Put small items in a mesh laundry bag before running your dishwasher. You'll thank us time and time again!
This Tip Will Change the Way You Load Your Dishwasher
Are you fed up with opening your dishwasher to plastic bowls filled with greasy water and a heap of small stuff at the bottom? The issues might not require machine maintenance. You probably have something already at home that will resolve them.
Dig out your mesh laundry bag, or buy a couple if you don’t already own some.
On This Page
Light Items
Plastic items can fly around, often landing upside-down or on the bottom of the dishwasher. Putting bits-and-bobs like plastic spoons, food containers or lightweight picnic plates and bowls in a mesh bag keeps them in place and makes washing them a cinch.
Small Items
Retrieving small cooking tools is frustrating and unnecessary. Put them all into a mesh bag along with jar lids, tiny cookie cutters and drinking straws — things that always slip through the utensil basket.
Kid Dishes and Flatware
Babies need plastic plates and sippy cups to avoid messes when they drop things off the high chair. Zip those little dishes into a mesh laundry bag and they’ll be cleaned without fuss. Baby bottles are another good candidate for the mesh bag treatment. You can even include small plastic toys.
Unusual Items
A mesh bag is also handy for cleaning household items like kitchen sponges, silicone scrubbers, sponge pot scourers and even bottle brushes.
Hair Accessories
OK, hair accessories are best not washed with your dishes. But running them through a dishwasher cycle will give them a new lease of life.
Pop items like plastic combs, hair clips and slides, even hairbrushes into a mesh laundry bag and everything will be squeaky clean. Don’t do this with wooden items and natural bristle brushes, though – they’ll split eventually.
Personal Care Items
And why stop at your hair? There’s a whole host of personal care items that can be effectively cleaned within the safety of a mesh bag. Toothbrushes, nail brushes, sponge makeup applicators, soap holders, shower heads – the list goes on.
Of course, some items should never be washed in your dishwasher, mesh bag or not. But once you try one of these laundry pouches in your dishwasher, you’ll wonder how you ever managed without one!
Here are some more tips on how to load your dishwasher.
