Best advice from TC: verify the water is hot before starting the dishwasher. Especially if your water heater is located a ways from your kitchen and the pipes aren't well insulated.
Cold water only connection for all dishwashers I've seen in New Zealand. Dishwashers have an internal heating element.
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).
It is unsurprising that it varies by country, etc. Below is pure speculation while eating a snack:
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.
I have a hot water recirculator for this. The price I pay is that instead of waiting for hot water at the kitchen sink I've to wait for cold water, as the hot water is recirculated through the cold water pipes.
I have seen a return loop on the hot side, but not returning through the cold side. Do you have more info on this? (I do wonder if recirculating hot through a pipe next to a cold pipe would result in heating the cold)
The thing consists of a) a pump that goes on the output of the water heater, and b) wax-based valves that go between the hot and the cold under each sink where you want hot water without having to wait a long time. The valves turn on when the water on the hot side cools, and they close when it gets hot. The pump stops when the valves and hot faucets are all closed, and it has a timer for scheduling hours of operation. I believe it's this:
So you’re always pumping hot water through your pipes? Does that not end up wasting quite a bit of energy? I guess in winter it’s not a big problem since you’re heating your house anyway, but presumably in summer it is just adding unwanted heat?
In the winter, as you note, it's not much of a waste, and it helps keep the pipes from freezing.
In 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 - over the last decade or so they removed the heating element in most US dishwashers. So they either are connected to the hot water line, or have a mechanism to heat the water (or both).
I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure that even today almost all US dishwashers have some mechanism to heat the water, just maybe not the giant exposed element in the bottom like older ones. Water out of the tap is going to be on the low end of usable dish-washing temps at the very beginning of a cycle, let alone 45+ minutes later.
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.
I forgot about the exposed element. These days most plastic spatulas withstand high temperature. Back in the day I think every North American family had at least one yellow spatula destroyed by the element.
My dishwasher doesn't have a big exposed heating element in the pan but it still has a water heater to it. It still gets the water very hot even if I start it without getting the hot water flowing first.
I bet some manufacturers don't even use temperature sensors in many models, and just assume an approximate incoming water temperature, and heat for a fixed time period according to calculations on amount of water in the system. This guess comes from the impression that cheap temperature sensing circuitry isn't the most reliable long-term.
I bet you're wrong. Is there a website where we can make an adjudicated bet JUST against each other. How many dishwashers come without a hot-wash option? Any dishwasher that didn't heat water enough would struggle with hard fats.
How did you conclude that they aren't the most reliable long-term?
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.)
For me, moving away from pods to a dishwasher liquid (cascade 3x from Costco) made the most difference. I add some liquid in the prewash and some in the main compartment. I had to figure out the right amount to add in each via trial and error. I don't pre rinse or run the hot water beforehand, my dishes come out clean.
I had the opposite problem. I used the gel and the dishwasher wouldn’t completely drain. I had someone out to look at it and they couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I tried a pod as a last ditch effort and it worked.
I’ve since moved and use the powder with my current one, as recommended by Technology Connections, and have had good luck.
I'm surprised you made the switch to liquid and not to powder. It's so much cheaper and not as fussy as liquid. That plus a tiny bottle of rinse aid that lasts forever winds up giving me the cleanest dishes.
I wonder how much this really matters. For me my dishwasher is far enough from the hot water heater that it generally takes several gallons for the water to run hot. But the wash cycle is 2+ hours long and uses very minimal water (~3 gallons/cycle). Even if I preheated the lines using the tap near the washer, it wouldnt even be lukewarm by the end of the wash cycle.
I recently moved into a home where the previous tenants told us they didn't use the dishwasher because it didn't actually clean the dishes. Having seen TC, I checked the kitchen tap and sure enough it behaved like yours: it took a good 60 seconds to get hot.
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.
