We had a dishwasher with auto-dispense where you pour the whole bottle of detergent into a reservoir and it would automatically dispense what was needed.
Well one day it was getting low I poured a new bottle in and all the dishes weren't getting washed. I called the detergent company to report a defective bottle, but turns out there was some sort of formula change due to a new regulation. Apparently mixing the two together in the auto-dispenser causes them to harden and clog the dispenser. So I tried just pouring it into the manual dispenser, slightly better but the dishes weren't really clean. I called my dishwasher repairman who just told me to buy Finish tabs and we would be fine.
My mother called me weeks later saying that six of her tenants complained that their dishwasher was broken and she had already replaced one (two of the dishwashers were less than two years old). I told her to just gift them all a tub of tabs from Costco which worked.
This happened to me in the car when adding a new kind of windshield wiper fluid over the old one. It did not clog the pipes, but made the resulting fluid very slimy, and it could not be wiped out by the wiper blades. The result was that the windshield became translucent and very hard to see through. When it stayed longer on the windshield, it frosted like ice, making it even harder to see through. I had to stop at a service station and drain all that fluid out, then fill the washer fluid tank with water to clean everything.
The new fluid by itself was fine, it was just the combination of the two that created a reaction.
Different brands use different formulations, apparently the brand that the dealership puts in at BMW/MINI doesn't play nicely with some of the brands from supermarkers.
More of an issue for newer cars though, I will give you that.
Well one day it was getting low I poured a new bottle in and all the dishes weren't getting washed. I called the detergent company to report a defective bottle, but turns out there was some sort of formula change due to a new regulation. Apparently mixing the two together in the auto-dispenser causes them to harden and clog the dispenser. So I tried just pouring it into the manual dispenser, slightly better but the dishes weren't really clean. I called my dishwasher repairman who just told me to buy Finish tabs and we would be fine.
My mother called me weeks later saying that six of her tenants complained that their dishwasher was broken and she had already replaced one (two of the dishwashers were less than two years old). I told her to just gift them all a tub of tabs from Costco which worked.