---
title: "The Asko Dishwasher Setting Almost Nobody Changes"
description: "Asko dishwasher cleaning depends on two controls: salt in the reservoir and a hardness number set for this water. Most machines are still on the factory figure."
url: "https://askomiami.support/blog/asko-dishwasher-water-hardness-setting/"
date_modified: "2026-09-13"
Category: "Maintenance & Prevention"
---


# The Asko Dishwasher Setting Almost Nobody Changes

There is a softener inside your dishwasher. It has two controls and most people have used one of them.

## Where the salt goes

Slide the bottom basket clear. Set into the tub floor, generally beside the filter, is a screw cap — occasionally with a small dial next to it. Behind it is the salt reservoir, feeding a resin bed that trades the calcium and magnesium out of the supply for sodium before any of it reaches a plate.

It is not the rinse aid. Rinse aid lives in a small door on the inside of the dishwasher door and does a completely different job.

Use coarse dishwasher salt. Fill it until it is full, expect to spill a little water doing it, and wipe the tub floor afterwards.

## The number that decides whether the salt matters

Somewhere in the settings menu is a water hardness setting. It is a single number, and on almost every machine we open it is still the one the appliance shipped with.

That number decides how often the resin bed is recharged from the brine, and it decides when the low-salt reminder appears. Set for softer water than you actually have, the machine recharges too rarely and the reminder comes too late — and the softener quietly does a fraction of its job while every indicator says all is well.

Get the figure from your utility's water quality report, or from a test strip. Set it once.

## What goes wrong when it is left alone

Nothing, for about a year. Then scale begins to form on the heating element, in the smallest spray jets, and on the tub surfaces. The jets close from the smallest upward, so the machine keeps washing but reaches less of the load. There is no error code for any of it, because nothing has failed.

By the time somebody notices that the top basket comes out gritty, the arms need clearing with a pin and the machine needs a cleaning cycle — none of which would have been necessary.

## Once or twice a year

Run a dishwasher cleaner through an empty hot program. On this water it is worth doing and it costs less than a visit. It will not open jets that have already limed shut, which is why the arms come off first if performance has already dropped.

## Why this is on the maintenance list and not the repair list

Because there is nothing to repair. A dishwasher that has been fed the right hardness number and kept in salt for eight years is a dishwasher that still cleans, and the whole cost of that is one setting and a bag of salt a year.

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