Neil Turner

My life in railcards

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A photo of my current Disabled Persons Railcard, and an older Young Persons Railcard

Over the years, I’ve had five different types of railcard, to get discounted travel on Britain’s railways. I guess it’s one way of showing how my life has changed over the years.

Staff privileged travel card

Before he retired, my dad used to work for the railways, and this meant that he got free and discounted rail travel for himself and his dependents – i.e. myself and my mum. It was a pretty good deal: 20 days of free travel per year. Except each ‘day’ was actually 48 hours, so (for example) an outbound trip on a Saturday with a return on Sunday would only use one ‘slot’. These were recorded by writing the day on a credit-card sized piece of card, which was paired with another piece of card with my passport photo on.

Once the 20 free days were used up, or if I was saving them, I could get 2/3rd discount on any other tickets.

I was able to hold onto the card until my early 20s – basically, the point at which I was no longer a dependent of my parents and earning my own wage. I miss the days of being able to simply jump on a train to London from Bradford, to attend something like Open Tech, without having to pre-book tickets or worry about the cost. Oh, and did I mention that I was able to travel in first class too?

There were limitations. First class travel was for off-peak only, and there were no seat reservations. Indeed, I would have to give up my seat to a paying passenger if required. But considering how much long distance train fares cost even then, it gave me a lot of freedom in my early adult life. I have travelled first class since then – our return trip from St Andrews, and some London trips where we won upgrades using Seatfrog – but it’s not a frequent occurrence.

If you’ve read this and thought about a career in the railway industry, just be aware that staff travel privileges have almost certainly changed and may be nowhere near as generous as this nowadays.

Young Persons Railcard

Once I was self-sufficient – or at least, earning my own money through work – I had to get my own railcard. At the time, this was the ‘Young Persons Railcard’ but it’s now known as the 16-25 Railcard, which are the age ranges it’s open to. Like most railcards, it costs £30 per year, and gets you a 1/3rd off any train fares, with some exceptions. It does work at peak times, as long as the discounted ticket would cost £12 or more.

Despite the name, you can buy a 16-25 Railcard if you’re 26 or over, as long as you’re in full-time education. And, it doesn’t expire on your 26th birthday – indeed, you can buy one the day before your 26th birthday and it’ll still be valid for a year.

26-30 year-olds can now buy the 26-30 Railcard, but this wasn’t available when I was in that age range. It offers the same discount as the 16-25 Railcard, but it’s digital-only and not available as a physical card.

Two Together Railcard

I wrote about this one in 2014, when it was still a trial in the West Midlands. Thankfully, the Two Together Railcard trial was deemed enough of a success for it to be rolled out nationally, and so Christine and I have had a few of these. As the name suggests, it allows two named people travelling together to get a 1/3rd off rail fares, but can only be used off-peak.

As it’s £30 to buy the card, I remember someone (probably Martin Lewis) doing a stunt at Euston station one day, finding two random people travelling to the same destination, and have them purchase a Two Together Railcard. Even though they were complete strangers, the £30 cost was less than the 1/3rd saving on the two tickets.

Friends and Family Railcard

Children under 5 travel free on the railways, but they need their own ticket from age five onwards. So, the next railcard we had was a Friends and Family Railcard. With this, you save 1/3rd on adult fares and 60% on child fares, and it’s valid for 1-4 adults and 1-4 children travelling together. Ours is a digital railcard and so it lives in the Trainline app, and can be used by myself and/or Christine when we’re travelling with our eight-year-old (and potentially up to three of their friends). For most of the UK, it can be used at any time, but it’s not valid for journeys within London and the South East during peak times.

Disabled Persons Railcard

I fully expected to carry on using a Friends and Family Railcard until our eight-year-old turned 16 and would need their own railcard (see above), but then I found out I was deaf. The definition of ‘disabled’ is quite broad for the Disabled Persons Railcard, and includes anyone who uses a hearing aid – even if your hearing loss isn’t severe or profound. I suppose this is because Railcards are a commercial paid-for product offered by the rail industry; I’m not (yet) eligible for a free bus pass, for example, which would be paid for by my local authority.

