Christina W.—September 2, 2023✓ Verified purchase
KleenWater Dishwasher Water Filter, KW2510HW-resin Under Sink Filtration System (RESIN) Summary: Works great and is easy to install. However, the connector hose was missing from mine and the customer service number, while responsive, did not address the issue - 4 stars. Read further for my experiments that show that this works. I hope this helps someone else. Hello. We had a strong smell coming from our dishwasher and lingering on our dishes. Although the smell will be different for different people, to us it smells like river water, or a wet dog. We live in an area with hard water, and the problem has gotten particularly bad this summer, so we suspected that hard water was contributing to the smelly dishes. We brought in a water testing company, and they verified that we had high hardness (but everything else was okay - lead, bacteria, chlorine, etc.). Since the dishwasher smell was our major concern, we decided to invest in this unit to see if it fixed the problem prior to investing hundreds of dollars in a new dishwasher or thousands of dollars in a whole house water softener system. After all, if the smell was not caused in part by hard water, we did not want to waste our money on a more expensive solution. Specifically, I bought the resin unit. The unit arrived and included a basic invoice with a support phone number on it. It lacks installation instructions, but it did come with a print out of what the unit looks like installed with some basic words describing where to make the connections. It is not that hard to install. In my case, I had to order a 3/8 to 3/8 female water supply hose, stainless steel, which was about 12 bucks. The fact that it did not come with a hose when one was depicted, and not receiving help from the help line in this matter, is the only reason for my 4 star review. When installing it, make sure you leave enough clearance between the cabinet wall and the unit itself to be able to fit the included removal wrench around the collar. Also, make sure you leave enough clearance on the bottom of the unit, about 3 inches, to allow the cylinder to come down fully from the top, important when you need to change the filter. The only other advice I would give is to use thread tape to ensure a good connection, check all the connections for leaking after you run a dish cycle, and also to open up the air bleed valve a little bit to allow the filter chamber to fill with water right after installation. After installation, run your dishwasher on a rinse cycle at least three or four times to clear any air from the line and to make sure your hookups are not leaking. After the first rinse cycle, I noticed that there was soapy foam in the bottom of my dishwasher. It took about four rinse cycles to get rid of this. I don't think it is in the filter, I think it is leftover soap residue now positively reacting with the softer water and finally coming to "life" after years of only having hard water. (I routinely had to wash with two soap biscuits, because the dishes never seemed to get fully clean on only one biscuit.) Time for some science. I wanted to see if this thing actually was softening the water. I have some swimming pool test strips that include a test for hard water. Before describing my procedure, know that my dishwasher rinse cycle starts by draining any water in the bottom of the unit first, then it fills its chamber with water from its source and sloshes things around, (it may perform a second drain/fill cycle), and at the very end it drains the supply water back out again. The water drains as a solid stream into my garbage disposal, unimpeded by anything else. I performed three tests: (1) I filled a 2-gallon picture with hot tap water and measured its hardness; (2) I poured that tap water into at the bottom of the dishwasher. I started the dishwasher rinse cycle; when it started its initial drain cycle, I put a test strip in the drainage stream coming into the garbage disposal to measure the hardness of the draining tap water; then (3) I put a test strip in a final drainage stream to measure the hardness of the draining filtered water. The results are shown in a picture that hopefully attaches to this. The top square on the test strip is the hardness measure. For my test kit, the redder the square, the harder the water, and the more green or gray the square, the softer the water. Strip #1, the test of the hot tap water in the pitcher, showed about a medium level of hardness. Strip #2, the hot tap water being drained back out again, showed a higher level of hardness, which was a little surprising. Strip #3 showed a much lower hardness than strip number one. First, I conclude that this unit works, and works well. It softens water as strip 3 had the lowest overall hardness of all the strips. The puzzling part was why the hot tap water I added came out with a higher hardness than what it went in with. I am guessing that since I just put the filter in, that the dishwasher has a lot of hard scale that it is starting to get rid of. The dishwasher has been installed and in use for about three years with no filtering. Even so, I have spent the last three weeks adding dishwasher cleaners, vinegar, and even Tang, in an attempt to clean the dishwasher. It makes sense to me that there are still quantities of water in the dishwasher, in one of its various storage bladders, that account for this hardness. It could also be that the rinse agent and/or leftover soap residue contributed a little to this problem, despite me running 4 rinse cycles before this test. Second, since the unit works and the dishwasher now has soft water flowing in it, it may take several wash cycles to remediate any additional hardness deposits and possibly smell - if hardness is causing/contributing to the smell. My experience with things like this is that it could take weeks to see a difference. Last, thinking more about the soapy bubbles after the first couple of rinses, I am guessing that softer water makes soap more effective. My guess (I'm not a chemist) is that the residues that have been there for years are finally getting a chance to come loose. If I'm right, then one biscuit should be sufficient going forward, leading to cleaner dishes and a cost savings. (I am NOT a compensated endorser for this product, just a regular joe. I have studied engineering if it matters.) In conclusion, if you think you have hard water, have somebody come out and test for it. If that is the case and your main concern is the smell of your dishwasher, well, I don't know yet if hard water is the cause of our smell, but I do think that the soap will work more effectively in softer water leading to cleaner dishes prior to the dry cycle, meaning less dirty water steaming up and settling on the dishes, so I should be gaining some benefit regardless. (Several sites say soap works better in soft water, so much so that it's easy to use too much soap. We shall see.) It's certainly worth the $130 to find out. Read more
SSRM—August 12, 2018✓ Verified purchase
PHOTOS: Left: Glass before installing water filter Right: Glass after installing water filter We've been having issues with our dishes not coming out clean for the past few years, and didn't know the cause for the longest time. We tried different detergents, jet dry rinse aid, we even tried adding calcium remover instead of jet dry out of pure desperation. We cleaned the interior of the dishwasher several times and yet our dishes would come out covered in a disgusting white film every time. We kept thinking it was soap scum and started contemplating buying a new dishwasher altogether since it's over 10 years old now. Thankfully before spending thousands on a new dishwasher, my husband googled other causes for the white film and discovered it was probably hard water. We don't have a water softener so that explanation made sense...instead of spending a ton of money on a water softener for the whole house we found this alternative that filters water on the dishwasher only. We were skeptical it would work especially on a product with no reviews but as I said, we were desperate and not exactly thrilled at the prospect of dropping thousands of dollars. I'm happy to say this filter COMPLETELY resolved the white film problem. Our dishes come out 100% clear. The difference is night and day. I'm no longer embarrassed serving our guests food and beverages with our dishes. Before I would have to basically have to take the dishes out of the cabinet and wash by hand before serving, which doesn't exactly instill a lot of confidence in the cleaniness of the dishes....no more washing dishes by hand after the fact. And we can finally wash our pots and pans in the dishwasher now which is great because it sucks washing those by hand. I am beyond pleased with this purchase. Works perfectly and saved us a ton of money. Read more
