There are two types of dishwasher people
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1. Powdered detergent people who sprinkle some soap in for the prewash
2. Tab people who attest that they need to pre-rinse their dishes before they put them in the dishwasher
I've seen the technology connections video, continue to use pods, and continue not to pre-rinse the dishes
Other's results may vary, but I found my dishwasher would eventually get clogged with the TC approach, even though I clean the filter regularly and wasn't putting in dishes with absurd amounts of food still on them. Since I switched back to pods and prerinsing, the clogging went away. Maybe my dishwasher or the install has something goofy about it, but it was definitely a failed experiment for me. Although I still think the TC argument is a solid one in theory.
Almost everyone I know still does excessive rinsing in the sink first. I have never done this and it’s always been fine.
I learned some things from the TC videos, but it was more about refining things, it didn’t drastically change what I was already doing.
Then they mentioned the part about dishwashers having a "filter", and in that moment, my heart was instantly filled with shock, horror, anxiety, and finally, resignation.
I apparently live in a world where dishwashers have filters.
I'm afraid to look, but I'm pretty sure mine probably does as well, in fact I think I've seen it with my own eyes, yet somehow it never registered. Oh no.
But that thing had a powerful masticator. It would slurry up almost any foods. There was a very coarse filter about half the diameter of the drain hose but outside of that there was never anything left in the pan.
It would also monitor the turbidity to determine if it needed to flush the current pan water and add fresh water. It had a soap dispenser so it could re-add soap if needed. That thing was an incredible dishwasher. I still miss it.
This is because the sanitizing stations are not ready for this kind of mash - they expect cleaner water + oil + larger particles. What they get instead is a substance that kills the bacteria in charge of the sanitization.
That's because heating water from the 120 volt circuit that the dishwasher runs on is slow. (At least in North America, 240 volt countries might not have this issue.)
Central America, parts of South America, Japan, and Taiwan are also ~110 volt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_electricity_by_country#/...
The electric grid is three phase; 60 or 50 hz depending on where you are in the world. The voltage varies considerably, long distance transmission is in the kilovolts, or higher.
"split-phase 240V" happens at the transformer near your house, in North America. I don't know as much about the rest of the world, but I've always understood it to be ~440v split phase because it allows longer wires between the transformer and the house.
> "split-phase 240V" happens at the transformer near your house, in North America. I don't know as much about the rest of the world, but I've always understood it to be ~440v split phase because it allows longer wires between the transformer and the house.
Where I live, we have three phase 480/277V for commercial. I believe that is standard in North America, but I'm not really sure.
I had an instant 195 F (90.5 C) faucet in my previous kitchen which worked well for the rare times I made tea. Worked fine with a 120V circuit.
It's really more that historically Americans have been fine with drip style coffee makers instead of drinking pour overs or tea.
We started using the dishwasher on day 1 with TC's pre-heated water tip and have yet to have a single problem with the dishwasher.
My dishwasher's "normal" cycle is 3 hours, but it has a quick cycle that runs in an hour and does about as good of a job with marginally higher water and energy use. We mostly use the quick cycle.
(I'll preface this with: If your dishes are coming out clean and you're happy with them, then keep on keeping on. The reason there's a lot of discussion around this is because there are a lot of people who _aren't_ getting clean dishes out of their dishwasher.)
If you listen to your dishwasher's cycles, you'll probably hear it do a relatively short initial rinse to get off the bulk of the gunk, then the main wash, then another rinse. (Maybe multiple washes/rinses, but that's the general pattern.)
The idea is to make that first rinse most effective. Anything that can be taken off in the pre-wash cycle is something that won't be washed off in the main wash and cycled over the dishes over and over.
As people normally use their dishwasher, that cycle is being done with cold to lukewarm water and no soap. Most people wouldn't see a oily plate with dried-on sauce on it and think to clean it by spraying it in the sink with cold water until it were clean. But that's what the dishwasher's doing to their dishes.
Hence the suggestion of running the hot water tap first. It's a very easy thing to do to ensure the dishwasher's using hot water in that initial rinse and everyone generally accepts that hot water's going to dissolve and rinse off the food and oils better.
Another very easy improvement is adding a bit of soap to the basin. Most dishwashers only have a single compartment for soap and it's released during the main wash. If you throw a squirt/scoop of detergent into the basin before you start it, that will get mixed in to the pre-wash cycle.
The cycle's happening anyway, using hot water and soap is just making the most of it!