I think the most crucial factor is that the initial pre-rinse cycle is usually relatively short, so pre-heating the water means that cycle is done with hot water. My dishwasher at least starts out rinsing for maybe 15-20 minutes before draining and refilling the tub. I also think there is likely some effect in that the main cleaning cycle will at least start out with hot tap water.
> I wonder how much this really matters. For me my dishwasher is far enough from the hot water heater that it generally takes several gallons for the water to run hot.
(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".
A lot of newer dishwashers have longer cycles to reduce water usage (and I presume get government environmental certifications like EPA Energy Star?). More soak time means less water needed.
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.
My generic GE dishwasher defaults to a few hours, it feels closer to 4h than 2h. There is also an overnight mode that seems to take almost 8h. And then a quick wash mode that takes 1h.
Pre-rinsing uses way more water than is typically necessary just to get the water hot, especially given that to be an effective pre-rinse you're going to want the water to be hot already before you even start.
You don't rinse everything! There's always a few items that need an extra squirt before they go in. (Like pots and pans.) By the time those few items have an extra squirt, the water in the pipes is hot enough to start the dishwasher.
There is no research that states such. Most online articles are referencing a study done on professional dishwashers, in which they complete their task within 2 minutes and some rinse aid was still found on the dishes.
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.
There is absolutely no need for rinse aids if you already wash the utensils with water before putting the in the dishwasher. This is good practice.
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?
All restaurants and food service facilities use “rinse agents” or “drying agents”; they simply never have the time or capacity to air-dry dishes and silverware, so eff whatever the training courses tell us to do, from the County Department of Public Health. Just slather everything with chemicals and make sure nobody can smell them from the dining room or taste it on a spoon.
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.
I've never had one that wasn't connected to the hot water line.
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.
Well both are not always available. In many countries, there is no hot water tank/line. There are only inline heaters or very small tanks locally where needed (each bathroom and kitchen sink). Then, you buy appliances such as dishwashers and clothes washers that also have inline heaters built-in (and you don't need to think about this, in such a region, this is the default thing that is sold).
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.
Everyone in the uk has a central hot water heater, and nobody has a hot-water plumbed dishwasher. Presumably the 230V supply is enough to heat the water up quickly.
Do you also have hot water plumbed washing machines?
In the US, yes washing machines are generally connected to both hot and cold water. Unlike dishwashers which need to get even hotter than hot water, washing machines generally don't have any internal heating element at all.
If it takes x gallons for your hot water to run through, and your dishwasher only consumes <x gallons before stopping long enough for your hot water line to cool again, then connecting your dishwasher to your hot water line would both waste hot water and never get any.
Not sure why you were downvoted. This sounds like absolutely crucial advice for people in countries where dishwashers don't heat the water on their own. I've never seen one like that in my life, but yeah, sounds important.
When the dishwasher has to heat the water, it's slower than from the water heater.
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.)
I know this is common knowledge now, but just for people who might not realize it: a typical North American NEMA 5-15R receptacle will indeed deliver 120V 15A electricity, but the electrical grid is split-phase 240V. Right across from my dish washer is an electric range; most of these require 240V 30A or 50A receptacles (I think mine is 30A, but I could be mis-remembering.) So it's not like we couldn't have higher power dishwasher, but if you already have central water heating it's kind of senseless to heat the water at the dishwasher.
Ah, I forgot about North America being 120 V, that would indeed explain it. IIRC that's also why electric kettles are not really a thing there while being ubiquitous where I live.
Most people I know have an electric kettle here in the US. Every office I've been to has had one in the break room. Anyone who drinks tea or eats a lot of ramen or drinks anything but drip coffee will have a kettle.
It's really more that historically Americans have been fine with drip style coffee makers instead of drinking pour overs or tea.
I feel like the two types of dishwasher people are clearly delineated by those who have and have not watched the Technology Connections videos on dishwashers.
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
Many types... I've seen the Technology Connections video and use whatever, mostly liquid detergent. After running a few experiments and coming away unimpressed, I've kept on pre-rinsing.
