Seeing people defend the cassettes is weird. Here's how I look at it:
1. The company say's being eco friendly is important to them.
2. They manufacture, sell, and ship expensive plastic containers for their detergent.
3. The machines don't necessarily need this specific detergent, and will work fine by leaving in one of the "cassettes" and just using normal dish detergent.
This means that the cassettes were never necessary, and are purely a separate stream of income for the company. Literally the printer ink method.
Which means they didn't have to produce this plastic waste at all, they could have just allowed it to use a smaller amount of liquid or powder detergent (pre-portioned pods are probably too much detergent).
Hell even if they wanted to continue with the printer ink approach, they could have used powder detergent in little wax-lined cardboard containers.
Regardless of how well they're recycling or re-using the cassettes returned to them, the cassettes never needed to exist. It's more plastic taking up more space in more polluting delivery trucks.
At the end of the day this company is selling a dishwasher and a detergent subscription service. It's not the worst thing out there and it's not creating nearly as much plastic waste as the fishing industry but it's still a company greenwashing itself to sell you more garbage.
Maybe seems like "cheating" to refill as it messes with the business model.
My experiences are with Printers and ink. A studio I'm a member of inherited a big epson4880 printer. Its a big heavy machine, well built. It came with a "chip resetter" tool for refilling ink carts. The printer seems to know that its using non-epson inks (it warns me on the little display, and I have to click through) but it allows them (right now filled with cleaning solution, but thats another storry).
Newer printers don't allow this (unless you are in Europe). Apparently they are running out of DRM chips, and some of the new printers require a firmware update to use new ink cartridges using the older chips.
One can see a day when these printers/dishwashers no longer have ink/detergents manufactured for them, becoming big paperweights.
Companies never seem to want offer more expensive products with cheaper use costs. Maybe the problem is people don't think about it enough? Where I live the markets have 2 prices listed on the shelves. 1) the cost of the package, 2) the cost per unit of the package (eg cost per oz, cost per pill etc..). Its much easier to compare.
"We are currently supplying the European Region versions of this printer model. They can work with a simple chip resetter and refillable cartridges (which we do not supply).
Unfortunately, the USA Region versions of this printer have been designed by EPSON to prevent the use of non-EPSON chips and are designed to prevent the use of a chip resetter. As a result, we do not believe any 3rd party solutions may become available for the USA region printers for some considerable time until the anti-3rd party mechanism that prevents the use of 3rd party products is discovered and circumvented.."
> Companies never seem to want offer more expensive products with cheaper use costs.
Never?
A regular dishwasher has the cost of production built completely into the purchase price, and it doesn't care what brand of detergent is used.
It's the same with some printers, too -- including some Epson printers. Their EcoTank line is refillable: Need more magenta ink today? Just squirt some more magenta in. It doesn't have to be Epson-sourced ink.
Dishwasher manufacturers may not officially care what brand of detergent you use but they do recommend a specific brand often in their service manual and I have to assume that some amount of money changed hands for that to happen.
That sucks, there used to be a company that offered a set of gray gradiants for epson printers for printing digital black and white prints that are some of the best I've seen outside of darkroom prints. I wonder if the drm nonsense killed them off but I can't remember the name atm.
As for the paperweights, I have a pixma pro9000 mkii gathering dust after bad aftermarket carts and official carts being at least $100+. It is cheaper and way less time consuming to let a professional printer handle the work at least for larger prints.
> Companies never seem to want offer more expensive products with cheaper use costs.
A recurring revenue stream, often via subscription, ideally with vendor lock-in, seems to be en vogue, judging purely anecdotally. You saw it in printers and razor blades, but "x as a service" is everywhere, seemingly increasingly so now. Rolls Royce does it for jet engines with their "power by the hour" program, for example (and has for decades).
From a seller business/investor standpoint, consistent net recurring revenue can often be better due to the predictability and planning it enables. Also it's easier to "hook" a consumer with a lower up-front price.
From a buyer standpoint, it's often easier to get approval for operational expenses than capital expenses, whether from higher management, or from investors. Also consumers often simply won't do the math to compare the two models, simply picking the cheaper one and then totally ignoring OpEx.
It is very ironic that they sell it has "eco-compact dishwasher" when it require disposable chunk of plastic to use it. The amount of water saved will really not make up for the amount of plastic thrash created.
From their website: "At Daan Tech, we’ve always believed that a more sustainable and fairer world is possible.", you really have to be cynical to write something like this and then sell a worse washing machine that generate lot of plastic waste.
> Each Bob cassette is returnable and reusable. We refill them and put them back on the market. Close the loop, lower your carbon footprint.
You're also NOT required to use the cassettes. You can just throw standard dishwasher tablets in. This is mentioned in Bob's manual, and probably on the website as well. I've been doing this for years and had no issue. There is no DRM-like aspect to Bob.
