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Comment by khazhoux | Hacker News Reader

Wow, author runs dishwasher twice a day, sometimes three times a day on weekend. That's insane. Life-hack: reuse dishes and glasses when possible throughout the day. Wipe off crumbs after breakfast and lunch and set the plates aside. Don't freak out if there's a little left-over grease smear on the dish or dried up fruit-water in the bowl from three hours ago, it won't kill you. If the dish is actually in gross shape (caked on cheese or whatever) then fine, throw it in dishwasher and grab a new one.

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Four humans, all home all day long. We cook.

Minimum one dishwasher run daily, maximum 3, average is about 2.

If the sink isn't clear, I can't refill the water tank for the chiller. If I don't refill the water tank, people don't drink enough water.

Running the dishwasher is cheaper than medical bills.

You may want to consider a simple detachable hose you can connect to the faucet to fill up something external when the sink is full. I use such a thing for filling a bucket of water that can't actually fit in the sink. You will find it in your local hardware store.

> If I don't refill the water tank, people don't drink enough water

Huh? What's wrong with water from the tap?

Depends where you live. Where I live now, I filter all my drinking water. Across town where I grew up, the tap water tastes so good you could bottle and sell it. Both places have safe water; it's just a question of how it tastes, and that's highly variable.

Not everywhere has perfectly clean tap water. See https://www.today.com/news/family-discovers-their-tap-water-...

> If your water starts fizzing, that could be a red flag.

You don't say.

It's clean and tasty -- but it isn't cold. I can convince my family to drink water when it's cold. So I have a chiller that I refill from tap water, and everyone drinks water, and all is good.

Five humans, all home most of the day. We cook a lot. Minimum one dishwasher run daily, maximum 3, average is about 2.

And all of the pans, special cooking / prepping utensilien are done by hand.

You actually think you're going to get sick if you don't run the dishwasher multiple times a day? How do people become this detached from reality?

I grew up in a family of seven and we didn't even have a dishwasher. Believe it or not, we're all still alive.

I read it as "the family will become dehydrated and need to go to the ER if there's not water in the chiller, because straight from the tap is UNACCEPTABLE"

Correct. As it happens, my wife's side of the family is prone to kidney stones, and also has an incredibly high pain threshold.

This raised my eyebrow too, but then I saw that she has 6-8 people in her house and it makes sense. With 2-3 people we usually wash about 2 out of 3 days, I can see if you have that many people running twice a day.

Kids.

When we doubled the size of our household, we quadrupled the volume of dishes and laundry.

We switched to cloth diapers and need to do a load every day or 2.

Hopefully this is better for the environment than disposable.

For decades, I used the dishwasher exclusively to wash my dishes, but once the pandemic began, I started washing my dishes by hand and have been doing so ever since.

I used to hate washing dishes by hand, because I found touching the leftover food and grease to be really gross, but since the pandemic I started using nitrile gloves when washing dishes by hand, and then since the leftover food was no longer touching my skin I didn't find it gross any longer.

In fact, I was surprised to find that washing dishes became sort of a meditative experience for me, when I took a break from whatever I was involved in in my day-to-day life, and for 10 minutes or so focused on just doing the dishes. So I almost started to enjoy washing dishes by hand, and only rarely run my dishwasher any more. Really, the only time I run the dishwasher now is when I'm too exhausted to do the dishes by hand, instead of every single time.

It's also nice not to have to wait for hours for the dishes to be washed and dried, and not to waste so much electricity to just do a handful of dishes.

Dishwashers are usually much more water efficient than hand washing.

Sure, if you run the tap the entire time that you're hand-washing. But you can just fill the sink with water, plug it and wash many dishes with that water. I once worked with a guy who lived in a cabin without running water for most of his life. Needless to say, he was very efficient at hand washing dishes with very little water.

I did some quick calculations out of interest.

It seems our sink fits about 25 liters of water. Let's say half of that volume is taken by dishes, so 12.5 liters. You need a second sink for rinsing unless you run the tap (which would be worse), so that's another 12.5 liters.

From experience, you need to change the cleaning side's water at least once if you have as many dishes as a dishwasher would fit. So the total would be 37.5 liters.

Now I checked on Bosch's website for a standard 60 cm size dishwasher and the water usage ranges from 9.5 liters (eco program) to 18 liters (most intensive/quick program). So the dishwasher wins by some margin.

Personally I don't rinse most dishes before putting them in the dishwasher, mostly just remove any solid bits of food with a knife or similar. So I'm inclined to believe that in my usage the dishwasher is much more efficient.

How does it balance out when electricity use is taken into account? Saving water might be better in water-poor locations, but saving electricity might be better in high-electric-rate locations. In water-poor locations, it might be more advantageous to use the gray water from hand washing for other uses, such as watering the lawn or flushing the toilet.

Most of the electricity usage is due to the drying cycle of the dishwasher. If you want to be super efficient, set your dishwasher to skip the drying cycle and either prop the door so that the dishes can drip dry, or hand dry the dishes coming out of the dishwasher.

Generally, when hand washing dishes, hot water is used. Typically ~5-10 times more water is required when hand washing, which results in more water needing to be heated (and is less energy efficient as a result).

> Generally, when hand washing dishes, hot water is used. Typically ~5-10 times more water is required when hand washing

Ah, is that so? I've not had a hand washing experience where hot water was used, I thought everyone used cold water. Also, I'm surprised at the efficiency of the dishwasher. Do people leave the faucet running while they do dishes? What I do and typically see is an initial rinse, then water is off while scrubbing, then a rinse to remove the soap. I personally direct the water stream so that the same water passes over other dishes while I rinse the one in my hand, thus reducing the amount of rinsing needed for subsequent dishes.

...if you only wash a full load and your hand washing is extremely hot water with the faucet at max flow.

Keep in mind though, that dishwashers use less water than washing by hand.

Keep in mind that marketing departments will pick and choose statistics that make their product look attractive. Dishwashers use more power and the water savings only apply if people don't rinse the dishes first, which many do.

That depends on the dishwasher and the dish washer, though.

There is some meditation that goes along the lines of:

How do you know that you actually enjoy your tea if you don't enjoy washing the bowl?

It would be nice if somebody could point out a source for that idea.

Sounds like something Uncle Iroh would say, but I can't find the quote.

Not to burst your soap-sud bubble, but modern dishwashers use less water than washing by hand[1], and by extension less electricity (purifying water is high-electricity usage, moving it around within your dishwasher is not)

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/11/24/564055953/to...

I haven't measured my water usage, but 5 GALLONS for a standard dishwasher, and 3.5 for a compact?

I feel like if I tried, I could use less water than that... I already don't run the tap while washing. I wet my sponge and scrub away. I only use 30-50mL of water at a time if my sponge gets dry, and my main water usage comes from rinsing.

If you tried. It takes active effort to use less than that. The typical sink fills with more than that, and even if you fill it half way, you use more than the rest rinsing.

Since it's HN: Bill Gates has mentioned he likes washing dishes. I can't stand it myself.

Steve Jobs also preferred hand-washing his dishes.

For 6-8 people in a household twice a day is unreasonably frequent. Most of those people are probably kids so it's not like you're racking up tons of wine glasses. So, while it's nice to use an environmentally friendly detergent - the most environmentally friendly thing you can do is just reuse dishes when possible - did you eat a bagel on that plate? Give it a rinse and use it again!

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