I've seen the video and tried switching from pods (which I assume is the same thing as a tab, just never heard that name before) to powder with some power in the prewash compartment without prerinsing 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.
Dishwasher companies have tried for a long time to get people to stop pre-washing their dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. I remember ads from the 80s or 90s with people putting full cakes, or a baked on lasagna pan into the dishwasher and it coming out clean.
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.
I had a GE Profile dishwasher from the 2000's when I moved into my current home. It was abused by the previous owner and sold as not working. I completely rebuilt it and it worked great for a while until it's logic board died and replacements were hard or expensive to source.
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.
A masticator is what I am missing in a dishwasher. We do not have that in Europe (not the faucet electrical thing that mixes and destroys organic dtuff you put in the faucet - this is forbidden)
For most of the article I felt like the author's learnings were pretty obvious, particularly in regards to the water jet direction and the minimum necessary dish arrangement. They didn't even get into detail about the heat and steam.
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.
I clean out our dishwasher filter every few months and I've never seen any residual food get caught by the filter. As long as you scape off the food bits it's fine. It'd getting to the point where I'm checking the filter less and less often.
I’m a Bosch dishwasher powder soap with some in the bottom for presoak but still pre-rinse type person. Clean the filter once a month (takes 2 minutes literally) use jet dry (or equivalent) and I have zero complaints about how my 20 year old dishwasher performs!
I too have a Bosch dishwasher and use powdered soap. I also add in some citric acid to help with the really hard water we have in my area. I pre-rinse everything though.
You know, the hot water tip is great, but cleaning the filter is really the best thing I’ve found to keeping it working well. Residue always seems to indicate a dirty filter.
I think it depends on the kind of residue. If we're just talking about caked-on stuff that you recognize that didn't wash off, I'd start with hot water and adding the pre-wash powder. But if you get stuff on your dishes that you don't recognize... yeah, that's a filter.
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!)
I’m mostly referring to my own dishwasher which I use all the time and understand. But for a long time I never cleaned the filter and then one day I did and suddenly everything made sense.
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.
I used to be uptight about how to load the dishwater until I put away a load that was packed by my partner, "like a raccoon on meth", and noticed there wasn't a difference in the cleanliness.
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...
Some things won't matter, some will. I think it's changed over time as dishwashers and detergents got better.
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.
When I was cleaning my dishwasher I realized there are two ways to configure it: with a in-sink garbage disposal, and without. If you don't have the garbage disposal part hooked up there is simply nowhere for the chunks to go and they accumulate at the bottom of the washer beneath a filter.
> I used to be uptight about how to load the dishwater until I put away a load that was packed by my partner, "like a raccoon on meth", and noticed there wasn't a difference in the cleanliness.
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.
On the other side of this argument, I've seen "just run the dishwasher twice" used as shorthand for giving yourself permission to do whatever is needed to get the job done and not letting perfectionism paralyze you from making progress.
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.
> On the other side of this argument, I've seen "just run the dishwasher twice" used as shorthand for giving yourself permission to do whatever is needed to get the job done and not letting perfectionism paralyze you from making progress.
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.
Oh no. 2 loads mean 2 unloads. I cannot exploit my children anymore (their words, not mine) because they are gone so you better concentrate to put everything in one to.
"Give yourself permission" here means acknowledging you're doing a "good enough" job (for now) instead of a "perfect" job, and not beating yourself up about it in the short term. The Wiki article on self-compassion [1] has more context on the therapeutic value of practicing self-compassion and the impact on measurements of life satisfaction/happiness, curiosity, resilience, etc.
Depending on the task/behavior, you may carry the same attitude into the medium/long term, OR figure out how to course-correct medium/long term to align with your values. E.g., if one of your core values is militant conservation of water, either because it's expensive or one of the disappearing resources on Earth, you might strategize ways to conserve your energy to do the best possible dishwasher-loading job every day. That's what I was getting at when I said these type of tasks are "microcosms" because sometimes they reveal misalignment of values.