Anecdotally (like all these other comments), my wife's approach is definitely the "racoon on meth" archetype--throw the dishes wherever they could fit, throw one of those detergent pods in, hit "start", close it, wait a few hours, then take all the dishes out and dump water out of cups and bowls and handwash them because they're still filthy. When I was building the kitchen, she was questioning the expense and effort of the dishwasher because in her entire life she's never had one that actually cleaned the dishes properly and thought they were kind of pointless.
Since I didn't want to spend the next however many years hearing about how the dishwasher sucks, after we put it in I played dishwasher czar for a month. I loaded the dishes properly, put in the proper amount of soap (and a sprinkle in the basin), made sure the rinse aid wasn't empty, ran the tap first, ran the dishwasher. Every single load came out spotless. She'd often question something I was putting in because "there's no way it's going to get that off". It did. Every time.
Wife satisfied that the dishwasher is good and having had a month of instruction I unleashed the meth-y racoon on it, and we're back to the dishwasher being a really elaborate rinsing machine we use before handwashing the dishes.
Is it just the running the tap? Probably not. Just like it's not _just_ the adding soap to the basin, using the rinse aid, loading them properly, etc. They all contribute to "using the dishwasher most effectively".
Remove solid gunk. Load dishwasher. Make sure you have Rinse-aid in the dishwasher. Run. Done. Comes out clean.
And yes they’re toxic. Of course they are! Next, let us coat all surfaces with antimicrobial toxins, starting with everything in the hospital, and your infant’s diaper-changing stations, and your stapler at work.
It will be just like Nethack, where you open a spellbook to read it, but it is “coated with contact poison!” so I hope your Unicorn Horn is available.
Home dishwashers, the ones that take 4 hours on average, are not going to result in the same thing. Claiming such would be like claiming you won't use dish soap since technically it can still be left on your dishes when quickly washed.
I've never had one that took 4 hours. The most is about 2.5 hours.
I guess we have wildly different levels of risk tolerance. I even use an extra rinse cycle. You will understand only after have gastrointestinal trouble. Speaking of which, have you had a colonoscopy lately?
Are modern US dishwashers plumbed into hot water?
NZ has 240 Volts (10 Amp 2400 Watt appliances are normal - anything above that needs special wiring). And NZ environmental regulations might be involved too (modern washing machines can be crappy because they try to skimp on water usage - our regulations can be overkill).
The reason cold or luke-warm water is a problem is that the programs are extremely simple and just assume the input is 110-120f and won't stall the cycle for waiting for the target temp.
Temperature sensing is extremely simple and cheap. Bi-metal contacts have been used since the dawn of electronics, and the solid state versions are also really simple. (Making components that are temperature invariant is the hard task.)
A bi-metal contact is only good for a single temperature, I think? (can be adjustable like thermostats) (I'm sure many but not all dish-washers probably do only need a single temperature...)
My dishwasher has a scalding 75°C option.
Likely dishwashers for the NZ market are designed to actually spend sufficient time heating the water.
My impression from watching the TC videos a while ago is that at least in the US, (many) dishwashers probably only do a insufficient time interval of adding more heat to the water.
It makes sense that different markets developed different ways; the brands that optimize for the local trends (cold vs hot water) can skimp on some features and have lower costs.
https://aurorixs.shop/product/watts-500800-instant-water-recirculating-pump-system-with-built-in-timerIn the summer... this is central Texas, so the sun helps keep the water in the pipes hot, so I imagine that the pump is on less often than in the winter. I've not checked though. My gas bills are not out of the ordinary, so I think it's not a ridiculous waste.
Yes.
If you've got both available, I can't see any reason why you'd choose to hook it up to cold. That just means it takes longer for your dishwasher to heat up.
It doesn't necessarily take longer to heat up, they are pretty much instant since they are designed to heat as needed locally as needed (don't need to heat a large volume of water) and they are at least as fast to provide hot water as a central hot water tank. They can be gas or electric powered depending on what is available/cheaper in the region and you never run out of hot water with an inline heater.
Even if you do have a central hot water tank, it's possible that heating water locally at the dishwasher is faster depending on distance to the tank. Anecdotally, I used to wait for hot water in the kitchen when I lived in Canada and I no longer do in Europe where I have no central hot water tank. In North America, recent high end home kitchens feature a local inline heater for hot water at the kitchen sink even though a central hot water tank exists.
Do you also have hot water plumbed washing machines?
Source; that time I replaced my fucking dishwasher because I couldn't figure out why it kept leaking so much everywhere.
I’ve since moved and use the powder with my current one, as recommended by Technology Connections, and have had good luck.
Are US washing machines connected to hot water as well?