As with other railcards, you get a 1/3rd discount, but with no time restrictions. As such, I can use it on my commute to work, and in the year that I’ve had it, it has paid for itself several times over. You can’t (yet) use it to buy season tickets, so I have to purchase a return fare every day that I’m in the office. If another adult is travelling with you, they also get a 1/3rd discount too – they can be a friend, family member, carer, or anyone else really.

You do need to demonstrate that you’re eligible for the card; in my case, I had to email a PDF form to my local authority who stamped and returned it for me, to vouch for my deafness.

We’ll still keep our Friends and Family Railcard, as this ensures discounts for our eight-year-old too, but we’ve no longer any need for a Two Together Railcard. And, unless there’s some way that my hearing can be restored in future, I probably won’t need a Senior Railcard when I reach 60 either. Assuming that railcards are still around in 20 years time.

Sowerby Bridge blog posts

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A photo the Rochdale Canal at Sowerby Bridge, with some geese in the foreground and a church in the background.

It’s been a while since I last did a summary of old blog posts that I’ve made live again – January, to be precise. This doesn’t mean that I haven’t re-imported any old blog posts since then – I’ve probably brought back 20 or so in the past few months. They’ve tended to refer to events that I’ve wanted to refer back to in new blog posts, such as previous visits to places. Overall, I’ve re-instated over 100 old blog posts so far, so about 3% of the total.

The latest batch that I’ve brought back are about Sowerby Bridge, the town where we live. I’ve chosen these partly to document us moving here 14 years ago, but also because it’s niche content that’s probably not available elsewhere. Here’s an index:

  • Moving out of the City (October 2010). When I first announced that we were looking to move to Sowerby Bridge, as it was convenient for both my current job, and Christine’s (then) new job. Neither of us could drive back then.
  • A year out of the city (November 2011). A retrospective of our first year of living in Sowerby Bridge. The first flat that we rented didn’t work out, but we ended up in another flat in April 2011, that we stayed in until October 2015 when we moved into our current house.
  • Cinemas and Sowerby Bridge (May 2012). A little bit of local history research. Sowerby Bridge once had two cinemas – whilst both buildings are still standing, one is now a pub/venue and the other mostly vacant, having most recently been a shop.
  • Rushbearing in Sowerby Bridge (September 2012). Sowerby Bridge’s most well-known annual festival, which takes place over the first weekend in September. Imagine a cart, filled with rushes, being trailed by morris dancers and calling at every church and pub in the town. It’s still going strong, although we had other commitments this year.
  • Britain’s best high streets (November 2012). Sowerby Bridge was included in a list of Britain’s best high streets, and I suppose the main street is still pretty good. However, we’ve since lost the two banks mentioned in the article.
  • The Sowerby Bridge Geese (September 2013). For years, there was a large gaggle of geese in Sowerby Bridge, that would happily stop traffic to cross the road, or sit in parking spaces. Unfortunately they haven’t had any goslings for a few years now, and I think there’s only three of them left now.
  • My first BuzzFeed Listicle (April 2014). Oh wow, remember BuzzFeed? It still seems to be going, but my first listicle, 9 Surprising Facts About Sowerby Bridge, also turned out to be my last one.
  • Happy Valley (June 2014). The BBC’s gritty award-winning drama was partly set in Sowerby Bridge, and saw two further series.
  • The Brontë Garden at Sowerby Bridge station (September 2014). This is the small garden at the railway station, maintained by volunteers and still looking nice ten years on.

Since starting blogging again in 2022, my only new post of note about Sowerby Bridge was a brief one about ghost signs.

How many parking apps do you have?

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A screenshot showing the icons for six different iOS apps used for parking.

