Emptying the dishwasher with systems theory
two-wrongs.com
two-wrongs.com
When you empty the clean dishwasher, immediately fill and close the soap dispenser. As long as you do that, you now have a reliable indicator for everyone of clean (open) or dirty (closed).
In hindsight, it is probably the most productive single dollar I've ever spent.
So many people in an office open the clean machine, remove one mug, and then close it again.
Should the machine now show dirty or clean?
[1] No readonable person could possibly consider begin to fill it before it’s completely empty, right?
The heat of the items gives a clue, as does the number of clean looking items, but there are ways to break that system.
I guess now I will.
I think the only problem would be if someone removes the last clean item and adds a heavier dirty item at the same time.
How would a machine even detect such situation?
What I think happens is:
Someone puts a number of items in the dishwasher, some of which wasn't used at all, they came back on a trolley from a meeting.
Next person comes, checks two cups and think it is clean and than put everything in the cupboard.
This is my system for my work apartment. My wife rejects it at home, for reasons I don't understand well enough to relay. I go along, I want to stay married.
On that theme, why is this post about emptying a dishwasher? The crucial issue in most good marriages is how to load the dishwasher. Emptying is pretty obvious.
Sometimes we cite from [0] to each other and laugh...
I won't link anything, but I'll let you look it up yourself.
I think a lot of what that video latches on to is typically how our generation, and the generations before us have treated "dealing with problems". I think you'll find younger people will look at this video and go, "what the fuck".
Ironically, I recently got into a merge sort discussion with her regarding how to load utensils. Sorting on load reduced unload time, she got it but didn’t care for the detour in time complexity. She just gave me a snide look at that part.
We use a bucket sort. My wife grudgingly conceded it was faster and doesn't hate doing the dishes as much as she used to (but I still do them most frequently).
Or maybe it’s just mine. Our dishwasher is shut and turned off at all times, I’m dreading the day our toddler has the finger strength to push the power button on.
The dishes found in the dishwasher will always be clean.
Dish soap and cycles are cheap. Storing dirty dishes in the dishwasher is madness. It's literally a machine with a button that makes them clean.
I've run my full size dishwasher with a single cup, single bowl, and single spoon in it. More than once.
It's a machine. It's okay to use it.
Which is why I, as a single household, don’t use mine.
And even if you do have a period between cooking where it does sit for a few days running a dishwasher even a quarter full uses less water, power and soap than washing by hand. So doing that occasionally if it is starting to smell isn't an issue.
Dish washers didn't seem worth it for two people in my opinion, either the dishes built up inside it and food dries on them to the point where the dishwasher didn't clean them properly, or I ran the washer with hardly anything inside it and felt like I wasted a lot of soap and water. Maybe it was simply too big of a dishwasher and that was part of the problem.
If you wash with hot water, they frequently use less energy than handwashing, too, as they use approximately an order of magnitude less water.
Dish soap and water are not free, even if you consider them cheap. I usually run my full dish washer once or twice a week. A regular container of dish washer pods has a little more than 60 pods and cost $20. Ignoring the water cost and assuming I always wash it twice a week I'm spending at most $40 dollars per year on dish washing pods, usually less.
If I follow your advice to the letter I'm running the machine three times a day, everyday so I'm spending $30 a month or $360 a year. Even once a day it's still $120. And ignoring the water cost.
All to not have to unload the dish washer when it's clean or spend an extra 15 seconds checking when lazy? Total waste of money.
Our system is: an open dishwasher can accept new dirty dishes.
So if the dishwasher is closed, it's either cleaning (put dirty dishes on the counter) or it's done cleaning. And when you open the closed dishwasher you immediately must transfer all clean dishes to the cabinets. And then it's able to accept new dirty dishes.
Starting the dishwasher is a decision we generally take together (and if unilaterally decided, we do tell the others that we programmed it for the night) and in the morning we all know the dishes are clean, and we empty the dishwasher (or hear it being emptied).
But more importantly, if the dishwasher is closed, full and not on (or blinking to indicate programmed for the night) then it has to be clean. If it's partially full then it has to be dirty? unless someone is emptying it right now which you would certainly notice.
There is one clean dishwasher and one dirty dishwasher. You take plates from the clean dishwasher, use them, and put them in the dirty dishwasher. Once the clean dishwasher is empty, the dirty dishwasher is run, and then becomes the clean dishwasher, and the empty one now becomes the dirty dishwasher.
There are analogous situations in system design as well.
Building on how I think I'd treat them is closer to a ringbuffer of workers. Would look a lot like the front/back idea in slow use, but I could easily see bursting through to where I have both running at once. And the destination of dishes out is still to the cabinets, for many other reasons.