I once stayed with family at a vacation rental where the dishwasher left things worse than we put them in—a thick gray residue plastered over everything. We were going to be there for a week with 30 people, which meant we had a lot of dishwashing to do, but by the time I became aware of it the rest of the family had already given up on it and had started washing dishes by hand.
I took one look at the output and knew immediately what was wrong thanks to TC. An hour later (it was that bad) the dishwasher was working flawlessly and we saved hours in dishwashing time over the week.
(We also told the rental owners that their cleaners weren't taking care of the dishwasher. I didn't ask for them to pay me for the time, but I probably should have!)
The filter can also clog up and a layer of water will form above it which can impede the rotation of the sprayers and then it really doesn’t work well.
Now I just worry about buying new bowls. Will the bowls fit nicely given pitch and angle of the of the dealies on the rack? The bowls I inherited from my grandmother fit so nicely in any dishwasher I've loaded them into, but now they're starting to crack...
I still try to be somewhat efficient about loading the dishwasher, but… if I notice myself stressing I just say “screw it”, run it, and wash the rest by hand.
The other thing I’ve realized is that sometimes things don’t get clean if you load them properly. For example, tall glasses that had smoothies in them. It’s a little gross if you don’t notice it until you’re about to use it, but… you can just look at them and wash them by hand when you unload the dishwasher.
I guess this is all to say that sometimes the best optimization is to not think about it too much.
The article mentions that newer detergents do better with unrinsed dishes. And I remember a commercial about a dishwasher that could eat a cake. My old model sure couldn't do that! If I wasn't careful I'd find hunks of food sitting inside after it ran. It also used to be that putting thin tupperware on the bottom rack was a sure way to melt it. Now I can't remember the last time that happened to me.
Things that used to provably matter... now don't.
On the other hand, I have a family member who loads the spoons in a big pile, and they stick together and don't get clean. Or, I had roommates who kept putting my good knives in the dishwasher, and the finish got ruined. That stuff still matters.
I like the article's conclusion: we can just get the answers, and update our knowledge. We don't have to treat this like a pre-internet argument, where we just went in circles repeating heresay.
My partner loads the dishwasher like a raccoon on meth. I do it like a software engineer who's been thinking about The One True Way To Organize Things for decades.
Cleanliness is fine either way. But I really hate that she can't fit a full day's worth of dishes in there so I have to do an extra load later.
This blog excerpt explains the idea [1]:
> Knowing this week was going to be a lot, I’ve been living by “run the dishwasher twice”. What the hell does that even mean?! Essentially it means to do whatever is the path of least resistance to get shit done. The advice came from a therapist to a woman who was feeling very low & was struggling with everyday tasks such as doing the dishes. She didn’t have the mental capacity to scrub dishes before putting them in her crappy dishwasher so she wasn’t doing them & they were building up & causing her more anxiety. Her therapist said not to rinse the dishes & just run the dishwasher twice, even three times if that’s what it took to get them clean. It was a game-changer for her, one that enabled her to do a small task in an imperfect way just to get it done.
I wish the OP article had dug a little bit deeper into the psychology behind daily task conflict in relationships. The dishwasher is one of many microcosms (laundry, car, pets, etc) that I wish I'd paid more attention to in my relationships, because these conversations really do reveal relationship dynamics around HUGE issues like compromise, empathy, perfectionism, and judgmental behavior.
[1] https://thebackfenceblog.wordpress.com/2021/08/27/run-the-di...
We've found that if we can't do a 10min tasks once, we won't do it twice either. We'll do dishes tomorrow. It's fine.
I used to try the do-a-little-whenever method when I was single and the only outcome was that I spent all day every day dealing with dishes and had a constantly dirty kitchen.
In other words, even if you believe the time taken to sort is identical whether you do it loading or unloading, the difference is if you do it while loading you divide that task into many smaller tasks instead of doing one big sorting task on unloading.
Not often so I learn a new 5 letter word. I have the same issue with trying to get rid of the fiestaware from my childhood home my mom gave me when I graduated college. It just fits right.
I inherited a dishwasher and became more uptight after:
- dishes that left the soap partially unused
- wet dishes
- melted stuff
- stuff that blocked the upper rotating thingie
- stuff that fell into the heating element and bottom rotating thingie
maybe seeking a racoon-friendly dishwasher would be a relationship saver.
If they screw it up good enough there is a difference because the water streams can't get where they need to to get everything sufficiently cleaned and rinsed.