I was chatting to a friend last week as he downloaded and installed yet another app to pay for parking his car. He already had eight different apps to pay for parking on his phone, and yet the one used by this car park wasn’t one of them. So now, he had nine different apps installed to pay for parking.

I had a look at my own phone and counted six parking apps: Connect Cashless Parking, PayByPhone, Trust, RingGo, YourParkingSpace and NCP. And, from memory, I’ve used five out of the six over the past month; NCP is the only one that I don’t use regularly.

Then there are those that I’ve uninstalled – Flowbird, AppyParking and APCOA Connect. APCOA Connect seems to use the same database as Connect Cashless Parking thankfully, and I’ve only had to use the Flowbird app once for one specific car park. AppyParking was used by our local authority for a while but has been replaced with APCOA Connect/Connect Cashless Parking, and I haven’t needed to re-install it.

The convenience of parking apps

A screenshot from the PayByPhone app offering additional insurance for £4.84 as an upsell.

Parking apps are a convenience. I tend to carry very little cash around, and frequently have no change for a ticket machine, so the apps allow me to make a card payment. They also remember your details, such as your car’s registration number, and so they can be quicker than using a machine.

Some apps, like Trust and MyParkingSpace, offer automatic payments in supported car parks. Automatic Numberplate Recognition (ANPR) cameras record entries and exits, and I get emailed a receipt based on the time spent there. It’s not widespread but it’s useful where it’s available.

Parking apps headaches

But the fact that there are so many of them, with different interfaces, is a faff. You have to register an account with each one, and not all of them support Apple Pay or Google Pay so you need to enter your card details each time. And there’s usually a ‘convenience fee’ thrown in; sometimes, as little as 8p but one car park I use regularly adds a 15% fee on top of the parking price for using the app.

There’s also the upsells – what Cory Doctorow may call ‘Enshittification‘. Every time I use the PayByPhone app, which is typically 2-3 times a week on the way to work, I have to decline additional insurance to cover my car whilst it’s parked. What’s worse is that the parking itself only costs £2 – the insurance is a 250% mark-up. I guess some people could find it useful as there’s no excess and it could avoid claiming on your own car insurance, but there’s no way to disable these prompts in the app. You have to opt out every time you park, and of course, the ‘not now’ button is smaller and less prominent. Meanwhile YourParkingSpace flogs a load of offers at you after you’ve parked.

And there’s the issue of how big these apps are. The Flowbird app is almost 200 MB, which could be 20% of someone’s monthly data allowance if they had to download it on mobile data.

Consolidation

I mentioned that Connect Cashless Parking and APCOA Connect use the same database and are therefore interchangeable, but every other app only works with certain car parks. Annoyingly, this is even the case where there’s a common parent company. Connect Cashless Parking, for example, is owned by PayByPhone, but you can’t use the PayByPhone app to pay for parking at APCOA Connect locations. Similarly, MyParkingSpace was taken over by Flowbird two years ago, but there’s been no integration of the databases and so you may need both apps.

This is why this blog post isn’t ‘which is the best parking app?’ because, as consumers, we don’t get to choose. The choice is made for us, by whoever owns or operates individual car parks. Right now, those owners and operators have plenty of parking apps to choose from, but whatever choice they make is then imposed on their users.

One parking app to rule them all?

Whilst I’m sure it would be very low down on the new government’s priorities, it would be great if there was just one, national app that we could all use. To encourage adoption, there could be new legislation mandating local authorities to use it once their existing contracts have finished. It could also offer onward travel options, such as bike hire, or even public transport to encourage park and ride schemes. And there could be an open API to allow some of the third party apps to continue to use it, with some kind of payment reconciliation for private car park owners.

That way, you could view all of your parking receipts in one place – great for people who may need to claim expenses – and not have to faff around with downloading a new app each time you park up. Hopefully, such an app would also be designed with best practice in mind, and not offer annoying upsells each time. I know this is very much a first-world problem, but we can dream, can’t we?

It’s Bandcamp Friday

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A picture of the Bandcamp Friday logo

It’s the first Friday of the month, which, most months, means it’s Bandcamp Friday. And that includes today.

