A. Watch his follow up video. Where he talks about all he got wrong.
B. I recently switched to a more “natural” SevenGenerations pouch and holy crap it’s been excellent.
C. You can not buy anything but pods at two of my grocery stores. You need to go to Walmart near me to find any straight powder. Market has spoken right or wrong.
I call BS on this. The non-pouch detergents disappeared, that much I know. I strongly doubt people had stopped buying gel and powder. I suspect that some bright bulb at Johnson & Johnson or wherever did the math and realized that pouch margins were higher than gel and powder margins.
Fixed serving sizes force over-use. Lots of included water means extra volume and weight (perceived value) on the shelf. While powders allow measured use, and reduce turnover.
I buy 20lb boxes of cheap powder and they last for months. Hot water just doesn’t need that much help if you put some in the pre-wash too.
20 years ago in my country overuse of powder detergents was well known by all the manufacturers; this is when fixed serving sizes were developed as a way to contain the problem and they are also considered more convenient by most consumers. I was working in one of these companies at that time, so I know the subject pretty well.
I'll grant that the pods are often reasonably sized. My main complaint is that they don't provide any detergent to the pre-wash cycle. That can leave a lot of oil for the main wash to process.
There were a couple of very undesired side-effects that manufacturers hate because it was making the consumers angry:
1. Burning the color of clothes.
2. Irritating the skin (hand-was was very common, it still has some use cases even today).
Also there was a move around 2003-2004 to increase the concentration of automatic washer detergents, that was meant to decrease the transportation cost for manufacturers, but overuse was even riskier. I know it was done, somewhere before 2005 when I left that area of business, part of the solution was a big marketing campaign, another part was switching to liquid detergent with a measuring cup, also including a measuring cup in the package with the larger sizes. I don't know what happened later.
Depends on the household size and habits. Daily cooking for 4 or 5 people and sharing two other meals and the occasional baking can quickly fill up the dish washer, especially in those growing phases when the kids are eating like there is no tomorrow ;-)
The local supermarkets all stock literally one or two boxes on the shelf at a time, even though I know they have more in the back because as soon as I buy one it's put back on the shelf the next day. Something really funny is going on, I wouldn't be surprised if they had some contractual arrangement to artificially limit the amount that appeared in stock, to make it seem less appealing.
As someone who has worked in a grocery store I think you're reading way too much into it. They have priorities when stocking shelves but I think conspiracies by Big Detergent to get you to buy tide pods are low on the list.
Switching to powder has done a lot for us in getting dishes cleaner, and we can dial in the amount of powder needed for the particular soil level of a load.
The fact that it's cheaper per load, and the box fits more neatly under the sink are added benefits.
And if your hands are slightly damp, the cardboard box for the powder doesn't stick to your fingers, where a dissolvable membrane would start dissolving on you.
We use dissolvable tablets (from Blueland) with all "natural" ingredients; can't vouch for how true the natural claim is, but we're happy with them and it's one way to reduce plastic; we also get their dissolvable tablets for hand soap, all purpose cleaners, glass cleaner, etc.
I tried the dishwasher tablets and felt like it didn’t clean the dishes as well. We been using the hand soap and other cleaners and I’m never going back on those. Maybe I need to give the dishwasher tabs a try again.
Maybe it depends on the dishwasher. We used them in our previous house and weren't as impressed with them but then moved and our new dishwasher works very well with them.
Apparently, energy efficient dishwashers have an energy budget per cycle and will only put a fixed amount into heating water, so getting hotter water into the dishwasher makes a huge difference in performance.
The difference with "primed" hot water is pretty crazy for something that seems trivial. I've also found opening the door and jiggling the racks during the drying cycle also makes a pretty big difference (assuming you catch it at the right time--and use heated dry)
Liquids have enzymes or bleach. They might have oxiclean instead of bleach but apparently the two best cleaning agents don’t exist in liquid together very well.
I always break a corner off the pod and crumble it into the pre-wash partition since watching the video nerdponx in the sibling thread posted (found it through a different post maybe a half year or so ago also here on HN). I also do the hot-water priming when I remember to.
