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Comment by deng | Hacker News Reader

Can't read TFA and archive is sending me into captcha hell.

BUT if this is about modern dishwasher taking 5h: yes, the last 2-3 hours are just drying the dishes in an energy efficient way. And it works perfectly fine for me and one cycle takes about half the electricity of my previous washer. Who cares how long a cycle takes, it usually runs over night anyway. This is the Eco program, and you can switch to an express program if you want a 2h cycle. If you have really dirty dishes (burnt stuff in a pot or whatever), you can enable extra hot water and even a high pressure zone where you can put the pot. It's a Siemens iQ300, BTW, but almost all dish washers I've seen now work this way. Is it really too much to ask people to skim the manual and figure out what these buttons do? Apparently so...

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On my machine (Miele) the door automatically opens on a hinge for the last 20 minutes of a normal program to let the dishes dry. I have no idea what the eco program does. Afaict it just seems to pauze at random during the cycles, doubling the program time. I never measured the agregate energy use, i doubt much savings can be made on water use as that is extremely low to begin with.

I always assumed they soaked the dishes a bit longer on an eco cycle.

This makes sense to me too. Letting stuff hydrate through soapy water contact or just steam will help de-cake a lot.

And cool “just loaded” porcelain can take a while to warm through, so caked food will release better when warmed up at the contact point.

The answer to your (and the headline's) question is:

Eco mode heats up less water, and to a lower temperature and then washes for longer to achieve the same outcome. The heating is the main power draw, compared with the pumping, so it saves energy even though it works for a longer time period.

Exactly. At least from my casual observation, most of the time, the machine does simply nothing. It let's the water soak the dishes, or for the last couple hours, it just lets the dishes dry from the remaining heat (and in the last hour opens the washer so that humidity does not condense again when the machine cools, whereas older machines needed to run a fan to remove it).

I actually prefer to just let the dishes air dry anyway because I've found they last longer.

I've wrestled a lot with the issue the article is mentioning the last few years. It's Goodhart's law applied to efficiency tests, where unrealistic standardized product tests get gamed in increasingly complex ways, and no one calls the tests on the unrecognized real-world problems being overlooked. Prerinseing, repeating cycles, mold problems, etc.

One of the most frustrating things for me is how everything has become more automatized. Laundry machines are often organized around preset clothing types, for example, rather than cycle settings, which makes it difficult to control your wash correctly.

> preset clothing types, for example, rather than cycle settings

My LG washing machine has a wifi connection and one of the advertised feature was the possibility to download a custom washing program set from the app.

I thought it kinda makes sense, because building a custom program involves many steps, timers and settings. A mobile UI would be better than the appliance's buttons.

Well, imagine my deception when I got to try the app and the custom programs is just a list of a dozen more niche presets. No customization whatsoever.

It's really like the machines we buy are no longer ours to control.

Seriously: at least if you buy a good machine, all this stuff should be and usually is covered in the manual. It tells you how to avoid mold (do a machine clean every month, for instance, there's even a dedicated button for this), if and when you should maybe rinse the dishes before putting them into the machine (usually not, because the machine does a pre-rinse and has a sensor to detect the degree of dirt in the water, but stuff like egg yolk you should rather rinse because once it is dried, it's just hard to get off), and so on. Same for laundry: a good manual will actually describe what each program does, and in what way you can modify it.

Yes, back in the day the machine would simply heat the water >60 degrees celcius and just heat the machine to oblivion to dry the dishes. Yes, that kills mold, but it's also stupid. At least here on HN, I would think that people would agree that doing things smarter is a good thing. Yes, it involves a little bit more work on your side, but at least here in Germany, where I pay 35ct per kWh, it actually saves real money.

So I stand by it: don't cheap out on these machines, and RTFM.

archive.is has some weird incompatibility with the 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver. Temporarily use some other one, and it will load fine.

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