove the months worth of old rotten corn building up in the filter, and drain off the 7 years of muck that’s blocking the greywater outlet flow.

My housemates will still say I stack the dishwasher like a sociopath, but I learned from the user manual so I don’t care, the dishes are clean.