We have yet another experiment – stainless steel vs lemon juice. This a highly unscientific experiment to test our dishwasher tech’s claim that lemon dishwasher detergents causes premature deterioration of your appliance. You can read about it here.
Most dishwasher detergents (particularly those with the lemon or orange scents) contain citric acid. The gist of the service technician’s theory was that lemon dish detergents should not be used because they container higher amounts of citric acid and in turn, causes the metallic parts to corrode earlier than intended.
So I wrote up a post debunking this theory. Afterwards, I put together this highly unscientific experiment to see what would happen.
Materials Used
I found a stainless steel screw, bought a bottle of lemon juice and glass jar.
I filled the jar up with our lemon juice, dropped in the screw and walked away.
1 hour later
No sign of corrosion.
1 day later
Screw was swirled around to stimulate corrosion.
3 days later.
Conclusion
As you can see, after rinsing off and allowing to air dry, the screw shows no signs of corrosion at all. I must admit that I am surprised by my findings, but one can conclude that citric acid is not as destructive to stainless steel as I was led to believe by the service technician that came to work on our dishwasher.
If I were to do this experiment again, looking for more accurate results, I would have more samples with controls. I would use a timed system of lemon juice soaking, air drying and water rinsing to further encourage corrosion, all with various grades of stainless steel. Perhaps it will make for a good experiment when PVC Guy.com gets a laboratory!
Check Wikipedia’s page on stainless steel for more information.
does this work with all screws
But what did the lemonade taste like?! Can I store it in stainless steel over night?
Never
This “highly unscientific” experiment doesn’t seem to apply to most cheaper stainless steel flatware, which is usually composed of metals such as chromium and nickel. My mom’s new flatware set, admittedly lower-end, was ruined by lemon-scented dishwasher detergent. When we checked the small print on the flatware box, it warned against using citrus-based detergents.
You are correct