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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

I did this for a while. It doesn't work as well as you imagine.

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.

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I have an improved idea...

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.

Sorry if this was meant as a joke, not surely systems engineering doesn't commute with use of 100x the necessary resources?

It's a great example of how pretty much everything we do is done with some kinds of constraints, even when we don't actively think about them.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/first-self-cleanin...

If you keep reasoning down this path you eventually arrive at DishOps, where you dispose of dirty dishes by hurling them out of a window, and provision new dishes automatically on demand, by ordering them from Amazon for same day delivery as part of spinning up each meal. From a systems design point of view it approaches maximum theoretical efficiency, with no stocks of 'dirty' dishes accumulating anywhere, or scheduling conflicts over when to run cleaning cycles; the same approach also scales up from a single snack to a multi-course banquet for several visiting diplomatic entourages.

I used paper plates and wooden spoons for over a year when I didn't have a dishwasher. I think I ultimately saved water and definitely saved a lot of time.

JIT cutlery and crockery.

You know what they say: treat your servingware as cutlery, not pets.

makes me wonder if dishwashing as a service has been tried. DWaaS. use your dishes, put them in a bin, on a schedule someone picks up that bin and leaves another with a weeks worth of clean dishes. i think it could work until the VC money dries up

> makes me wonder if dishwashing as a service has been tried

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)

Some Japanese kaitenzushi restaurants use these relatively simple automated dishwashers[1] for plates, and I’ve thought for years about ways you could design something similar for households with standardized dishware.

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.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAK5f_0kNSA

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