If you pack it orderly unpacking is a lot faster. It also helps to avoid problems with leftovers blocking the dish washer. Turns out most dish washer manufacturers thought a bit about how to load a dishwasher ideally (that matches the layout of the machines insides).
For home use with small amounts of dishes it won't really matter tho.
Scientific method 101
They did it with intentional vulnerability, and took responsibility for themselves at the outset.
We need more of this and it’s rare to actually see someone document it. It requires the ability to be wrong, something that seems to be going extinct …curiously despite it being almost universally accepted as a virtue.
> Last week, I purposefully subjected myself to the real-life version of an anxiety dream. I stood in front of my boyfriend and my parents—three of the people who mean the most to me, and who have offered the most, uh, feedback on my dishwasher-loading abilities—and tried to do the thing. Plates on the bottom, don’t cram too much in there, think about the spray: Honestly, it wasn’t that bad. I thought about the hard work, and the help, required to keep a home. The dishes came out clean.
Eventually, you think about running the washer just to clean itself. But, you wonder if the thing will surprise you with leaks if you do run it, because it has been months or more and who knows if the seals are working...
No way. Not if you're washing with a scrub sponge and scraping the corners of everything. The argument for the dishwasher is that you're not using an old sponge. If your sponge is not nasty, washing by hand should be as good or better.
People are lazy. They only look for dirty spots and go for those. They intentionally or intentionally avoid cleaning some areas. Dishwashers don't care what 'looks' dirty - they just keep washing.
Even if you think it's clean by hand, chances are there's far more residual residue and bacteria you can't see that a dishwasher wouldn't have any trouble with.
99% of the problem with dishwashers are that people use them wrong:
* They don't clean the filter and spray arms regularly
* They use the shitty pods instead of powder, which is the most effective since it can have bleach
* They don't put some detergent in the pre-wash
* They have a unit that doesn't pre-heat the water and need to just run the faucet for a bit to get the water hot
* They don't use a rinse aid
If you can avoid those 5 mistakes, a dishwasher will always way out-perform hand-washing. Even dirt cheap basic units you see in low end apartments will do an amazing job if actually used correctly.
Like the article mentioned, to get the best result you need to have your dirty dishes line up with where the water is coming out. So if you need to wash something on multiple sides (including top), handwashing will be better.
Hot water is not what cleans your dishes, it's the pressure from the water washing things out (helped by soap). Heat just softens the gunk and oil. Plus you can wear gloves and/or let dishes soak in hot water so that's not even a factor.
By the way, many microbes can survive heat (in spore form), even boiling hot water. Nothing can survive being washed away by soap though. Well, they could survive, but they won't be on your dish.
As a microbiologist I'm aware that what looks clean can have leftover residue. How are you measuring cleanliness out of a dishwasher? I'm guessing by eye, the same way you're measuring hand-washed dish cleanliness.
The way you talk about dishwashers is like you think they're autoclaves, which can actually break spores down using a high heat only achievable in a high-pressure tank (higher than boiling temperature, around 120 celsius). Your dishwasher is only getting about 50 to 60 degrees celsius.
So no, a dishwasher will not always out-perform hand-washing. And if you're using a new sponge, I bet you the result is comparable or better if your hand-washing technique doesn't suck and you should get about the same result with cold water if you use enough soap.
So how are you measuring, if not by eyeballing it? Can you swab it and check for microbes? Did you?
> If you can avoid those 5 mistakes, a dishwasher will always way out-perform hand-washing
> Even if you think it's clean by hand, chances are there's far more residual residue and bacteria you can't see that a dishwasher wouldn't have any trouble with.
The inverse statement is just as likely to be true depending on the shape of the dish used, where it's placed in the dish-washer, etc.. You think just because the corners of a weirdly shaped dish doesn't have obvious gunk after coming out of the dishwasher that they are clean? Well, I trust my hand scrubbing method more since I don't have a camera to see where and for how long the water landed in the dishwasher.
You could swab a plate, do a dilution series and count colony forming units but there's no guarantee that the growth conditions of your petri dish will reflect what can grow in your body (i.e. will the spores germinate in your petri dish?)
What is well known is that washing with soap trumps heat (except 120+ degrees celsius), and you don't need to kill bacteria for a surface to be clean (in fact it's better to wash them off than to kill them). The fact that hand-washing is better for scrubbing corners with soap is obvious. Case in point, this burnt/sticky rice leftover on a pot that I stuck in the dishwasher a few hours ago as a test: https://imgur.com/a/wfnxMnZ
> What is well known is that washing with soap trumps heat (except 120+ degrees celsius)
The dishwasher uses heat and soap. And it sprays things off, while we're at it.
