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).
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.