It sounds like you softener isn't working properly or is severely undersized. 60 grains is some pretty bad water. I would get your softener dealer out and ask his to fix it. Or, better yet, contact several dealers and compare what they say.

As to your glasses, you might try Bar Keepers Friend. It is acid-bared and works wonders on hard water buildup.

I'd say address your water softener. We just moved into a new house in a city with very hard water as well. Bought a Bosch DW and until we installed the water softener it was a useless mess. Since then, it's been a whole different appliance.

My husband turned it to every day instead of every day. It wasn't the softeners problem. He had heard that the city had made improvements to the water and it was "better" than it had been.

The water is now at 5 grains again. My glasses are still cloudy.

5 grains is still hard water. If that is the hardness that consistently exits your softener, then your softener has a problem. Your husband setting it to regen every other day caused it's resin to become exhausted and you got the full brundt of the extremely hard water for that period of time. But, the generally hard water out of your softener tells me one of three things is occurring: Water it channeling through the resin bed, resin beads are damaged, or the softener is too small for the flow. If you are on city water, chlorine could be part of the problem. Did the unit ever perform better (0 hardness)?

Try using lots of Glass Magic in every DW cycle.

I have a water softener (we have 16 grains; can hardly believe 60 grains exists; I feel for you!) AND a Bosch DW. I get the same problem. Culligan has come out and tested our water and showed me that it measures "soft" so it is not the softener, and I find it hard to believe it is the washer, so I think it is our water leaving some other sort of residual on the glasses. No one in our town drinks unfiltered tap water. The water tastes terrible and you see "things" settled in the bottom of the glass. The softener replaces minerals with sodium, but does nothing to filter the water.

To deal with the cloudiness, I use tiny amount of Trader Joe's dw detergent (slightly less than half), keep the Jet Dry thing filled (required by Bosch) and always use at least a 1/4 cup of Glass Magic poured onto the DW floor before starting every load.

To help clear up your cloudiness, load your DW w/everything that is cloudy, use 1/2 cup of Glass Magic and a small amount of detergent and run the load. If not fixed, repeat using same amount of Glass Magic. Slowly you will see that the cloudiness will go away.

Glass Magic is stupidly expensive sold for about $5 for a tiny box around here, but unless I want to consider my glassware disposable, I have to use it.

(FWIW, Yesterday I installed a whole house filter by Aquasana, which I'm hoping will help with our cloudy glasses, although the primary reason I bought it was to try to help my son's painful eczema. Our water has very high levels of chlorine and this filter removes it, among other stuff. I just had my first shower in chlorine-free water and I noticed a difference in the smell of the mist, and our tap water seems to be drinkable now!)

Here is a link that might be useful: Glass Magic

Here's an article about cloudy glassware. Your glasses may be permanently etched if the water was too soft.

Here is a link that might be useful: water and cloudy glassware

Thanks, and fwiw it's normally at 1 or 2 grains, not 5. It shot up to 16 grains trying to cycle it every other day. I'm sure it will head back down soon.

I don't think we will ever have the water is too soft issue as long as we live here.

Our water is plain undrinkable without filtration. We have the softener and then a reverse osmosis system to our kitchen sink, fridge and downstairs in the laundry for grabbing a drink of water and for the little ice machine. The fridge also has a filter with it so that water is double filtered.

Will the glassmagic help the ss interior as well as the glasses or is there some other thing that I need to do?

Go to Wal Mart and get you a bottle (or 2) of Dishwasher Magic and run that through your dishwasher to help clean it out. Etching or cloudy glasses is usually caused from soft water, high heat and too much detergent and pre rinsing.
I have never heard of 5 gr. being consider hard water. In fact I have seen charts that even a 7 is just beginning to be considered hard. I think that is what is wrong with the glasses the softened water and the Bosch uses high temp water. Go to the P&G website. They have a lot of info on there about water hardness and Cascade.
Try the DMagic. It will clean out the pump filter and tub.
You might try soaking the glasses in white vinegar and water in the sink.

The glasses were beautiful until the softener issue. It isn't something that happened over time, it happened in one DW cycle.