Why do you say "therapist" here (with the air quotes)?
Modern dishwashers are incredibly efficient. They consume insignificant amounts of power and water compared to heating or cooling your home, or taking an extra shower.
Your opinions are your own, but I don't have the slightest hesitation in running an extra dishwasher cycle if it makes my life the slightest bit easier.
>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.
This is not about efficiency of the use of the earth's resources. It is about the modern-day priests of America (therapists) telling people that it is okay and good to simply put no effort into anything. That it is acceptable to "struggle to wash dishes" Instead of this person being checked into a mental hospital, instead they are given a coping strategy.
What next? Not doing well in school? Don't worry about it, just use AI to cheat! Not making enough money? Just steal, what's the big deal? Don't beat yourself up, you don't have to be perfect, just get through the day with all your fucking spoons.
One shouldn't ever be anxious about such things as being wasteful. Mindful, sure, but not anxious - being anxious about such things is actually a pretty good reason for therapy.
That’s not what they said. Don’t be anxious about being wasteful, don’t be wasteful! It’s not some lofty goal or something, but a part of growing up and being a responsible adult.
yes, but if trying not to be wasteful creates an anxiety, then you need to treat the anxiety first. in that case giving yourself permission to be wasteful is what matters, and responding to that by telling to person not to be wasteful is counterproductive.
No, that’s just the wrong way to think about it. It’s something that needs doing, so you do it. Are you anxious about going to the toilet? You’re not. You do it as it’s necessary.
Sometimes it helps to stop thinking and start doing. I’ve been there. It takes practice.
Speaking of wastefulness and dishwashers, I rent an apartment which does not include a dishwasher. In fact, no apartment I've ever rented included a dishwasher, although many have included a clothes washer and dryer installed.
My kitchen does include a garbage disposal, which is a nuisance, because even though my ex-girlfriend called it "dispose-all", it disposes of nothing, except it effectively annoys 10-30 neighbor families if you manage to clog up the lateral drainpipes, and I don't rely on it to chew up food or any solid waste at all. The only reason I activate it is because it speeds up the draining of water in the dual sink. And also because, if I don't run it on a weekly basis, the motor will seize up in a way that requires a maintenance call, and you don't want to call in maintenance.
Anyway, I wash my dishes by hand, and the bane of my existence is dirty dishes in the kitchen sink when I'm quite hungry and it's 7am and I just want to get breakfast started, but the sink isn't clear and everything I need is dirty, and needs soaking time before the residue will budge, and so I end up punting and ordering delivery anyway.
Washing dishes is a pipeline, a process, that can take 2 hours, or it can last 12 hours, or it can take 3 days to complete. I often don't get around to that magnificent endgame of putting away the dishes but I leave them in the drying-rack until I need them again. It's like my "L2 Cache" for kitchenware, that drying rack. And guess what, when I go to wash dishes again, I often discover there's no room in the rack, and I rip out my hair a little bit and I stop washing the dishes long enough to empty the rack, and then I'm exhausted and I go to lie down in bed instead of washing dishes, or starting dinner, and guess who's ordering delivery again?
So one of the sanity-preserving hacks I've developed is using paper plates, paper bowls, plastic cold cups, and plastic flatware. And this works great for cold cereal, and the raw eggs I drink, and microwaved frozen meals that I can plop into a bowl or put on a plate in order to cut them into pieces.
And I thought that cloth napkins and dish towels were cool, because I was Saving the Earth, and for a couple of years I owned not a single roll of paper towels; I used cloth napkins and I laundered them, and now I use both, and if something is going to stain my precious cloth, then I use paper towels or a disposable sponge on it first.