> The fact that hand-washing is better for scrubbing corners with soap is obvious. Case in point, this burnt/sticky rice leftover on a pot that I stuck in the dishwasher a few hours ago as a test
I will happily agree that hand washing tends to win on mechanical grounds. I think that if the machine can spray off the dishes to the point of being visually clean then it probably left them sanitized as well (again, hot water and soap and spraying is compelling to me), but if there's stuff stuck on the dishes then yes obviously a person scraping it off is going to be better at removing it.
> machines wash 1000 times better than hand ever could, uses less water, and doesn’t dry out your hands
"Ever could"? "1000 times"? And yet you have a problem with me saying hand-washing CAN be better when have dishes with corners or need to wash both sides of the dish. The next commenter said:
> Even if you think it's clean by hand, chances are there's far more residual residue and bacteria you can't see that a dishwasher wouldn't have any trouble with
I invoked being a microbiologist to make the point that I'm already aware of the fact that looking clean doesn't equal being clean. None of my arguments rely on my authority as a microbiologist. Anyone with decent reading comprehension can evaluate the broken logic: he's mixing up the fact that cleanliness is not just what something looks like with the idea that the dishwasher must do a better job than hand-washing because you can't tell if something is really clean or not. That makes no sense, and seems to be some kind of appeal to technology or modernity.
> I think that if the machine can spray off the dishes to the point of being visually clean then it probably left them sanitized as well
This is the exact point that the guy was saying is NOT the case, and as a microbiologist I agreed with him even though it's irrelevant to the argument since neither of us has tested the dishes.
>The dishwasher uses heat and soap. And it sprays things off, while we're at it.
My whole point was that soap and mechanical washing trump heat. My faucet sprays water, and I can evaluate the cleanliness without waiting 2 hours to see if the probabilistic machine jet spray left residue on my dishes or not.
Glassware looks yuck when washed by hand - even with a lot of care. A dishtowel will get glassware mostly shiny but it takes way more work and dishtowels are just icky (past trauma of smelling a rank dishtowel, or watching someone wipe their mank hands or face on a dishtowel, plus you know most people wash them with underwear, fabric can't be hygienic).
It most certainly does not in any dishwasher I've ever interacted with. Glassware is one of those things that I can very easily get cleaner than a dishwasher.
But just like looking clean doesn't mean being sterile, sometimes you can have benign residue such as mineral deposition which are not dirty per se.
The more dirty dishes you have the better the dishwasher becomes in terms of active work but in no scenario is it actually faster.
You do not. We are comparing the time it takes for a man to wash a dish versus the time it takes for that man to put that dish in the dishwasher, not versus the time it takes for a machine to wash that dish.
Dishwashers can handle a lot of dishes and loading them takes like five minutes. Yes, it might take between 2 and 3 hours to finish washing, but it's asynchronous, you're not involved with the process. I usually load and start the dishwasher right before I go to bed.
This is not even to mention the fact that many dishwashers can sanitize dishes better than you can by hand since they can get very hot and maintain that heat, and the fact that they use considerably less water.
Unloading is the most annoying part, and needs to be done anyway however you wash it. So, not a huge chore.
Most importantly, I live in a small apartment and I hate the noise it makes.
Also, I’ve worked as a dishwasher and don’t want to do more of that ever.
It's a great feature, but since the dishwasher has a standard height to fit under the counter, it means the bottom rack is a bit shorter than standard and I have to be very careful stacking plates to avoid blocking the washer arm. And there are a few large plates which I'm sure would fit in most washers which I have to wash by hand, like a caveman.
On balance it's a good feature though.
https://www.macknife.com/collections/original-series
And the Victorinox "Swiss Classic Picnic Knife", very sharp, good for slicing fruit, spreading hummus, cutting bread & cheese, etc. Also available serrated but I figured the straight edge would be more useful overall for spreading stuff on bread -- and it is, this lives in my lunch bag along side a Snow Peak Titanium Spork:
https://www.victorinox.com/en-US/Products/Cutlery/Paring-Kni...
(shown here in Red and Black, but if you look around it's available in many other colors). I've found the Victorinox Fibrox line of knives to be a great affordable, high-quality option.
The handle is typically loaded so that it weighs a lot more than the blade, which means they're likely fall out of the basket if they're blade down.
Also: blade down, you can't tell which ones are the knives unless you only do knives blade down (but forks and spoons handle down), which seems even more insanity to me..!!
And yes, you do only knives down. If you did spoons and forks down it would be too crowded at the bottom. I don't know why only knives down seems like insanity to you?
