The hardest working member of the home at Christmas isn't the person cooking the turkey, or baking dessert, or decorating the house, or navigating all the awkward and tricky conversations around family.
No, it might well be the dishwasher.
With many dishes to be washed in the coming weeks, home care expert Laura De Barra joined Oliver Callan on RTÉ Radio 1 to talk about how to protect your appliances to avoid emergencies over Christmas.
"The thing that you can do to prevent a call out is get to know the things that go wrong", she said about dishwashers. Start preparing for Christmas by cleaning your filter, which will get clogged.
De Barra cleans hers weekly.
Next, she suggested doing a deep clean on the dishwasher just before Christmas kicks off. She runs the dishwasher empty on 90 degrees with a cup of vinegar sitting on the bottom basket. "It'll just clean the parts you see and don't see", she said.
What will potentially cause problems, she said, is overloading your dishwasher, so resist the temptation to toss all of your plates, glasses, cutlery and baking dishes in there at once. This will clog your dishwasher's spray arms.
Another hazard is putting in larger serving plates or baking dishes that might prevent the spray arms from spinning, so De Barra suggests giving them a spin before turning on the dishwasher to make sure everything fits in there safely.
As much as you might be salting your turkey and vegetables this Christmas, make sure you've topped up the salt in your dishwasher too.
"You have a reservoir that has water in it already, and that's the water that comes into the drum when you're doing a wash. You want that water to be soft to make the detergent work in the first place, so it's that you're softening the water before the cleaning starts", De Barra explained.
If you have a lot of glassware that needs washing, De Barra said that a rinse aid can help by speeding up the drying time, but she's not the biggest fan of them overall. A cup of distilled white vinegar will do the same, she said.
Another appliance we need to protect at this time of year is the washing machine, with endless new clothes to be washed and festive outfits freshened up. Knitwear and looser weaves of fabric will shed a lot of fibres, De Barra explained, so we need to clean the filters in our washing machines too.
"If you do get that dreaded alert on your washing machine where it says that it can't drain, the first thing you're going to do is check your filter."
To keep your fridge tipping away over Christmas, De Barra said to avoid overloading it. If you have changed the temperature of your fridge over the Christmas period.
She explained that it "takes days for your fridge to get accustomed to that temperature, so you are better off making sure that you are letting enough cool air circulate between items instead of cranking it up or down, and then it's only in a few days' time it'll get the benefit once you've emptied the fridge".
If you're filling the fridge up, she added, you will get more water running down the back, which may clog the drain.
For more tips on maintaining your appliances, listen back to the full interview above.