On Bandcamp Friday, Bandcamp waives its revenue share from all purchases made on that day. Instead, their share of the purchase goes to the bands and artists instead. It started during the pandemic in 2020, and has continued most months since.

Basically, if you want to buy a song or album from a band or artist on Bandcamp, today’s the day.

If I may, here are some recommendations:

If, by the time you’re reading this, it’s no longer Friday 4th October, then the next Bandcamp Friday is December 6th (skipping November, it seems). However, buying music from Bandcamp on any other day of the year is still a good idea, as even when it’s not Bandcamp Friday, a higher proportion of the revenue goes to the artists and bands compared to most other digital platforms. Plus, you usually get a choice of audio formats and there’s no digital rights management on the files.

The Current Account Switch Guarantee

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A screenshot of the home page of the Current Account Switch Guarantee web site.

Until this year, I had never changed my bank account. I was still using the same account, with the same bank, that I opened when I was 18, shortly before starting university. But with the account no longer meeting my needs, and incentives to open a new account, I switched back in May, as mentioned last week.

Most UK banks are signed up to the Current Account Switch Guarantee, and this means that the switching process should be relatively painless. It’ll take about a week, during which your new account will be opened, everything moved across, and your old account is closed. You only have to interact with your ‘new’ bank – they take ownership of the process and will handle the closure of your old account for you.

What gets transferred

As part of the switch, the following will get moved across to your new account:

  • Any money in your account. You may also be able to switch if your account is overdrawn, but check your new bank’s terms and conditions.
  • All Direct Debit payments.
  • All Standing Orders.

Plus, any payments made into your old account will be automatically redirected to your new account. Payees should be notified of this and payroll systems may be able to update to your new bank account details automatically. When I logged into my employer’s payroll system to check my details, my new bank account number and sort code were already there.

What doesn’t get transferred

Basically, anything paid for using recurring card payments, or Open Banking, won’t get automatically transferred. When your old current account is closed, your old debit card will be deactivated and so any payments using this will fail. So any subscriptions that use recurring card payments will need to be amended to use your new card details.

Similarly, if you make payments using Open Banking (for example, to app-based savings accounts like Chip (referral link) or Zopa), these will need re-authorising using your new account.

Incentives for switching

Banks often offer incentives for switching your account – I got a low three figure sum as a reward for switching my account. MoneySavingExpert tracks the current deals on offer – £175 seems to be the going rate, but such incentives come and go. Also, I was able to get a little bit more by initiating the switch using Quidco (referral link), which gave me around £10 cashback in addition to the switching incentive.

Just be aware that whilst almost all banks are signed up to the Current Account Switch Guarantee, not all of them are. If they aren’t, then you may have to manually switch over your payments, which is a major disincentive to switch.

Welcome to October

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A photo of some trees turning yellow in Shelf Hall Park near Halifax in October 2018.

Well, it’s October now – which means three quarters of the year has gone. We’re past my busiest month at work, now that the university term has started again. It’s also Black History Month in the UK, for which this year’s theme is Reclaiming Narratives.

Also, it’s International Raccoon Appreciation Day today, according to some web sites that seem to only exist to tell you what is observed on each day of the year.

It’s definitely getting colder now. We relented and switched our heating back on last month, after what seems to have been a particularly cold September. The days where we can use less than £2 of grid electricity and gas are behind us now until May next year – not least because energy prices went up by 10% today.

Speaking of cold, our household is also starting the month with colds. Kids going back to school, and the dreaded Freshers’ Flu at universities mean that we’re all a little under the weather. At least I get my annual flu vaccine this week.

I’ve had my first (and second, and third) Pumpkin Spice Latte, and family plans for Christmas are starting to be drawn up. And I’m sure our eight-year-old will end up doing something for Halloween. I’m sure there’ll be days out (when we’re feeling better) but I’m not sure where and when yet.