Walmart? That's what I forgot to ask in the last post, where to buy this stuff.

Thanks. :~)

I tried to get the table that is in the URL below that defines water hardness levels into this reply, but it looks much better in the web page below.

-Roger

Here is a link that might be useful: Water Hardness

If you had hard water before and it became soft and you were still using the same amount of detergent in the DW, your glasses may be etched.

I'm curious about this occurring immediately after the softener was adjusted. Your DW is supplied by only hot-water line and heater-tank would have taken a number of days to become completely filled/diluted with the newly-processed water. I think something else may be at work.

The best way to tell if your glasses are etched or have hard water deposits is to soak them in vinegar and see if the cloudiness is removed. If the cloudiness remains the glasses are etched.

Now one way the the etching occurs is if you wash your dishes before washing your dishes.
In other words the dishwasher requires some soil on the dishes so the detergent has something to attack. If there is no oils, fats, or proteins, the detergent will attack the dishes and cause etching.

Something else may be involved but when I had a tank water heater all the water in the tank would be replaced by taking two showers back to back. If children and laundry were involved, the water in that tank could have been totally replaced in less than a day.

jerrod6...believe you are mistaken. It's not a matter of pure volume replacement. It occurs by gradual dilution. For example, imagine a 40-gallon water heater tank filled with blue-dyed water. Now begin supplying the heater tank with only clear water. How much water do you think would have to run into and through that tank before it's output was perfectly clear -- no blue coloring left?

I don't know either.....but quite a bit. Certainly many times more than the 40 gallon capacity of the tank. Newly-softened supply flowing into a hard-water tank would work like that. The new soft water would eventualy so dilute the old hard water that the soft would predominate -- but it would take a while. In my experience, a number of days for a "typical" household. More for larger tanks. Less for smaller tanks.

Wow ...60 grains of hardness. That is some pretty crappy water. When I lived in SoCal it was 22..in a few days you could grow a stalactite from your faucet. I would leave that softener on 24/7. And Jakvis is right, pre-cleaning your dishes is a bad thing. But in the end you will still have etched glasses. Soft water just etches faster. Until detergent manufacturers remove the caustic phosphates from their products its just the way it is. Oh and before you run out and by phosphate-free detergent..please ask Jerrod how well they don't work.

Cheers

With the water back to normal, so are the glasses. The ss interior is still cloudy though. Walmart is 20 miles either direction for me so I haven't been to purchase any Dishwasher Magic. Would it help?

Hi BVE,

Here is another product I recently purchased at Walmart ($3.66)that removes the hard water-caused cloudy glasses:Lemi Shine.
My water is extremely hard and I don't have a water softener. I'm extremely pleased with the job this product does on my glasses;they really sparkle now.

My water company,Kentucky-American,says:

"How hard is my water?
Hardness is a measure of the concentration of two minerals
(calcium and magnesium) naturally present in water. Hardness
levels of water leaving our water treatment plants range from 117 (hard) to 227 parts per million (very hard) or 6.8 to 13.2 grains per gallon."

No wonder I have cloudy glasses!!

FYI, Lemi Shine completely cleaned the interior of the DW after only two uses.

I found other people like Lemi Shine too;see the reviews:

Here is a link that might be useful: Lemi Shine user reviews on Epinions.

eek if 13.2 is very hard, what's 60?

Elvis-

60 is outrageous.... you can almost hear the salt truck backing up to your house. You might not want to drink that water after being softened. I think you are going to taste the salt. If your softener is preforming correctly the interior of your dishwasher should shine up in a couple days. Or run a cup of vinegar through it on a long cycle.

We dont drink the water, ever, unless it's gone through the reverse osmosis system.

I do not believe that reverse osmosis will affect the hardness of water at all.

Fairegold - it does. It will strip out all the hardness. Actually, they recommend that people with very hard water, soften their water first then run it through a RO. You will add years to the life of the memebrane.

RO will remove 90-98% of everything in the water, including hardness. For 60 grains hardness, you will have about 3 grains left, possibly less. Pre-softening will greatly extend membrane life.

Thanks for the correction!

All the water, except outside faucets, goes through the softener, including what goes through the RO.