Dishing up mosquito larvae

October 11, 2008 8:16 AM

Can anyone recommend a dish rack/water catcher combo that will drain into the sink?

The water catching thing beneath our dish strainer by the sink fills slowly with water as dishes above shed water, and what I have to assume are teeny food particles slowly accumulate to create a swampy science experiment of stagnant water and mildew or mold. This happens over the course of a day or two, we clean it, it accumulates again.

It's a pain to clean it because we rarely fully empty the clean dishes from the dish strainer itself. We have a new baby and I for one am quite lazy about that sort of thing and would just as soon grab a clean coffee cup from the dish strainer as from the cupboard. So, the answer is not 'empty the dish rack fully and clean the water-catcher below it every day', nor is the answer 'clean your dishes more fully'. (we're doing a reasonably good job of cleaning our dishes.) I think it's just that teensy food particles in a wet environment get gross quickly (we're talking a few tablespoons to half a cup of water total.)

The problem seems to be that the rubber thing that's supposed to catch the water and drain it into the sink buckles up, so the lip that hangs into the sink and is supposed to efficiently drain the water away actually doesn't do that. The water just sits there.

I think this is our third attempt at solving this problem--we keep buying products that are supposed to drain the water away but none of them actually do.

Preferably not a plastic monstrosity that's going to undermine the otherwise pretty nice look of our kitchen.

posted by A Terrible Llama to home & garden (16 comments total)

Do you have a divided sink? They sell in-sink wire dish racks. They're going to hold less than the counter monstrosity, but there's no ookie buildup. Depending on how many dishes you go through a day, this may or may not work for you.
posted by phunniemee at 8:46 AM on October 11, 2008

Ikea sells a dish rack which mounts on the wall above the sink. I guess this is a pretty common thing in Europe. We've got one in our kitchen, and it works great. Here's a picture.
posted by wyzewoman at 9:03 AM on October 11, 2008

Ikea's got this cheapie dish drainer which is teeny but wall mounts so it can hang over your sink. You might also want to try gently elevating the away-from-sink side of your drainer/watercatcher an inch or two. This won't be enough to make your dishes slide out but it will be good for keeping water moving in a sinkward direction. For me, I just hold all the dishes IN the drainer and tip the whole thing to get most of the water out when I'm done doing the dishes. The rest seems to dry okay but I definitely have this same problem.
posted by jessamyn at 9:05 AM on October 11, 2008

If you do not have a divided sink...I gave up on dish racks years ago. They do not work. I tried tilted ones, metal ones, plastic ones, you name it I tried it. The things I wash by hand place on towels to drain and yes they sit there a couple days before I put them up.
posted by bjgeiger at 9:05 AM on October 11, 2008

Prop up the tray with a piece of wood so it stays on an angle.
posted by pseudostrabismus at 9:14 AM on October 11, 2008

I'm glad to hear other people have this problem, because I was worried the first thing people were going to ask was why we live surrounded by scum and food particles, and if we're just dirty, dirty people.

The shelf thing is awesome and would be ideal in that it does away with the water catcher thing entirely, except that we have a window above the sink. I've tried the towel solution before, and we might have to go with it, but it does kind of create a look that the dishes are never totally done. Like, if they're in the strainer you could argue they belong there. If they're sitting on a bath towel, I think I'd feel them looking at me asking 'hey, is anyone going to put us away?' and I'm not sure I'm emotionally strong enough to resist putting them away, and that's not something I want to do every day. Or three times a day, which is more in line with how many times we do dishes.

We do have two sinks but we kick up too many dishes for that to work (we have different taste in food and frequently cook two dinners, so there are a lot of pots and pans.)

We can't prop it up to create a slope because due to the above it's a fairly precarious structure.
posted by A Terrible Llama at 9:28 AM on October 11, 2008

I bought a cookie sheet, and am going to cut the edge off one side, and coat it with something like polyurethane or spar varnish, so that all the water will run off and not stagnate on the bottom. I picked up a plain aluminum sheet, but a teflon one would have been better since it's already non-stick. On the bottom of one end I have some little rubber feet I plan on sticking so that it's sloped towards the sink.
posted by glip at 10:39 AM on October 11, 2008

We use this drying rack. It used to be available from Williams Sonoma, but sadly is not anymore. This looks similar, and you may be able to find something even better by searching around for "metal dish rack" and the like. Notice that the bottom is more like a cooling rack than it is like a tray. A clean dish towel goes underneath to catch drips and can be whisked away without disturbing the rack. It's a bit more trouble to put a fresh one underneath than to remove the old one -- but not much trouble, honestly, and the towel solution really works well. It looks tidy and un-junky, too.
posted by redfoxtail at 11:30 AM on October 11, 2008

Although I've got the rack in the second sink now, back in the one-sink apartment days, we used a rubbermaid product with a built in angle that worked well. This page looks like it has pretty much the thing (see "drain boards") and apparently also has some kind of antimicrobial quality built in these days.
posted by nanojath at 12:33 PM on October 11, 2008

We don't use a plastic drainer thing anymore. We set our dish rack on a thickish dish towel, which gets laundered every week. We've been doing that for years now, and it's always handled the normal amount of dish runoff, and it's dry by morning. And it doesn't look too bad, either.
posted by booth at 1:25 PM on October 11, 2008

We set our dish rack on a thickish dish towel, which gets laundered every week.

I've also used this method (I now have a dishwasher, glory hallelujah). Dries quickly, no icky buildup, easy to clean itself.
posted by tyrantkitty at 2:14 PM on October 11, 2008

I'm in the UK, but I have a Simple Human plastic drainer that I bought in Costco.

I know you mentioned not plastic, but its really well made and lets face it, anything covered in dishes isn't going to be fancy!

The base has feet so you can chose which direction to slant it in, and it has a movable spout so you can chose where it drains.

http://www.simplehuman.com/

Simple Human have a US website, and I'd definitely recommend them.
posted by chrispy108 at 3:11 PM on October 11, 2008

Ditto what chrispy just wrote. I found the one we have, and have to say, if put together correctly, works like a charm. Water just flows off the spout into the sink.

http://www.simplehuman.com/products/dishracks/wave-frame.html

Very clean looking too.
posted by WickedPissah at 6:20 PM on October 11, 2008

Excellent. Thanks you guys. I don't know why I didn't think of Simple Human--we got our kitchen garbage can from them and we had an exacting search for that too.

Thanks to all who responded. To those who are building a solution--we considered doing that too and probably would have if we couldn't find one--but here's a tip I wanted to try out: using doorstops as the mechanism to prop up the water basin (pre-built at a good angle.)
posted by A Terrible Llama at 6:09 AM on October 12, 2008

I got this Zojila drying rack a couple of years ago and it solves this problem perfectly. Not plastic, but wow, it's pricey now!
posted by yarrow at 11:48 AM on October 13, 2008

Working through a problem of this magnitude takes time.

The answer: tea towel under the dish strainer, dries quickly, washed weekly, no more mosquito larvae or disintegrating bits of cat food (kitty eats nearby).
posted by A Terrible Llama at 3:50 PM on June 26