And they called me "wasteful" for using disposable kitchenware, but in reality I only own a single tablepspoon and a single teaspoon. I own about 3 forks, and 2 butter knives. I recently purchased a set of 4 identical steak knives, because a good sharp knife to cut meats is essential. But most of my flatware is disposable, including semi-disposable chopsticks (set of 8 for about $4).
And guess what? None of the delivery services include plasticware anymore. None of the restaurants tuck it into your bag. They used to give you, like, a packaged knife-fork-spoon-napkin-salt-pepper, sealed in cellophane. Then COVID-19 happened, and plasticware is a cost center, and restaurants hate delivery services for many reasons, and no restaurant carries knives, even plastic butter knives. They are still usually sending me plastic straws, but I nevertheless keep on hand a stock of plastic bendy-straws to use with every beverage.
So basically whether I order delivery or I make food at home, my plasticware suffices, and yeah, it's wasteful and I do not wash or rinse or reuse any of them, and I don't really care, because it is a sanity-preserving strategy that works quite well, because it is much easier to just tuck into a meal when I have flatware ready to use.
That's the real difference. I'm playing Tetris, and getting an amazing score. She's leaving a bunch of stuff on the side for the next cycle, or hand washing them.
Crushing the high score here too. Just recently got an entire line of colored kids plastic glasses on the top rack, I swear it made a do-do-do tone when I stopped that last cup in there. :)
What I notice is that the dishes and glasses don't chip when I put them in and I do when anyone else does. Don't matter if there are more clean dishes per load if they're broken, people.
You are thinking like someone who buys the dishes, rather than someone who wants the person who buys the dishes to get off their case about it so they can do something more interesting.
Similarly, I used to stress about loading the dishwasher when I was a teen. I would spend so much time loading it that I have myself a neck ache from leaning over and I could have saved time by washing the dishes by hand.
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.
IMHO the main advantage of neatly loading dishes neatly is that unloading becomes a 60 second exercise as opposed to a 5 minute one. It's not so much that I don't have 5 minutes to spare, but my back appreciates it if I can get it done quicker. I get 4 plates with each hand, silverware is already sorted neatly... it's just overall a better experience.
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.
I view it as an area where diminishing returns are almost as soon as you get started. Using a dish washer is already getting a TON of work done for me that I would otherwise have to do. Trying to squeeze any extra from it is kind of silly. I'll always have to run it some more tomorrow.
>and noticed there wasn't a difference in the cleanliness.
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.
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.
In one of my jobs (civil service) I had to pack and unpack a cheap dish washer, for a horde of unruly kids each day.
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.
The author evaluated their position, measured the situation, sought more information, adjusted their position, independently tested it and updated their position
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.
I had a much less rigorous version of this in mind after reading the article but this is exactly what I enjoyed about it. I think you're right that this isn't frequently documented and maybe if it was such responses to problems would be more common.
It’s always been like this, but the old media landscape prevented the coarse and low class from succeeding by making navigation of all the subtle prestige granting institutions of the upper class a prerequisite.
I'm surprised this Jon Richardson bit hasn't been posted already. It's an incredible piece of comedy, even moreso given that it's about loading the dishwasher.
This makes zero sense. Are you considering the machine time or just loading? Also, machines wash 1000 times better than hand ever could, uses less water, and doesn’t dry out your hands.
> machines wash 1000 times better than hand ever could
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.
Dishwashers, with rare exception, are much better at washing dishes than people are. They can use water temperatures that would burn skin, pressures that would bruise, and can keep going at it for HOURS without getting tired.
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.
Tablets still can't be split into pre and post-wash and they tend to WAY overdo the amount of detergent, because the manufacturer has no idea how hard your water is.
You're missing the point. I'm not talking about people lazily washing their dishes by hand. I'm talking about focused hand-washing of dishes with many corners, vs. sticking them in the dish-washer.
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.
> 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.
So how are you measuring, if not by eyeballing it? Can you swab it and check for microbes? Did you?
