---
title: "Dishes Come Out Wet: What a Bertazzoni Dishwasher Is Actually Doing"
description: "Why is my dishwasher not drying my dishes: condensation drying explained, why rinse aid is not optional, and the code that is real."
url: "https://bertazzonimiami.support/blog/why-is-my-dishwasher-not-drying-my-dishes/"
date_modified: "2026-08-27"
Category: "Common Problems"
---


# Dishes Come Out Wet: What a Bertazzoni Dishwasher Is Actually Doing

## Why is my dishwasher not drying my dishes? Because of how it dries

There is no fan blowing hot air through the tub. There has not been on machines like this for a long time.

These dishwashers dry by **condensation**. The final rinse is heated, so the load comes out of it hot. The stainless tub is cooler than the load. Water evaporates off the dishes, meets the cooler tub wall, condenses there and runs away down the drain.

It is quiet, it uses very little energy, and it depends completely on two conditions being met.

## Condition one: water has to leave as a sheet

This is what rinse aid does, and it is why the maker names it first when asked about wet dishes.

Without rinse aid, water sits on a plate as **beads**. A bead has a small surface area for its volume, so it evaporates slowly, and whatever is left behind dries as a spot. With rinse aid, the surface tension drops and the same water spreads into a **sheet** — far more surface area, far faster evaporation, and no spots.

On South Florida water this matters more than it does in most places. Hard water fights you on both counts.

All-in-one tablets do include some rinse aid, at a fixed dose. On hard water that dose is frequently not enough. **Fill the separate reservoir anyway.**

## Condition two: the load has to be hotter than the tub

Which brings us to the complaint people find hardest to believe.

**Plastic comes out damp on a machine that is working perfectly.** It is not a problem and no repair will change it. Plastic has almost no thermal mass, so it drops to tub temperature within seconds of the rinse ending and stops evaporating anything. China and glass hold heat and go on drying themselves for twenty minutes.

If your china is dry and your storage boxes are wet, **your dishwasher is fine.**

## The three free things to try

**Use the Extra Dry option.** The maker recommends it alongside rinse aid, and it lengthens and heats the final rinse.

**Crack the door open at the end.** Ten minutes is enough to let the last of the moisture out as steam. It also prevents the smell that develops in a closed damp tub — the maker separately recommends leaving the door ajar when the machine is not in use for exactly that reason.

**Load so water can escape.** Cups and bowls angled rather than flat, nothing nested, tall items where they do not shield everything behind them. Water pooled in an upturned base was never going to evaporate.

## When it is actually a problem

These are the machines in this line that publish codes, which makes this easier than it is on the rest of the kitchen.

**F8 — heater error.** The element or its circuit. Drying and washing both suffer.

**F6 — failed heater sensor.** The machine cannot read its own water temperature, so it either does not heat or does not stop.

**F2 — will not discharge water.** Water that stays in the tub gets re-evaporated onto everything above it. Wet dishes are a side effect; the drain is the cause.

Write the code down before clearing it. On these machines it is a genuine diagnosis rather than a hint.

## What to have ready if you do call

Whether the china is dry and only plastic is wet — that answer alone may end the call. Whether there is a code. Whether the rinse aid reservoir is full and what the dosing is set to. And whether anything changed the week it started.

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