WordPress, and conflicts of interest

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There’s been quite the to-do in the world of WordPress in recent weeks. Matt Mullenweg, one of the two people who forked b2/Cafelog to create WordPress in 2003, has had a public spat with WP Engine, a WordPress host.

Matt’s arguments are that WP Engine should be paying to use the WordPress trademark (or offer development time to the WordPress project in kind), and that it disables features in WordPress such as post revisions (which allow you to revert a blog post or page back to an earlier version). He’s used his platform to publicly call out WP Engine, including at a recent WordCamp event where he was the keynote speaker – an event supported by WP Engine.

Before I go into much more detail, please take 5-10 minutes to read If WordPress is to survive, Matt Mullenweg must be removed by Josh Collinsworth, which sets the scene pretty well. You can then come back here to continue reading.

Matt is basically the same age as me – he turned 40 a few months before I did. But in the 21 years since WordPress became a project in its own right, he has accumulated a huge amount of power and responsibility. He’s the founder and CEO of Automattic, the commercial enterprise that runs WordPress.com – which is a WordPress host and direct competitor of WP Engine. But he’s also one of only three board members of the WordPress Foundation, which looks after the WordPress open source project (aka WordPress.org), and, seemingly the only active board member.

To me, this is a massive conflict of interest, and means that a massive amount of control over WordPress is held by one person. Don’t get me wrong, I believe Matt deserves to be on the board of the WordPress Foundation, but not as the only active member. And we’re seeing the impact of this control, with WP Engine’s access to the WordPress plugin and theme directory cut off.

Though there’s been a temporary reprieve, this is an abuse of power. As Josh Collinworth says in the piece linked above:

Matt’s actions have ensured his hosting companies are now the only WordPress hosts that can guarantee something like this will never happen to their users.

Whilst I don’t use a dedicated WordPress host, should Matt have a beef with my host for whatever reason, this could cut off my access to security updates for plugins. I mean, there would be ways of downloading updates manually, but this would also require regular manual checks. Not really feasible considering I have 28 plugins installed.

I hope Matt backs down, and comes up with some kind of agreement with WP Engine so that their users won’t lose out. But I also think that some change needs to happen at the WordPress Foundation, to stop a single board member to act unilaterally like this again. And Matt needs to take a long hard, look at his actions from this year; first there was the transphobia, and more recently selling out content on WordPress.com to train AI models. This is why I no longer use the Jetpack plugin on here.

To recluse oneself from making decisions where a conflict of interest may occur is a core principle of most professional membership organisations, and good leadership. I’ve taken a step back more than once at work, where I’ve had a conflict of interest regarding a decision for someone that I know outside of work. Matt needs to do the same.

Comparing ZeroSSL and Let’s Encrypt

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If you run a hobbyist web site like I do, then nowadays there’s at least two places to get free SSL certificates: ZeroSSL, and Let’s Encrypt. I’ve used both, and so this is a comparison of their relative advantages and disadvantages.

Of the two, Let’s Encrypt is the most well-known, even though it’s only been around almost 10 years. It’ll celebrate its 10th birthday this coming November. Despite this, over 400 million certificates have been issued over those 10 years, and 93% of web sites use Let’s Encrypt certificates. It’s now the world’s most popular Certificate Authority, presumably because it’s free for all to use.

ZeroSSL is a much smaller commercial alternative, but it too offers free SSL certificates. The concept of SSL certificates being free would have probably blown my mind 20 years ago, but now almost all web sites use SSL – probably because Google ranks such web sites higher as a way of encouraging better security.

Anyway, this is a comparison, so here we go:

A still from the Lord of the Rings film where Boromir states 'One does not simply walk into Mordor'. The text has been replaced with 'One does not simply get a Let's Encrypt certificate'.

Ease of issuing certificates

Let’s Encrypt is designed to be an automated service for managing certificates, using tools like Certbot. Which is fine if you have a host that supports Certbot, or another tool that uses the ACME protocol. For example, I run Sympl which manages my Let’s Encrypt certificate for this web site.

