Please help me, Sheffield forumers, for I have done a very stupid thing!

Last night, the low salt indicator light was on on my dishwasher, so I filled the salt dispenser to the brim and ran the dishwasher as normal.

This morning, I noticed the indicator light was back on again which I thought was rather strange. I have now discovered why. Instead of using salt, I have filled the salt dispenser with dishwasher detergent powder. oops.

I've dug as much of the powder out as I can get at, but most of it seems to be set hard in the bowels of the machine. There must be about a kilo in there. The machine ran perfectly normally last night and even got the dishes clean. Do I dare keep running it until the powder has worked through the system? Any other helpful suggestions anyone? :help:

Not an expert, but I'd fill the salt dispenser with warm water, swirling it around to try and dissolve as much as possible. You can fill over the top of the salt well and then the first stage of the program usually drains out the machine anyway. Repeat until it's gone.
Wear gloves!

I don't put salt in mine, I didn't think you needed to anymore with the modern detergents ?

I'd just run the machine until it all washes away, a bit of a waste of water but......

I'd second hotphil's suggestion of manually dislodging and removing as much of the stuff as possible then running the machine til it's clear- but be aware that it is corrosive in high concentrations so gloves are a must. It might also be handy to interrupt the machine in the middle of a hot cycle a few times to allow the hot water to sit in all the pipes and dissolve any remaining bits of detergent there.

The other thing that you'll need to do afterwards is to clean the inside of the machine very thoroughly and use one of those special pots of dishwasher cleaner- it will remove the resulting sticky gunk that will be in every pipe and crevice of your dishwasher.

Can you tell that I've had to do exactly the same thing for my parents when my father couldn't work out what went in where?

hehe, sounds like something I'd do!

Thanks for the advice everyone. I shall now launch a dishwasher cleaning campaign. And I'm glad I'm not the only one who's ever done anything like this!