Andrew's Review of Palmolive's "eco friendly" Detergent

Gone are the bachelor days where the dishes just stacked up in the sink for 6 weeks until the cockroaches themselves grew tired of the mess and started washing up the dishes. Now, as a family man these past years, I've grown to depend on the automatic dishwasher. Yes, you could say that in my life, the dishwasher has now entered its "zenith". (yawn)

In case you were wondering how a review of automatic dishwasher detergent could be interesting, let me save you the suspense...it's not. However, from time to time I like to review random products that we try at home and random products that I use to produce video here in Las Vegas, all for the benefit of the consumer. Whoever that might be... OK So here we go...the breakdown

The Supposed Good
When we first saw the new line of Palmolive automatic dishwasher detergents in the store, we were happy to check out this new "ecology friendly" version. That slowly, silently turned to regret after only a few uses.

The Supposed Smell
The detergent boasts an "apple" scent on the label, but I actually had to read the label to know that there was supposedly a "scent" included with this soap, as it didn't smell like any apples that I've ever seen. Unless maybe they were apples that were grown in orchards under power lines while irrigated with water that comes from a nuclear fission plant? Its hard to say, but forget about the scent. It just smells like plain old dishwasher detergent.

The Supposed Eco Friendliness
It claims its safe for septic tanks and is environmentally friendly but as I relay our experience I suppose I'll leave that conclusion up to you.

Prior to using the Palmolive Eco+ detergent, we've used a variety of detergents (even other Palmolive products) with complete success. So much success that we never even thought about what detergent we were using. This Palmolive Eco+ was the the first "environmentally safe" detergent we have tried.

The Bad
The first couple usages flew under the radar as we didn't really notice anything different about the soap but after 3 or 4 uses of the detergent, we started to notice a white film left on all the dishes. We simply wrote this off as a "bad wash" and proceeded to use it for the 5th and 6th times at which point we started to notice big chunks of undissolved detergent on all the dishes and actually, the dishes were coming out more filthy than when we put them in.

The Ugly
We tried different cycles and eventually, the undissolved chunks grew so heavy that they clogged the drainage system of our dishwasher. At that point the washer stopped working regardless of what detergent we tried. Fortunately, my wife is like Rosey the Riveter and tried a few tricks to open the dishwasher drain back up but we literally had to remove all the racks and scrape, soak, and scrub to get all of the hardened Palmolive Eco+ detergent out of our dishwasher.

The Conclusion
Today, our dishwasher works but not quite as well as before and its obvious that we've discontinued use of this product and have gone back to the "non ecologically friendly" detergents that seem to work fine.

Now I leave you with the question, if dishwasher detergent does not dissolve in water and actually cakes up in drains, is that really more environmentally friendly than soap that does dissolve and dissipate?

Surmise it to say that our joy of finding and eco friendly dishwasher detergent was met with equal disappointment at the damage that resulted from the caking up of undissolved Palmolive Eco+ detergent in our dishwasher.

So we paid less than $4 for this soapy crud but its cost us about $80 in labor to fix the mess that it left behind and of course, my hope is to spare you from the same trouble...now if I could just get those cockroaches to come back and fix my dishwasher, all would be well.