But if you want to manually obtain an SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt, it’s a much more involved process. You’ll need to interact with Certbot on the command line, and probably fiddle with your domain’s DNS settings. SSLFree.io appears to be a web-based front-end for getting Let’s Encrypt certificates, but I’m not sure how much I trust it.

ZeroSSL is the winner here. There’s a web-based tool for obtaining SSL certificates, and you can authenticate using an email link if you wish. There is also an ACME API.

How many certificates you can get

Let’s Encrypt is free for everyone, no matter how many certificates you need. You can also create a ‘wildcard’ SSL certificate, that would cover example.com and all its subdomains, although you’ll need to use a DNS provider that has a plugin available like CloudFlare.

ZeroSSL, being a for-profit company, isn’t so generous. If you want to use their web-based interface, then you’re permitted a maximum of three free SSL certificates that are valid for 90 days. This limit of three certificates includes renewals, so if you have three certificates already, you’ll need to wait for one to expire before you can renew it (or pay for a new one). Thankfully, there isn’t a limit on those created using the ACME service.

How long the certificates last for

Paid-for SSL certificates would typically last for 12 months. The free certificates that Let’s Encrypt can issue are only valid for 90 days, but the idea is that their renewal is automated using tools like Certbot so that, in practice, there’s no interruption in service for users.

ZeroSSL’s free certificates are therefore also only valid for 90 days. You can, of course, pay for a standard certificate that lasts longer, but this will cost. Rather than paying per certificate, ZeroSSL charges a monthly subscription beginning at $10 per month. By contrast, Xilo, who I used before Let’s Encrypt was a thing, charges £20 for a one year SSL certificate.

Other alternatives

I’ve focussed on Let’s Encrypt and ZeroSSL as these are the two that I have the most experience with. CloudFlare also offers free SSL certificates, as does SSL.com. I can’t really compare these as I haven’t tried them.

Frustratingly, paper bank statements are still a necessity

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Earlier in the year, I changed my current account to a new provider. I’ll probably talk about the process in another blog post another time, but when it came to choosing a new bank, I decided to stick with a bank that still has high street branches.

When we moved to Sowerby Bridge in 2010, there were still two banks left in the town. HSBC and Yorkshire Bank had recently upped sticks, but Halifax and (the then) Lloyds TSB were still there. But Lloyds left a few years ago, and then Halifax shut up shop more recently.

Now Sowerby Bridge essentially flows into Halifax (the town), and most high street banks still have branches there. This includes Halifax (the bank) – indeed it wasn’t long ago that there were two branches, including the original branch of what was then the Halifax Permanent Building Society. That’s now gone, but there’s still one branch remaining. Barclay’s have also closed their branch, but we get a van for ten hours a week instead. But, on the whole, Haligonians and those living nearby are still reasonably well-served by banks.

Banking hubs

That’s not true for some other places. Elsewhere in West Yorkshire, the towns of Ossett and Normanton are now the home of ‘banking hubs’, run by the Post Office to provide banking services where no other banks remain. Almost all UK banks are signed up, and allow customers to pay in cash and cheques, and withdraw cash. Representatives from the main banks then visit at a set time every week for more complicated queries. It’s better than nothing, but many banking hubs lack printers for printing off paper bank statements.

And that’s a problem. For the most part, I’m happy to go paperless with my accounts, including my current account. But there are times when a paper bank statement is a necessity. When we re-mortgaged the house a couple of years ago, we needed paper bank statements that were certified by a solicitor. And if you need a DBS check, to work with young or vulnerable people, then you have to provide paper documents. Simply printing a PDF statement from your online banking app isn’t sufficient – it has to be a proper paper document. Bank branches can provide paper statements and put an official stamp on them where needed.

As much as online-only banks like Starling, Chase and Monzo regularly top customer service charts, they don’t make it easy to request paper statements. You normally have to contact their customer service team and wait for them to be sent through the post.