Why would that matter? I'm not the one who stated opinions as fact:
> 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
You did in fact make several claims of fact, and then followed up with an appeal to authority as a microbiologist. Having those credentials means you probably could have verified your claims, but you don't appear to have done so, so we get to hand-wave at each other.
> 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.
I find it hard to believe that you're still doubling down but only selectively detecting unsupported "claims of fact" without support especially since I made weaker, more situational claims. The original poster commented:
> 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.
If you're only using one dish, then sure it's probably better to wash by hand. No one I know has ever suggested running a dishwasher for one 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.
I'm usually getting ~40 dishes and ~40 utensils into the dishwasher per load, which at 20 seconds each is like half an hour. I can load the dishwasher a lot quicker than that.
You also need to count the time for it to wash them and unload them. Washing is async which means its less active work, but it’s definitely includes in how long it takes.
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 need to count that time. There are very few situations where the time which is not active work time matters. Dishwasher uses up less of your time (and saves money, energy, water). Note the origin statement: It's just so much faster to do the washing by hand. It's completely wrong, but makes clear what kind of time is to be measured here.
> You also need to count the time for it to wash them
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.
The time the dishwasher takes to wash the dishes is time you yourself can use for literally anything else. Not to mention the savings on the water bill and the much higher quality of the wash. The only objection I can think of is if you do not have enough dishes, which means the dishwasher "locks in" the dishes for some time, but the real solution to that is to simply get extra dishes so that you have some to use while the dishwasher is running – seriously, it will pay for itself in no time.
Hah, we have a habit of using them as a drying rack after handwashing too. With the lower rack pulled out and resting on the open door, so air circulates well and things dry pretty fast.
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...
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..!!
It's easy to cut yourself emptying the dishwasher if knives are point up, but since you're in the kitchen which can have slippery floors and there's usually an open door low to the ground and a lot of moving back and forth there's also a small risk of slipping/tripping and falling onto the knives final destination style and impaling yourself on them. Ideally pointy things point down and spoons go up.
Dishwasher utensil baskets have compartments tall and narrow enough that the knife is not going to fall out. I haven't had that happen ever in my life. Even with heavy handles. (If it's as large as a chef's knife, however, that lies down flat in the upper rack.)
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...
It seems like the comment you're replying to is likely referring to butter knives. But if your paring knives match your other flatware it seems like a pretty reasonable confusion.
This is a mistake you only make once. Lesson learned when I put a boning knife through my arm in the dish rack one day. Cost me a trip in the ambulance. Absolute insanity– correct! I don't even know how it got in there with the rest of the utensils. But I triple check the sink area every time now.
I have a dishwasher that does this. It was in the house already, I used it for at least a month wondering why it didn't have a proper place to put cutlery before I tried cleaning the top and realized there was a drawer hidden there!
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.
Some dishwashers have an option to change the height of bottom rack by moving upper rack up or down. You should check that, maybe it's you dishwasher too.
This is the absolute best feature any dishwasher can have. I can’t go back to having one of those awkward cutlery baskets now. Besides doing a terrible job with the cutlery, it just wastes so much space that could be used for plates and cups.
I haven't owned any kitchen knives with wooden handles for years. Probably part of the gradual replacement of plastic for wood that's happening just about everywhere.
What we really need is the double-wide or triple-wide dishwasher. If everything fits in one load, you're always all clean in the morning and all dirty in the evening. Now it's just a daily habit of putting things away in the morning and popping things in after you're done eating each meal.
How about just keeping two dishwashers? One starts full of clean stuff and you use it like a cupboard, taking stuff out of it as you use it. The other starts empty and you add stuff to it after using it until you have transferred everything from one to the other. Then you run the full one and start again.
> Here’s the third big thing: Rinsing isn’t necessary. Oma Blaise Ford, a senior executive editor at Better Homes and Gardens, told me that overrinsing is “one of the most common mistakes in modern dishwasher loading.” She recommends scraping leftover food off your dishes into the trash with a rubber spatula and immediately loading them into the machine, without even turning on the faucet.
