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Comment by FooBarWidget | Hacker News Reader

Slow dishwasher is a huge pain.

When relatives visit and join dinner (and they do so often) I end up with more dishes than I can fit in the dishwasher.

I can wash the remaining dishes the next morning, but this wastes energy and water because the dishwasher is not full.

I can also "preventatively" turn on the dishes in the afternoon, to wash the breakfast and lunch dishes, so that it's completely empty for the dinner dishes. But this too wastes resources (not full, but better than the "wash remainders next morning" scenario), and I have to turn it on early enough in the afternoon so that it finishes before people start cooking (around 16.00).

It's a pain to have to wait for 3 hours. I would absolutely want a dishwasher that finishes in 1 hour.

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YMMV, but our Bosch dishwasher has 5 modes and one of them is "party" mode. When selected, the machine first preheats water for 30 minutes and then you can load it repeatedly, each load only takes 10 minutes to wash. It does have two drawbacks though. First, you have to use liquid detergent, as tablets do not dissolve fast enough. Second, it consumes a lot of power and water as opposed to the regular 3h+ setting. But it is handy if you ever need to wash a lot of stuff fast.

Sounds interesting. The water isn't metered where I live, so using more water doesn't matter. If it could be connected to the 70 C hot water outlet as well.. that would be even better.

Many brands offer a specific variant of their models that has a hot water inlet. You just have to ask for it. It's pretty efficient if you have hot water via solar.

I wonder what it is about dishwashers that need 3h in order to be efficient, when hand washing can accomplish the same task much faster for similar amount of resources as long as you don't wash under a continuously open faucet.

Quoted from their site: "With the longer wash-cycle, the water doesn't require heating up as much".

I believe it's because dishwashers are rated for efficiency when at their default settings. So it's no wonder that the default setting is the slowest. It's all done to conserve energy and water. Obviously, you don't have to use it, the machine has multiple programs in total, with varying temperatures and speeds (and also a "faster/eco" button that can further reduce the time needed to wash a load at the expense of more resources used. But I think you'd be hard pressed to wash the same amount of dishes with less or equal amount of water. They claim the machine uses "3.15 gallons (11.92 liters)" on average.

Also, you can just dump dirty dishes there during the day, then run the machine overnight and have clean and dry dishes in the morning without having to manually wash them. It's convenient.

The cleaning is done by pushing soapy water against your dishes with high momentum. If the water is already hot then reheating it doesn't use much energy so it's pushing the same water through again and again. The pump is not using much energy.

How does a faster dishwasher help here?

Also: you can't cook without the dishwasher running everytime before you cook?

It helps with the "wash in the morning" strategy. Right now I manually wash big pans because they don't fit in the dishwasher when there are also dishes. But I need those pans tomorrow morning as well. If the dishwasher finishes before I need to go to sleep then I can just put those pans in the dishwasher.

The "wash in the afternoon" strategy also becomes more viable. That way I don't have to turn on the dishwasher before 13.00 in order to have it finish before people start cooking. Relatives often visit unannounced, or maybe they change their minds around 16.00 and decide to join for dinner anyway, so I can't always plan for this.

A fast dishesher lets me "batch dishes" (maximize efficiency, save resources) without worry.

Cooking with the dishwasher running is a huge pain. Most of the utensils and chopping boards are in the dishwasher right when you need them for preparing a meal. And when you're done eating, the dishwasher still isn't done so your kitchen and dinner table are left dirty for an hour or two.

Well there are several ways to tackle that problem, but from that aside I would not buy a dishwasher for less than 5% of my use-cases, where it would be much to resource consuming in 95% of all others...

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