And finally, it's not a worse washing machine as you say, it's just smaller and more flexible (wrt plumbing), and as Techmoan mentions in his intro, this is a very strong advantage of Bob for people living in small European apartments.
Yes, in theory, which requires from you the effort of packaging it up, paying postage, plan time to go to the post office, etc - or you could just throw it in the trash for exactly the same visible effect and be done with it. Even if people want to mail them back, this sounds like exactly the kind of task that will perpetually stay on the "I'll look into that when I have time" list, until they finally just want to get rid of it and throw it in the trash.
But it's good for shifting the blame, because then the pollution is not DaanTech's fault but those of individual consumers.
> You're also NOT required to use the cassettes. You can just throw standard dishwasher tablets in.
Doesn't this contradict what the article was saying? At least there was a quote from DaanTech somewhere that you have to have a cassette inserted to start a wash.
Even if they ship it back, i'd really doubt the environmental impact of shipping something halfway across the country is less than a few gallons of water per dishwasher load.
It would be nice if companies like this gave a significant benefit for returning cartridges, especially given the enormous markup on the detergent. 25 or even 50 percent off if you send your empty cartridges back. They would still extract the absurd full price from the lazy.
Of the fraction that gets returned, how many are actually reused? It's black plastic with a shine to it and it'll show scratches easily. Does the factory even have the facilities to clean them out and refurbish them for next use?
It's any acronym that's often used when someone wants to point out that a question could have been answered by reading the fine article that is being discussed. TFA = The F'ing Article.
Nj recently banned single use plastic bags. Now instead of people actually reusing the reusable bags forever they just throw them out almost every time. Everyone who buys this machine is not going to go out of their way to return the casettes. America is obsessed with convenience and will continute throwing out perfectly reusable things until we have a massive cultural shift.
I was confused by this so I looked it up [0]. The point I had missed was that stores and delivery services still provide bags like before, but now they're heavier bags designed for reuse. And people still throw them away like before.
Result: Now there's even more plastic in the waste stream.
We keep reusable bags in the car for every time we go to the grocery store. I think the entire country would only benefit from banning single-use plastic bags nationally, and I'm not sure how you could have an issue with that.
The issue I have is already stated in the first message. You just don't want to accept it.
I have another question for you while I have your attention; how do you handle trash? Do you just have a bin with no liner and you carry that to outside and pour it in to the big bin? Or do you buy plastic bags at the store to line your bin and then carry that plastic bag filled with crap to the bigger bin?
I mostly agree, but here in NYC I don’t have a car to keep the bags in. If I stop at the grocery store on my way home from work, I either have to have planned ahead and put a reusable bag in my work backpack, or I have to buy more reusable bags (which eventually get tossed because we have too many of them).
It’s definitely better to have the bag with me, and just typing this out made me realize I can keep one or two in my backpack at all times.
I personally keep in my daily backpack a reusable Baggu that packs down nicely and doesn’t take up much space. As long as you have a daily bag/purse/whatever and you’re not strapped for space, it’s pretty easily solved, yeah. I live in not-NYC so I also keep a bag in the car.
I have some sympathy if you find yourself on a weekend out and about and needing to spontaneously buy some victuals and don’t have any bag on you - but that’s the cost of us having less litter.
Don't even need a Baggu.
Single use bags aren't inherently single use, they are just cheap enough to throw away. No one prevents you from bringing a tight-packing lightweight "single use" bag back to the store to use again.
Well, I suppose that’s perfectly fine if you’re the wasteful sort of person who uses a personal vehicle instead of a bike or public transit.
But what about the responsible people who actually care about reducing their carbon footprint by not unnecessarily carrying 3000 lbs of steel everywhere they go?
I live in central Alabama. Would take over 4 hours to walk or bike to get groceries. Not everyone lives in a huge city and the ones in Alabama are too dangerous to walk around in without concealed carrying a firearm (except for Huntsville).
Is this based on particular evidence, or just a feeling?
I lived in Birmingham for a while (admittedly not in the downtown), and this was not my experience at all, nor have I ever heard this from anyone else I knew, including people that did live downtown. Obviously, there are better and worse areas like everywhere else, but most of the city is basically fine IMO.
I got one because it's the only mini dishwasher that can fit in my kitchen. The cassettes don't clean that thoroughly compared to normal dishwasher tabs, so I just use those instead.
I can see now how that line can give the wrong impression. My unit is very dear to me, to the point where I call it by name like any other housemate. It's always "honey, I'll give Bob a go at these dishes". I guess I was expecting constructive discourse on HN without having to dodge knee-jerk comments at every step.