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.
I don't know how many arguments I've had with how many partners I've had about this.
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.
If it's not full enough to run, but you also don't want wet food residue to dry on and stick, most dishwashers have a "Quick Rinse" setting that's designed for exactly this purpose.
Scrape, load, and then run Quick Rinse. Much more efficient than rinsing by hand!
When I was in university with three roommates we had one roommate who would leave all the dishes dirty in the kitchen, so when he left for Christmas break, the three of us made the executive decision to go down to one set of dishes per person.
An elderly friend of mine who lives alone keeps his most used dishes in the dishwasher. Need a clean dish? Find one in there. Have a dirty dish? Put it in the dishwasher? Can't find a clean dish? Run the dishwasher.
Maybe not quite efficient from a water/energy/soap perspective. But efficient for his time and attention.
We recently had someone at our house to repair our dishwasher, because we suddenly started hearing a horrible grinding sound when closing the door.
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.
I think probably the latter. Either that, or your dishes are made out of tungsten or something. (If so, I'd love to see your dish collection. That would be rad.)
More like 90-120s. There's the type that close from the top (expensive) and the conveyor type (more expensive), but they're incredibly fast, mostly because they blast near-boiling water at pressure-washer velocities. They also don't typically have a "drying" cycle -- because the dishes are so superheated they dry themselves in another half minute. Downside is no plastics or anything else meltable. See https://www.cafemutfak.com/en/blog/content/industrial-dishwa...
Having worked in a commercial kitchen, I can say these dishwashers are not really made for the same purpose as home dishwashers. The commerical ones with the 2 minute cycle kinda suck at cleaning, probably because of the shorter cycle and minimal design. They don't remove stuck-on food. They only remove what can be removed by spraying water for a short while. What they will do well is sanitise your dishes, because the water is fucking hot.
It was an art form in the kitchen to find the most efficient balance between prescrubbing/presoaking the dishes and getting them through the dishwasher.
I worked at a Pizza Hut in college that had one that washed a full load of dishes in just a few minutes. I'm blanking on the exact time, but I'm almost certain it was under 10 minutes. It got extremely hot, so it probably wouldn't work for a lot of dishes people have at home, but it was very efficient! We saved at least a few hours of labor a day from it, and an unquantifiable amount of sanity.
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.
I've used the type that are common in bars/pubs/nightclubs in the UK and Denmark. They take 20 minutes or so to heat the water, then each cycle is just 2 minutes or so. The glasses are loaded on trays, so it's best to have a place to load up a tray and another for them to cool down.
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.
Yep, I’ve only volunteered in commercial kitchens for events and stuff before, and the ones I’ve been in have essentially an assembly line for dishes from sinks to a dishwasher box that took 2-3 plastic cubes of dishes, and washed them in like, 5 minutes. No drying though.
Sure, but you'd need to be quite dedicated to install one in a home:
- 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.
I used a commercial dishwasher in an Airbnb that had the fittings for a catering operation. It had an initial heat up time of like twenty minutes, after that each cycle of dishes took like... two minutes? Maybe five.
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.
I'm the sloppy person at home, but I hate seeing dirty dishes, so I do the dishes. I squeeze every bit of space out of the dishwasher. There is One Right Way to do it. That said, if someone throws dishes in there willy nilly, I couldn't care less, as long as it gets done. It's basically Postel's Law: be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send/do.
I just wash dishes by hand while I wait fo the kettle to boil for my after-food cup of tea.
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.
I write my posts with a chisel and clay tablet because it makes me conscious of how many words I should be using (e.g. as few as possible). No, writing words is cheap now, so I can use more words.
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.
> If I have to pre-rinse dishes for the dishwasher, I might as well just rinse it fully then and there.
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.
