Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

If it's manual and not an electric appliance, you can try more floggings until morale improves.

If it is an electric appliance, you may or may not have heard that several states, 13 or so, outlawed dishwasher detergents containing phosphates. Because of the increased cost of splitting production runs to ship phosphate-free deterg to one state and phosphate-laden deterg to another, the manufacturers just removed phosphates from all their detergents.

And post-wash quality has taken a nose-dive.

We have super hard water up here that seems like it can only be broken by kryptonite, until I found out about a detergent called Lemi Shine. Does an excellent job in hard water environments, but it's probably twice as expensive, or more, than other detergents. So I nosed around online and and found some sites where making your own dishwasher detergent was discussed and decided to make my own.

The common recipe was a cup of Borax (20 Mule Team) and a cup of baking soda (the same Arm & Hammer that you use for baking). Another recipe suggested half a cup of salt for hard water environments, another suggested a couple of packets of non-sugar Koolaide lemonaid. I mixed it up, used it twice, and it sucks. Total fail.

So I went back to Lemi Shine, but the price really made me wince. Previously the one detergent that did a really good job was a liquid that had baking soda, but I couldn't find it any more, so I decided on another experiment. A common point of discussion on these DIY message boards was that you only needed about a tablespoon of deterg for a typical load, so I tried a teaspoon of powdered Cascade and filled up the remainder of the container with baking soda.

Wow. Fantastically clean. The glasses were terrific!

So I tried another experiment with one of those self-contained pouches of detergent and again filled up the rest of the container with baking soda.

Not quite as terrific. Still, better than a non-modified detergent.

I still have a couple of experiments to conduct with some liquid detergents that I bought, I'll see if boosting them with baking soda will improve their lackluster performance. But for now, it looks like powdered Cascade boosted with baking soda does a good job.

If you look carefully in the cleaner aisle, you should be able to find some 4 pound boxes of baking soda, probably on a bottom shelf. Tremendously cheaper on a per ounce basis than the small boxes in the baking aisle, and as far as I can see, the contents are identical.