There will always be some items that are left in the 'clean' dishwasher - eg. that lemon squeezer you only use once a month.
Also, with two dishwashers, thats a lot of cutlery/crockery in one or other dishwasher. Sometimes the cupboard is empty. Now every time you want an item, you need to check the cupboard and the dishwasher.
You might say, why have a cupboard, simply only store your plates in the dishwasher. But sometimes I have stuff that needs washing but I haven't yet used up all the clean plates... So I need somewhere to empty them out to.
every cupboard in your house is a dishwasher. The dishwashers are smart, and if they have been opened, they know there might now be something dirty in them, so they will wash overnight that night. It's wasteful of energy because you'll be washing 99 clean plates and one dirty plate, but I think it would lead to a good user experience.
For commercial customers, absolutely. I first came across services like this a long time ago in Hong Kong[1] but it's pretty widespread in mainland China, Taiwan, and parts of SEA[2] because local restaurants tend to be quite small. Sometimes you can tell because you'll get your dishes as sets in sealed plastic[3] wrappers.
1. https://www.ezwash.com.hk/en/services/
2. I've never personally seen it in Japan or South Korea, but I'm sure it exists.
3. https://countryandahalf.com/chinese-dining-etiquette/ (see the second pic in this article)
Instead of every cabinet being its own dishwasher, you could have a wall-mounted dishwasher that automatically distributes clean dishes back to the cabinets.
Maybe this will be my retired-and-bored passion project later in life.
Not that I'd ever do something like that.
How are people incapable of identifying a finished cycle?
Why would dishes pile up on top unless the dishwasher is actually running?
There's zero mistaking clean from dirty.
(I'll also run a special machine cleaner every few months; empty machine with a special detergent. Machine is great when run like this.)
- always have sufficient time and motivation to empty it immediately when you see that the programme has finished, and
- always have sufficient time and motivation to put dirty things in it as soon as you have used them.
I'm jealous.
Also: https://www.itv.com/news/granada/2022-08-17/ryan-giggs-calle...
Pop-quiz hot-shot. Are the dishes clean or dirty?
You pick the first glass. Looks clean. You pick a bowl for you cereal an spot some grime at the bottom. The spoon is questionable..water spots?
Answer: Rewash your glass, spoon and bowl and let somebody else handle this.
I've been wondering why dishwasher makers don't include a "clean indicator" with a reset button. Automatically set the "green LED means clean" light when a wash cycle completes, pushing the light turns it off, make it obvious enough and you'll likely get 99% compliance.
Wouldn’t that depend on the difference between arrival rate and fill rate?
I’ve specifically wondered about how sunk cost fallacy plays into these systems.
Say you believe that the value of college is only realized once you have a degree. (Oversimplified of course, on purpose.)
Purists of rationality might say that it is sunk cost fallacy to believe that you should finish the last class, since you’ve come this far (the sunk cost part).
But as this article states, the condition change is the meaningful bit; at what granularity should we measure something like sunk cost?
In other words, it’s not irrational to take a final course just to get the credit and finish the degree, even if the course seems useless, because it is a necessary step for the higher level condition change.
Because a) I had reached my self-imposed deadline, b) I would have to do another full year of college for just those 2 classes[1], c) I was already having to turn away freelancing clients to make time for school, d) you don’t go into debt for college in Europe
[1] The classes were in different semesters with a mandatory weekly tutorial/lab presence, which doesn’t transfer across years
I always thought it would be cool to have a dishwasher that doubled as cabinets.* It could have a slot for dirty dishes and clean dishes could be summoned at any time using a touchscreen. The machine would clean the dishes when necessary and without requiring further intervention (beyond keeping the soap hopper full).
If you want to steal this idea for your startup be my guest. You can even sell subscriptions to seasonally-appropriate compatible dishware.
* Edit: I see this exact idea is already posted as a comment downthread, so apologies for retreading.
Your spouse asked you to empty the dishwasher/clean the kitchen for the n-th time and so as a procrastination/excuse you started bikeshedding strategies.
Maybe start thinking about the world you leave behind for your kids.
Along those lines the most recent Goldratt / Theory of Constraints book “Rules of Flow” has a chapter on Thanksgiving dinner preparation, similar to the original ‘Herbie’s Scout Hike’ that is pretty good.
https://fredlybrand.com/2023/03/06/goldratts-rules-of-flow-c...
It either shows who thinks about or prefers to do the work up front in loading the dishwasher well to be be able to unload it the quickest.
Also helps folks identify if they hate loading or unloading a dishwasher more.
Imagining the parallels to tech roles is left here open for your comments.