Now, this is arguably a problem for DBS and solicitors, rather than the banks themselves. For example, the DBS doesn’t support the government’s own GOV.UK ID check app. And I’m sure that the banking industry could work with organisations like the DBS to develop a way of sharing identity without relying on paper documents, a bit like how drivers can share their driving license details using a share code. But until something like this happens, I’ll be sticking with a mainstream bank.

Speaking of cheques: sure, you can scan cheques using most banking apps, but I’ve had this fail on more than one occasion. Indeed, one cheque that was rejected was issued by my own bank. Admittedly that was a few years ago and technology has moved on a bit, but I’d want to be able to take my cheque somewhere to pay it into my account – especially if it was for a large amount.

Things I’ve learned about running a dishwasher

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A photo of our dishwasher, with the door open and some crockery inside

I’m lucky enough to have grown up in a home that had a dishwasher, which in the 1980s and 1990s was much less common than nowadays. And since 2010, Christine and I have rented flats, or owned a house, that has had a dishwasher. We also made sure that a decent dishwasher was part of our new kitchen.

My own experience, along with this YouTube video embedded below and some guides from Which? are what I’m using to inform this blog post about what I’ve learned about running a dishwasher. And, more importantly, how to get the most out of it.

1. Some dishwashers are bad

Specifically, the dishwasher that was left behind in our house by the previous owner, which was manufactured by Indesit. It may have been age, or just bad design, but frequently the glassware in particular would come out dirtier than when we put it in. We tried giving it a thorough clean a few times but this never seemed to make much difference. So we were glad to see the back of it when we had the kitchen re-modelled.

Its replacement was manufactured by Bosch, which is one of the better quality appliance manufacturers. In the two years since, it’s done a very good job. If you’re in the market for a new dishwasher, check the professional reviews and maybe consider paying a bit more for at least a mid-tier model. We nearly went for a cheaper model – it was going to be built-in and so the ‘brand’ didn’t bother us – but I’m glad we didn’t.

2. A good dishwasher will clean just about anything

Because our old dishwasher was unreliable, we didn’t put anything too testing in it – just cutlery, crockery and glassware. Whereas we know we can rely on our new Bosch dishwasher, and so we put more challenging items in it. This includes pots and pans, and even oven trays with burnt-on food. Whilst it can’t always get rid of all burnt-on food, it does a pretty good job. As such, we run our dishwasher with a full load every day.

Not having to wash these things up manually saves a lot of time.

Just make sure that whatever you put in is dishwasher safe – many plastics are, but avoid putting anything wooden in like spoons or chopping boards. Knives can also lose their sharpness if they’re regularly put in a dishwasher – whilst this is fine for standard crockery, we tend not to put cook’s knives in the dishwasher.

3. You still need rinse aid and salt, even with all-in-one tablets

Most dishwasher tablets are ‘all-in-one’ nowadays, and include small amounts of rinse aid and salt. That should, theoretically, mean that you can ignore the low salt and rinse aid warnings in your dishwasher. But it doesn’t.

You should still fill these up, but many dishwashers will have some way of limiting how much is used. We use all-in-one dishwasher tablets from Smol (referral link) which are posted to us regularly. But I’ve also configured our dishwasher to use a smidgen of salt and rinse aid as well. As we have a smart dishwasher, I was able to do this using Bosch’s Home Connect app, but your dishwasher’s manual may have a way of doing it using some combination of buttons on the front.

4. You can just put the dishwasher tablet in the main body of the dishwasher, but you probably shouldn’t

Some experts say that you needn’t bother putting a dishwasher tablet in the dispensing tray. This is contradicted by the above YouTube video however, and I’m siding with that. The reason why you put the tablet in a dispensing unit is so that it’s released after the pre-wash cycle. The pre-wash is essentially a rinse to get rid of dirt on your plates before the main wash starts. If your tablet is in the main part of the dishwasher during this time, then the detergent will be partly consumed during the pre-wash, leaving less behind for the main wash.

