How to clean a dishwasher with citric acid

Cleaning a dishwasher is a sore subject for many housewives, especially when descaling is required. Such cleaning is required quite often, especially considering that many cities in our “immense” country have hard water. You can buy special products for these purposes, but the fact is that the basis of many such products is ordinary citric acid. A natural question arises: why overpay if you can clean the dishwasher with citric acid. Moreover, these household chemicals cost mere pennies. Let's figure out how to do this and whether it can be done at all.

Manual care

Some housewives ask: is it possible to use citric acid when manually washing a dishwasher? From our point of view, it not only can, but also should be used instead of powders with abrasive particles and other aggressive chemicals. Take a soft cloth and a sponge, as well as a small bowl of water.

1. We open the washing chamber of the dishwasher and take out the baskets with the tray.
2. Pour a little lemon onto a sponge soaked in water and wash the trays with baskets.

It’s better to wash the tray and baskets in the bathroom, it’s more convenient.

3. Generously fill the bottom of the washing chamber with lemon and clean the surface from dirt and scale with a sponge.
4. Using a sponge and lemon pulp, we clean the sprinklers: upper and lower.
5. We wipe the inside of the washing chamber completely. You don’t have to spare the lemon, besides, you don’t have to rinse it off thoroughly; during the next dishwashing it will be washed into the system.

Washing the dishwasher with lemon means cleaning the internal surfaces of the washing chamber from scale and dirt.Also, lemongrass is merciless to microorganisms, and it does not harm the human or animal body - all advantages. This cleaning needs to be repeated once every 1.5-2 months.

Cleaning the system

“External” use of citric acid is safe for PMM and their owners. But you can use it to remove scale from inside the dishwasher system. If your water supply has hard water, we can assure you that the “lion’s share” of scale, and this 97% will be concentrated in the heating element, hoses and pipes. You cannot remove them from there manually, unless of course you are going to disassemble the dishwasher. There is only one option left - automatic cleaning of the system at home, and this can be done using a regular lemon juice.

Take citric acid and pour it into the compartment for powder or tablets. We do not load dishes into baskets. Close the PMM door, select the intensive washing program and start the unit. When the program finishes, the PMM system will be well cleaned of scale inside. This procedure needs to be done approximately once every 2 months.

It’s clear where to pour the lemon, but how much should you pour into the powder compartment? Through experience, we came to the conclusion that we need to rely not even on the size of the PMM, but on the volume of water pumped into the system. Check the instructions for your dishwasher.

1. If it uses less than 10 liters of water per cycle, then add no more than 40 g of lemon.
2. If the washing machine consumes about 12 liters, you need to add 50 g of lemon.
3. Does it consume 14 or more liters? Pour 60 g.

Why do you need to monitor the dosage so precisely? We'll talk about this in the next paragraph.

When not to use lemon

Using citric acid and other cleaning products can cause real harm to your dishwasher. Imagine that you have hard water, but you have not taken any measures to clean the PMM for several years. Of course, large lime deposits formed inside the machine. And finally, several years late, you decided to clean your dishwasher with lemon. Citric acid will destroy fragile lime deposits, all at once.

Overnight, the PMM system will contain a huge amount of large debris, which will certainly cause a powerful blockage. If such a blockage occurs, it will be problematic to clean it. But the blockage is not so bad. Scale from the internal surfaces of the flow-through heater can fall off so that the heating element itself is damaged. As a result of cleaning with lemon juice, you may end up with quite expensive repairs. The conclusion is simple: if you haven’t cleaned the inside of the dishwasher from scale before, you shouldn’t start, it’s fraught with consequences!

So, how to clean the inside of a dishwasher with your own hands using regular lemon juice? It seems to us that we have answered this question. If you require clarification or do not agree with our point of view, please leave comments or participate in discussions on our forum. Good luck!

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