5 Mistakes Your Staff Could Be Making!

This blog highlights 5 mistakes that your staff may be making right now, and this covers both the dishwasher and glasswasher.

If you can get even a basic understanding of most of these mistakes, get your staff to stop making them and build in ways to prevent them from happening into your training, then this will save you a serious amount of money in engineer call outs, labour and dishwasher parts. Sorting these out can easily add years onto the lifespan of your machine.

1. Putting cutlery in basket racks meant for plates or cups. The cutlery, especially small spoons fall through the holes in these baskets as they are not designed to take such small items. A teaspoon burning out a wash pump can cost over £1000. Cutlery, wooden spoons and spatulas hanging through the bottom of a basket will also stop the bottom wash and rinse arms from spinning and properly performing their duty. There are specialist cutlery baskets that have a finer mesh that stops cutlery from falling through, although ideally the cutlery should be stacked standing up in a cutlery basket. That way the wash water gets to each piece more evenly and the rinse water can dispel off them for much quicker drying.
2. Placing basket racks on top of the glasswasher or dishwasher. Dirty or clean dishes and glasses stacked in baskets should never be placed directly on top of the machine. We understand that the staff may struggle with space for somewhere to put the basket, but the top of the machine is not the place. Water ingress in the form of either slops from dirty glasses or dripping water from clean glasses, will only cause problems. If this doesn’t seep in and effect the electronics of the machine costing you hundreds of pounds in damage, then it will serve to bind the top panel to the machine and stick them together like glue. This may not cause direct damage to the machine, but it can add on significant time to a job when your dishwasher service engineer needs to remove this panel for a repair or service. If you really are stuck for space to use, buy a purpose-built drip tray for the job. They are inexpensive and very effective. Problem solved.
3. Using the top of a pass through dishwasher for storage. When large items are placed on top of the hood of a pass through dishwasher it creates an imbalance between the stainless steel hood and the hood springs at the back of the machine. This can place unnecessary stress on the springs and shorten their lifespan. When hood springs snap it is very difficult to lift the hood, and it will no longer stay in the open position by itself until a tricky repair has to be made. It is also a health and safety issue as the heavy hood becomes a real risk as its always wanting to close. Drying tea towels and cloths (as well as clothes) on top of the hood is also a bad idea. These tend to fall down the back of the machine and lie on top of important components, which over time can heat up and become a fire hazard.
4. Not properly scraping plates. This habit leads to food and other things such as sugar sachets, butter wrappers going into the machine and clogging up the filters and dirtying the water more than it should. If some of these get through the filters, they make their way into the wash pump and wash system and end up clogging up the wash arms and the machine. This can result in costly repairs.
5. Not cleaning out the wash and rinse arm manifolds. On all of the machines that we have ever worked on, the wash and rinse arms can be removed from the machine for cleaning. So many people neglect to do this, and we see this time and again. When the wash and rinse arms get clogged up, they can no longer spin properly, especially if they are clogged up in the middle at the manifold. When they don’t spin properly, they won’t clean properly. Often, they will stay in the same position and not move. Sometimes it results in jets of water being sprayed out of the sides of the door and creating a pool of water at the front of your machine. When it comes to glasswashers, they seem to collect fluff and hair. Make sure that this is cleaned out. Also, as a word of caution, be careful of small pieces of broken glass that may be lodged in the wash manifolds. Use blue roll or an old cloth to wipe these down and use the torch from your mobile phone to see. Don’t drop your mobile into the wash water.

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