The differences of opinion here suggest that the impact of not using the detergent dispenser is minimal. And, if your dishwasher has a broken dispenser, then you can still use it with the tablet in the main body of the dishwasher. One other suggestion is to consider putting the tablet in the dispenser, and some dishwasher powder in the bottom of the dishwasher. The powder will be used in the pre-wash, and then the tablet in the main wash.

5. The ‘auto’ or ‘standard’ programme is probably the best one

Most dishwashers offer a range of programmes, which optimise for either speed, cleaning or energy, or a balance of the three. For example:

  • Eco will prioritise energy efficiency over speed and cleaning. It’ll use the least amount of water and electricity, but won’t clean as effectively and will take a long time.
  • Intensive is the most powerful cleaning programme, which may be good for heavily soiled items or pans and oven trays with burned-on food. But it’ll use more energy and may take longer.
  • Rapid will be the quickest, but to do so it’ll use more energy and won’t give as good cleaning results.
  • Standard is a compromise of the above. It’ll offer the best balance of energy efficiency, cleaning and time.

If your dishwasher offers an ‘auto’ mode, then it should use its own logic to work out which programme is most appropriate. As long as you don’t mind some unpredictability about how long the dishwasher will take, this may be your best option.

Which? compares the various cycles and finds that the standard programme offers the best results overall, with the rapid programme the worst. But whilst the eco programme performs a little worse than standard, such programmes typically use significantly less energy – about 30%, and typically saving around £15 per year. There’s some hard data here, if you’re interested.. For the most part, we use Eco or Auto.

6. You need to clean your dishwasher regularly

Our Bosch dishwasher sends out an app notification via Home Connect when it decides it needs a clean – usually every couple of months. It also has a dedicated ‘Machine Clean’ programme. But if yours doesn’t, then you can still just run it empty on a standard programme with dishwasher cleaner in it.

However, just using dishwasher cleaner isn’t enough on its own. You also need to clean the filter regularly – Which? reckons weekly, but I tend to do it at the same time as the machine clean, so every couple of months. And, less often, it’s a good idea to clean the spray arms – they can get clogged up with bits of food which prevents them from working properly.

7. There’s no need to manually pre-rinse your crockery

If you have a good dishwasher, then you don’t need to pre-rinse your items before putting them in. That’s because your dishwasher will do this for you during the pre-wash cycle.

That being said, it’s best to scrape off any bits of food on your items before loading them in the dishwasher. We have a selection of silicone spatulas that we use for this, with any leftover food going in our food waste bin. Leaving lots of food on your items will clog up your dishwasher’s filter and spray arms more quickly.

8. Your dishwasher may work better if you run the hot tap first

This one depends on how your dishwasher is plumbed in. Generally speaking, in the UK and Europe, dishwashers are plumbed in with just a cold water feed, and then the dishwasher heats the water to the required temperature. But in the USA, there’s a higher likelihood that there’s a hot water feed as well.

This is worth bearing in mind. When you turn on a hot tap, the water is sometimes cold and takes a little while to warm up. So, if your dishwasher has a hot water feed, then it may initially be getting cold water at first. Therefore, if you run the hot tap before starting your dishwasher, the water that comes into the dishwasher will be warmer.

We’re in the UK, and our dishwasher and washing machine just have cold water feeds, so this doesn’t make a difference to us.

9. Use time delays to take advantage of cheap electricity

I know I drone on about our solar panels, but to make the most of them we tend to run things like the dishwasher during the day. Bosch’s Home Connect app lets you specify times when you get cheaper energy, and so it can default to running the dishwasher at those times. For us, this is during sunlight hours, but you may be on (for example) an Economy 7 tariff when it’s cheaper to run overnight.

The smart features of our dishwasher make this easier, but most should come with some kind of time delay programme. If not, you can make a regular dishwasher ‘smart’ using a ‘fingerbot’ and an energy monitoring plug.

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