I mean, I'm glad you've never sliced your hand on a thin paring knife sticking up at an angle that makes the blade virtually invisible. But hey, it's your hand you're risking, not mine...
> like to actually clean our utensils and dishes…
If only there was some other way to clean things...
It's therapeutic, takes a few minutes, and makes me conscious of how many dishes I should be using (e.g. as few as possible). If I have to pre-rinse dishes for the dishwasher, I might as well just rinse it fully then and there.
Because dishwashing has made clean dishes abundant, we should use more of them than previous generations, opening up more pleasing recipes and more courses per meal.
That's the point: you _don't_ have to. Scrape off the majority of the food, use the right amount of soap (and add some on the inside of the door for the prewash), and you'll be surprised at the results.
I've always done this out of stubbornness. If I have to turn on the faucet then I might as well just wash the dish by hand. If the dish is still dirty after a cycle then I'll do exactly that and let it air-dry.
It's a dishwasher, not a dish re-washer.
My wife and her family are all freakin' religious wash first, then put it in the dishwasher. My father in law snapped at me about this once. I'm going to send this to him.
Scrape, load, and then run Quick Rinse. Much more efficient than rinsing by hand!
You can also do this for drawer style dishwasher. Giving it quite an inconspicuous look.
But I am a bit surprised that more people who entertain a lot don’t have two dishwashers. But they probably have staff for that in many cases.
You have to special kind of person to obsess over dishwasher.
I've never had any problems with cleanliness with either the "normal" or "energy saver" modes on my dishwasher. (For that matter "energy saver" on mine trades more water for less energy - which given the cost for the energy/water is a good deal for me.)
1) gritty pulse material dried on, with potato starch
2) egg white, egg yolk, and cooked mixed egg, dried on
3) dried on avocado
4) finely chopped leaf herb, which floats in soapy water.
- find the spray arms and make sure they can hit the dirty surface
- ensure no bowl is concave up against gravity (water will collect)
- ensure everything is stable
- nothing that can block meshes should be on the dish when it goes in
None of this requires intelligence. It just requires looking at the machine and figuring it out. Once a little bit of plastic broke on one of the trays and it blocked the drain and it was trivial to figure out: see that water is stagnant, google the error code, attempt force drain, then reach for the drain filter and remove the clog. Ultimately, it's just a machine. The intake comes from the same water as the sink and the egress is above the garbage disposal.
Apart from that I just make sure all the things are active when it's ready to go: pod in the tray, rinse-aid in that section.
We have one of the quiet ones, which is nice, but also is a bit annoying since the only way to know if it is active is if it is displaying a red light on the floor. I'd prefer a front LED display. And I prefer just turning it off to run it.
My wife loads it haphazardly, and I load it a certain way but neither she nor I have any trouble with outcomes because while it may be complex functioning, the user awareness is restricted to those few levers.
The one annoyance is that we have these bowl dishes and they don't stand up like flat dishes. I'm sure there is an alternative tray holder that can do those but I haven't gotten around to replacing.
Maybe not quite efficient from a water/energy/soap perspective. But efficient for his time and attention.
It doesn’t matter, Mom. It’s fine as it is. But you know what? How about I never use a dishwasher again for my entire life? Deal? Deal!
My wife likes them, though. It looks to me that she is washing the dishes before “using the dishwasher,” so I don’t understand what she thinks she is gaining by it.
Dishwashers promote delusions.
If you only have a few dishes, then sure washing by hands is fast enough, but if you let it pile up on the sink for several days, it can be a fairly long process, on the order of 30-45 minutes if things are really stuck on there.
When I bought my house in 2018, it didn't have a dishwasher. We had to wash dishes by hand, and it changed our entire psychology. I was hesitant to cook anything in the kitchen because it would generate dishes and I don't like washing dishes, so we ended up mostly surviving on low-effort frozen food.
In 2021, we had the kitchen remodeled, and in the process we installed a dishwasher, and it made it fun to cook again. I could use a lot more dishes and utensils in the process, and the effort to clean up doesn't change significantly.
At this point I don't think I will live in a place that doesn't have a dishwasher ever again.
First reason is hand washing gives you a much faster iteration cycle on clean dishes. If I'm cooking I don't really want to wait 3 hours to get a pot back.
Second reason is (in my experience so far) dishwashers suck for any significant quantity/intensity of cooking. Ceramics, sure. But big pots? Don't fit in the dishwasher. And cooked-on food? It doesn't come off (despite people repeatedly claiming that if you "just use the dishwasher correctly" it will remove all food, I've never experienced that).