> "At Daan Tech, we’ve always believed that a more sustainable and fairer world is possible.", you really have to be cynical to write something like this
I tend to assume incompetence rather than malice. The marketing person that wrote that piece of copy never worried about the lifecycle waste analysis of the project they were working on, because they trusted the CEO/founder that hired them, who said it was gonna be good for the environment. They probably aren't the type of person that worries about nor has the skills to do a lifecycle waste analysis.
Yeah, I'm all for applying Hanlon's Razor, but in this case this seems like a clear case of "they had an incentive to say whatever made them look best and they sure followed it". "Weaponized incompetence" isn't a bad word for it.
The issue is that there's no incentive to return the chunks of plastic to them. They need to follow a Sodastream-like model to apply a discount to the next order when returning a unit, especially with such astronomical prices.
These refill packages for dishwasher, printers are just SaaS for products. It is terrible and contain 'dark pattern' to continuously over charge customers. Just also a lazy way to try to make business profitable and doesn't really provide any benefit to the customers.
Mat/Techmoan has a perfectly eclectic mix of useful current generation hardware reviews (with his reviews skewed to things which Work Well, are well built and resilient vs fancy features) and nostalgic reviews of electronics (sometimes of things you never knew you should be nostalgic about!). I love his channels style as well, bit of funny, lots of facts, not too technically dense, lots of fun.
The more I think of it, the more I can draw parallel between Bob cassettes and those overpriced DRM-enabled inkjet cartridges, often costing more than the printer itself.
More than two decades ago, this is the first publicly documented attempt at hacking printer DRM - indeed, also accomplished with EEPROMs in the cartridges: https://eddiem.com/photo/CIS/inkchip/chip.html
I thought the GUID was put in the cartridge to prevent the machine from accepting the same one but refilled, since I know this is done with ink cartridges (printer remembers last N cartridge's IDs) so it's odd to see no other mention of that.
If hacking cartridges becomes popular enough that it impacts their cartridge sales, they might put out a firmware update that does just that, but it looks like they went with the "lazy option" first?
Daan Tech broke their firmware update mechanism for lots of dishwashers in the field by losing their keys, more than once too. I own one such dishwasher and can't update the firmware without replacing the main board. They could certainly prevent cartridge resetting in newer dishwashers.
Every time this gets posted to HN, the comments go straight for "DRM bad!", when the Bob dishwasher does NOT in fact require you to use the proprietary cassettes.
But the company itself mentions several drawbacks to not using the cassettes. So, yeah, it is absolutely a form of DRM. It doesn’t totally brick your device, but it definitely reduces its functionality.
Scroll down to FAQ, and expand the first question: Is the use of a Bob cassette mandatory?
LE: It's also mentioned in the rewind project's README.
> Credit where credit's due, Daan Tech didn't completely lock down the machine with Bob cassettes. Once empty, you can leave it there and add detergents manually.
Why bother? Powder dish detergent is so damn cheap and works just as well as any other dish detergent product, and better than packs because those don't use the prewash cycle properly.
That project is cool. I decided to check out his other repos and he has done a lot of neat stuff. I really like the duckypad and this thing: https://github.com/dekuNukem/daytripper
Don’t use rinse aid products, some have been found to damage the lining of your intestines at extremely low concentrations. Personally i never even noticed a difference when i did use them.
The study did not find damage at the concentrations typically used in household dishwashers. This is only for professional dishwashers.
You may have a point with regard to this article though, as the author uses professional dishwasher rinse aid and detergent without real knowledge of what is happening.
If you don't notice any difference when using rince aid, you may have very soft water. On many dishwashers (not sure about Bob), you are supposed to adjust the amount of rinse aid being used depending on your water hardness level, and for very soft water, it may very well be zero.
The fact that the scent stays on dishes after even multiple washes with detergent speaks to how powerful of a surfactant rinse aids are. 2/10 do not recommend.
Personally i never even noticed a difference when i did use them
I always thought rinse aid was only needed if you have hard water. We have pretty soft water and like you, I found that rinse aid made no difference at all in drying performance or preventing water spots (we have no water spots even without rinse aid).
You can make your own rinse aid, just use a bit of citric acid (to chelate metal ions to soften the water), a dash of EDTA (also a chelator), and a mild surfactant.
But isn't it what the commercial rinse aids the article talks about are made of?
Doing stuff by yourself is always interesting, but rince aid is cheap, and according to the article, apparently harmless at the concentrations used in household dishwashers, so unless you want something specific, why bother?
Yes, it is. And it is assumed to be safe in the concentrations used. This finding has not yet been confirmed in real studies on humans, only on tissue models.
I just checked, and my rinse aid has 0.2% of ethoxylated alcohols. So this would be around 500 times dilution already, and the rinse aid is further diluted by about 100x by the dishwasher. The article found some effects at 1:20000 dilution.
So I think that it might be concerning, but not too alarming.
