Contemporary cleaning appliances, such as dishwashers or clothes washers, are a common convenience in many homes. A user simply loads the cleaning appliance with laundry to be treated into a treating chamber, along with an optional supply of a treating chemistry, such as detergents, bleach, enzymes, and anti-spotting agents and selects and initiates a cleaning cycle that may be subsequently automatically carried out by the cleaning appliance. An example of a typical cleaning cycle includes the steps of washing the laundry with heated liquid and optional treating chemistry and rinsing the laundry with heated liquid.
Cleaning appliances may be provided with a dispenser for automatically dispensing one or more treating chemistries during a cleaning cycle. There are generally two types of treating chemistry dispensing systems found in the cleaning appliances: single use dispensing systems and bulk dispensing systems. The single use dispensing system is by far the most common type and typically has one or more dispensing cups that may be filled with only enough treating chemistry, i.e. a “charge” or “dose”, for a single cleaning cycle. Water is then flushed through the cup to dispense the treating chemistry. A user must fill these single use dispensing systems with treating chemistry prior to each cleaning cycle of the cleaning appliance, which may be a tedious task that many users would prefer not to perform. Users have also been known to forget to fill the cup, fill the cup with the wrong treating chemistry, or to fill the cup with the wrong amount of treating chemistry.
The bulk dispensing systems, while known, are not very common. The bulk dispensing systems hold multiple charges of treating chemistries. Some systems are capable of controlling and varying the amount of treating chemistry. These systems are more convenient to the user in the sense that the user only has to remember to fill them once over several cycles of operation. However, they are less convenient in that if the user has a non-standard wash load that requires a special treating chemistry, the bulk dispensing system may be loaded with the wrong treating chemistry.
Only a few cleaning appliances have both single use and bulk dispensing systems. The two systems are functionally redundant and add cost to the cleaning appliance. Further, each system tends to have water supply systems that are incompatible because of the different manner in which the systems dispense the treating chemistry.