Hacker News Reader

Comment by toper-centage | Hacker News Reader

They are for sure more water efficient. But I wonder how long do you need to use a dish washer to compensate the energy expenditure of producing the machine.

View on HN

Dishwashers get old and they have their own problems. There are machines that use less water. But manually people are capable of reducing the amount of water that we use to clean the dishes.

I can clean my dishes in 10litres of water. On the other hand dishwashers on an average requires 12-20 litres of water. The tip is do not use running tap water.

> I can clean my dishes in 10litres of water. On the other hand dishwashers on an average requires 12-20 litres of water. The tip is do not use running tap water.

What's the correct technique to ensure the dishes end up being clean, and not just thoroughly immersed in a bacterial growth medium that's made of water and dissolved food? Or am I being too paranoid about sanitation here?

Assuming you rinse them off and you have a reasonably large amount of cutlery, I'd say you are definitely too paranoid about this specific thing. Your entire kitchen is a bacterial growth medium - just leaving things out means they get covered in bacteria. Those bacteria will grow and this is fine - the most efficient use of your thoughts is fixing the really large offenders, one of which is: Do you properly wash your hands (most people do not, or at all)?

Wash them quickly. Bacteria growth is not significant on the order of minutes.

It's not the growth during washing I'm worried about, but that not rinsing them will leave them covered in a growth medium that will significantly accelerate their growth over the next hours or days.

I am pretty sure that the amount of bacteria will be lesser than what we carry.

But yeah at times I have the same thing running on my head.

I was able to reduce my water bills by almost 30% just by manually cleaning the utensils and reducing the washing machine usage.

Interesting point, and one I hadn't considered. In our case, the house (rented) came with a dishwasher, so it makes sense to use it either way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com