I was about to make an argument that "there's no DRM" because it's a simple flash memory chip used to keep track of how much detergent is left, and it's totally unencrypted...
Except the juicero approached the squeezing portion with what’s basically a hydraulic press rather than something sane. This just has overpriced detergent but otherwise a seemingly well thought out machine.
Something doesn't add up here. It says £43 for 90 washes, but the picture shows six cartridges which is 180 washes? On top of that, it contains rinse aid and enough deep cleaning for those 180 washes.
Compared to dishwasher tablets from the supermarket it looks like 180 would cost from about £15 for supermarket own brand, all the way up to about £32 for the most expensive. Then on top of that you have the rinse aid, deep cleaner and salt, which seems to account for the other £10.
Obviously this thing is significantly smaller but I think the assumption is you'd be running the big dishwasher half empty every day anyway so the cost would be the same. So it doesn't seem to be that far off price wise?
I find dishwashers in general to be an example of convenience addiction. The amount of dishes this thing can hold I could wash up by hand in about 5 minutes and, unlike the dishwasher, I can guarantee I'll do it properly. People forget that washing up is a skill like anything else that you can get good at. It only takes a bit of practice. But once you use a dishwasher and forget how to do it yourself you get addicted and think you can't live without it.
I'm not familiar with mini dishwashers like Bob, but the full size ones are definitely not a "convenience addiction". You may be capable and skilled at using the two/three-sink method for washing up, but the general population isn't and will instead run the tap and waste far greater amounts of heat and water than a dishwasher would require.
Yeah I'm not capable/skilled at playing the piano either because, guess what, I don't play the piano. Are you seriously suggesting washing dishes is some next-level human skill?
Dishwasher manufacturers will eagerly tell you they use less water than hand washing. But they're more quiet about the fact that they use more energy. I've honestly never heard anyone complain about their water bill.
It's quite a basic circuit board. Start with an Arduino tutorial to get a feeling of hooking up electronics (Adafruit is probably a good start), once you've got it working look up a KiCad tutorial to turn it into an actual PCB.
The trickiest parts here are dealing with the MCU (look for example schematics to copy, they're probably already in the datasheet), sourcing parts (Mouser/Farnell/Arrow are expensive but have good search tools - LCSC is dirt cheap but has terrible search), and soldering the PCB (stick with through-hole parts, if at all possible). You can get a bare PCB of this size made at JLCPCB or a dozen other places for less than $5 - not including shipping.
> stick with through-hole parts, if at all possible
These days it's more work to avoid SMD than it is to embrace it. Many many parts are not available in through-hole, and dealing with 0805 passives and 0.65mm pitch ICs is not that difficult (unless you assume that it is).
As a bonus, you get much easier re-work, access to assembly services, and cheaper components.
This is a great write up, thanks for sharing. I had never heard of these before, and would usually be totally against a subscription based product like that. But the idea of totally bypassing their "drm" for 1/60th the cost? Much more intriguing
I don't understand the casette pitch. I'm filling the dishwasher anyway. The tablet is like 1 more item in the dishwasher, not having to do that is below 1% improvement.
This dishwasher is much smaller, so would require smaller tablets to work work efficiently. Certainly possible, and Daan Tech sell small tablets for this use.
One benefit of measured detergent is that the wash cycle can dispense the correct amount for different parts of the cycle, for example the pre-wash can dispense a small amount and the main cycle can dispense a larger amount. The rinse at the end can dispense rinse aid.
This system offers more control to the machine about when fluids are used, though it would be much better to include refillable tanks instead of the cassette system.
I own a Bob and use powder since mine has stopped pumping detergent...
Maybe I am just naive, but when I had a table top dishwasher like that I just threw in a tablet or half a tablet depending the dirtiness and amount of dishes and I never had problems.
Only reason I changed to full size one was because I got tired of pouring the water in each time
1. The company say's being eco friendly is important to them.
2. They manufacture, sell, and ship expensive plastic containers for their detergent.
3. The machines don't necessarily need this specific detergent, and will work fine by leaving in one of the "cassettes" and just using normal dish detergent.
This means that the cassettes were never necessary, and are purely a separate stream of income for the company. Literally the printer ink method.
Which means they didn't have to produce this plastic waste at all, they could have just allowed it to use a smaller amount of liquid or powder detergent (pre-portioned pods are probably too much detergent).
Hell even if they wanted to continue with the printer ink approach, they could have used powder detergent in little wax-lined cardboard containers.
Regardless of how well they're recycling or re-using the cassettes returned to them, the cassettes never needed to exist. It's more plastic taking up more space in more polluting delivery trucks.
At the end of the day this company is selling a dishwasher and a detergent subscription service. It's not the worst thing out there and it's not creating nearly as much plastic waste as the fishing industry but it's still a company greenwashing itself to sell you more garbage.