A Toothpick Is The Quick Fix Your Dishwasher Needs For A More Effective Clean

Keeping up on your household cleaning is an important part of ensuring your home runs efficiently and your living space is comfortably maintained. A big wrench in your clean and relaxing home vibe can be smelly, inefficient appliances — like your dishwasher. While there are many benefits to using a dishwasher, it's not without its pitfalls. That's right, we're calling out the dishwasher for its annoying habit of collecting stinky buildup. It's a common complaint among users, and there's nothing worse than opening up your dishwasher and getting blasted by a waft of hot, disgusting food smells.

There are some basic ways to clean your dishwasher to keep it smelling nice and working well, like removing large or hardened food particles and running a vinegar cycle, but there's one more game-changing cleaning hack you could be missing, and it all starts with a toothpick. That tiny piece of wood is your best friend when cleaning your dishwasher's neglected spray arms. The spray arms can often be the culprit of foul smells and inefficient cleaning. The toothpick is actually the perfect tool to clean your appliance's hard-to-reach pinholes.

Simple cleaning hacks are the best kind, and this one's easy-peasy. All you need to do is remove your dishwasher's spray arms (if needed, check the manual on how to do this), grab your toothpick, and use it to clean out the spray arm's small holes.  While that's technically all you need for this cleaning trick, it's definitely a good idea to go one step further and soak your spray arms in vinegar (both of them!). This last step will help ensure they are truly clean.

Though it may be tempting to skip cleaning the spray arms and opt for just a vinegar cycle, you'll just be doing yourself a disservice by not fully keeping up with your dishwasher's maintenance needs. Continue doing vinegar cycles that will help to dissolve hard water and lime buildup in a dishwasher, and simply add this last step to your cleaning routine to keep your appliance in tip-top shape, avoiding that gross buildup and keeping your dishes coming out shiny.