Third reason is a bunch of things that can't go in dishwashers, e.g. wood.
So in the end, the most time consuming things to wash need to be done by hand anyway. The rest is a small enough amount that it doesn't take very long to wash. And of course the dishwasher costs more to run. Once I factor all this in, hand washing isn't that terrible of an option.
I just don't use dishes or cutlery or utensils that aren't dishwasher safe. I don't use wood spoons, I have a set of silicone ones that I like.
I agree that there will be some stuff that sticks on sufficiently enough to where dishwashing probably won't get it off even if you do everything correctly, but I find that those are outliers. In those cases I let stuff soak in the sink for awhile, scrub it, and then put it in the dishwasher to make sure it's sanitized (my dishwasher has a sanitize cycle). I don't run the dishwasher just for that dish, I just wait for it to fill up again and then run it.
It will be hard for us to stay married, then. But I am willing to let you do all the dishes, for the sake of the children.
It wasn't designed like a normal home dishwasher, it was open on all sides and you would slide a rack of dishes under the top part of it, pull a lever, and the dishwasher walls would come down around it and start the washing.
But it was much worse at actually cleaning dishes than a regular home dishwasher. I never prerinse at home, but you really had to with this thing. Maybe it was just crap, but some searching around it seems like that's just how they're designed to operate.
Anyway they use a shit-ton of power and energy (wired for 5 KW, 2-3 kWh per cycle), they're loud, it's not something you'd want in your home kitchen.
This kind of thing: https://www.buzzcateringsupplies.com/classeq-c500-gw-glasswa...
I've also used one three times as wide in a small food factory for cleaning equipment, mixing bowls and so on. This was even more powerful, and could clean greasy pots and bowls quickly. It was hot and steamy while unloading it.
Like this: https://www.buzzcateringsupplies.com/mach-utensil-washer-130...
There's probably something in between for restaurants
Presumably this: https://www.buzzcateringsupplies.com/classeq-pass-through-di...
And something like this for somewhere huge, maybe a large school or office: https://www.buzzcateringsupplies.com/warewashing/commercial-...
- They're 3-phase, 220-volt.
- They cannot use PVC or other plastics for drainage lines because the water is too hot.
- The high temperature steam can damage surroundings unless designed for it.
- They're very loud.
They'll wash in e.g. 90-seconds, but the dishes are too hot to handle for a bit. Plus some residential kitchenware cannot handle the high heat of a commercial dishwasher.
You'll likely never see a commercial dishwasher in a residential home.
Apparently we had bent one of the hinges! How? By overloading the bottom rack too many times. His advice was to load it ~50% LESS than we were. And don't pull the bottom rack out all the way when it's fully-loaded.
I can't tell if this is like general dishwasher advice, or our GE is a POS.
Thus instead of stressing how to tetris pack everything. Turn your brain off and put less inside. With less dishes it is easier to avoid mistakes.
If you want to observe the world as a pro-dishwasher person does, replace the word 'dishwasher' above with 'toilet'. We see dishwashers as objects that serve us so well, that the alternative choice is fairly disgusting by modern standards.
Recent UK dishwashers use less than 2.
Just do your dishes by hand. If you have a big family with lots of dishes, what a great opportunity to teach kids some good habits.
- Buy more utensils and plates than you need. It's just me and my partner but we have something like 20 mugs in the kitchen, 12-18 plates etc. Who cares?
Doing the dishes just once a day saved water, energy and time.
I don't believe cooking has spare moments, eg there is never a time when I could take out my phone and watch something for 30 seconds. I think that means I am filling the spare moments with efficient task scheduling (chop while sauteing) and washing dishes is just making it take longer.
Well, you've got interactions of dissimilar habits, which is one of the most worthwhile things to address.
Then you have the advanced appliance which is somewhat likely to have been optimized for not exactly either one (or more) of the users' desired or even imagined scenarios or use cases.
So they all tend to use it differently, to different effect.
More than two types right out of the gate, the robot has it's say, with strong influence even when it's a simple automaton, from helpful to agonist.
Nature's way of influencing you to limit your feasting to special occasions . . .
tldr sometimes it really does just seem like superstitious voodoo is really what matters with dishwashers
The old water heater was probably set to 110°F or something, and the new one to 140°F.
Now, this article suggests that the first handwashing can be skipped with contemporary detergents, which is useful information if true, though I think it wouldn't help in the social situations the article talks about since it makes it look as though you're cutting corners.
What?
I don't know about handwashing after it comes out though, that's crazy.
https://www.geappliances.com/appliances/dishwashers-with-pir...
You have never actually used a dishwasher have you.
Without detergent in the pre-wash compartment, only water is used to pre-soak the dishes.
https://shop.miele.com.au/en/cleaning-and-accessories/miele-...
2) a cycle will typically be much hotter for much longer than whatever you do manually. So the dishwasher is what I trust to fully disinfect my dishes
3) a family of four cooking at home will need a full load every day so it’s a lot more efficient than manually washing and drying everything, especially when both parents work
The water probably doesn't get hot enough, unless the dishwasher has a sanitize cycle.
US dishwashers tend to assume the incoming water is from the hot water line and is pretty hot. It takes a bit for the tub to actually get the water very hot, so you'll end up spending most of the pre-wash step with only mildly warm water if you don't get the hot water there first.
Once the water gets to temp I just toss the rest into the dishwasher.
A quick rinse only decreases chances of issues.
Also, waiting 3 years to load the dishwasher until full to run it will make food hard on it.
Have to choose the poison.
Even the article has this little caveat that's not so little: you don't need to prerinse unless it involves protein, which is actually a lot of dishes potentially.
It depends on how long it takes you to load the dishwasher, as you're pointing out, and all sorts of other things.
I've also noticed that consumer outlets frequently complain that people don't clean out their filter enough, which damages the dishwasher, but that filter is probably clogged by stuff that doesn't get rinsed off the dishes.
We have a dishwasher, we use it, but I have always kind of felt like dishwashers were the one appliance I could live without (and have for years at times, even when we owned one). If there's lots of dishes or lots of people, they're useful for us. But we don't have that many people over usually, I can't put certain things in ours because they don't get clean, there's always things I don't want to or can't put in the dishwasher, so I end up washing things with them, there's things that I will have to pull out anyway or run a very empty load, and so forth and so on.
I guess I feel like they're useful to have around but other appliances (range, fridge, washing machine) have been much much much much more important to me.
Likely that’s because if there’s just a couple dishes I just hand wash them. But when we have company the dishwasher is a massive time saver. That said, I bet the average American has way more electronic “stuff” and possessions than I do (with the exception of instruments and music gear) as I try to live pretty simply.
If your dishwasher does not generally work in this way, it is not working correctly.
She used it's crumminess as justification both to wash all of the dishes manually, and to never buy another dishwasher again, since she would obviously have to wash all of the dishes by hand anyhow. The thought that technology might improve over time never seemed to occur to her.
I get the idea that she was not alone in that.
I'm willing to believe commercial-grade dishwashers are actually effective, because only very occasionally do restaurants give me dirty dishes or cutlery. In personal homes, however, I've only encountered totems and superstition, but unlike internet commenters they don't usually get super outraged.
Maybe you are just wrong and basing your opinion on old, obsolete data? Granted I haven’t had to do any ritual of any kind using dishwashers for the last 20 years… but yeah. It’s not like I’m the one pointlessly wasting time hand washing dishes.
Seriously though, your opinion is common (maybe not majority, just weirdly not as rare as you would think).
I sometimes wonder about it, and I generally land on these explanations, in decreasing order of how common I think they are ("you" below refers to the representative of all people, not you personally):
1. You experienced a partial failure a number of times in specific cases (e.g. a fluke of loading/shapes where a spot just doesn't get clean, or maybe you were expecting it to accomplish the impossible task of cleaning a left-out bowl of mini-wheats). This soured you and caused you to over-compensate forever after.
2. You have very high standards for "clean" (e.g. faint streaks on glass is unacceptable).
3. You over-load it or never clean the filter.
4. Washers and/or detergent were indeed crappy, and are now better (maybe true, but I'm not sure I buy this as a significant reason).
5. You use detergent packs or you don't call for hot water before turning it on (even I'm guilty of these, and don't have issues).
> > The entire concept is flawed and can't possibly work and wastes more time than it will ever save.
> List of tips for proper usage
It's when visiting other people's homes that I encounter dishwashers and weird superstitions relating to dishwashers.
You could consider placing this belief in the open for people with dishwashers to contradict a sort of test, but you don't appear to consider it that way. Do you still think that everyone in this thread with a dishwasher washes their dishes by hand before and after they put them in the dishwasher?
You're accusing people who use dishwashers of a profoundly inefficient process. I think that you don't recognize this as insulting, but I also think that you derive a sense of superiority from this accusation, and if you are holding onto this belief in spite of people's insistent contradiction, then I think that this amounts to superstition and vitriol on your part.