>Bringing any kind of technology into these sacred spaces saves time, but it can also alienate us from the labor of caring for those we love. Maybe this is why so many people don’t trust, don’t use, or want to command their dishwashers. “The strong opinions associated with how to do it could be people trying to retain some semblance of control in a world where technological devices are doing things so much for us,” Janning said of the dishwasher. “I do wonder if there’s a little bit of fear of losing the humanity associated with our domestic lives.”
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.
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 . . .
The dishwashers in my various homes these past 25 years have served as extra plate storage with only occasional running to keep them in working order. Otherwise, we just wash our dishes by hand. I don't see the point of letting your dirty dishes accumulate in the dishwasher or the sink for that matter, when it is a simple and pleasant task to just clean them, dry them, and put them away. The alternative is pretty disgusting. As you cook, simply use spare moments to clean pots and pans as you go. Those can't go in the dishwasher anyway, so nothing gained there. Moreover, you have to clean the dishes before you put them in the dishwasher in any case so that the dishwasher can actually get them clean. Dishwashers feel like a double-taxation chore. You're already scraping off food, running the plates under water, and giving them a brief scrub even if you're using a dishwasher. And then you have to wait for the thing to finish while that dish or utensil is unavailable. Plus the little soap packets or pills or whatever are another hassle.
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 pans that can go in the dishwasher, or just accept they will have a reduced lifespan.
- 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?
why would I want to clutter my life with more than needed? Why would anyone want to be surrounded by dirty dishes, even in a partially loaded dishwasher? It takes time to fill one up unless you're feeding a lot of people at once. If it's not full, then either it's partially full of dirty dishes, or the sink is, or the dirty dishes are just lying around. All three of those options are disgusting. "Who cares?" Why not just live in filth? Why take out the trash before it overflows? Why clean up food mess from the counter or floor before it attracts vermin? Why bother keeping things neat and tidy?
"Pleasant task" sounds like an oxymoron to me. We have video games now, the spectrum for "pleasant" has shifted and household tasks are toward the bottom.
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.
Different strokes for different folks. The day I stopped having to hand wash dishes because my apartment had a dishwasher was a great feeling. Handwashing dishes is for suckers (and so is pre-rinsing).
My work had a dishwasher that performed terribly when we first moved in. About 6 months later we complained and they replaced it. Worked slightly better, but still sub par (dishes came out gray with bits of food still on them, with or without prewash). About 6 months later, the water heater leaked and had to be replaced. For the past year since then, the dishwasher works amazing (no prewash and dishes shine). I don’t know what transpired to cause the change. I was guessing that somehow the aging hot water heater just leached too much mineral into the water or something that the soap formulas could not overcome?
tldr sometimes it really does just seem like superstitious voodoo is really what matters with dishwashers
Water heaters have different temperature settings that are supposed to be adjusted depending on the occupants of a building in order to avoid scalding.
The old water heater was probably set to 110°F or something, and the new one to 140°F.
Okay - here is the deal. If it not water soluble or emulusifiable - it goes in the bin. No wood or knives, aluminium only the pieces you don't care. Order them so any piece has at least some waterflow and arms spin. Small stuff - top basket. Throw some detergent in the container and a dash outside for the pre rinse cycle. Here is the most important part - ignore the auto/eco and other planet saving or smart programs. Put it on big pots and pans heavily soiled - instead of 60C those programs operate on 75 to 80C degrees. If you can't fit everything in one go - the sink makes good temporary storage area.
You have to special kind of person to obsess over dishwasher.
> Here is the most important part - ignore the auto/eco and other planet saving or smart programs.
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.)
I refuse to use a dishwasher. I don’t think it makes anything faster or better. When I was a child in the seventies my household chore was loading the dishwasher, but my mom always said I did it wrong.
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.
Everyone always says that they can "wash dishes faster than the washer", and maybe that's true, but loading the dishwasher takes like five minutes of active effort, then you're done. It might take three hours to finish washing them but you're not involved.
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.
It's interesting how you talk about dishwashers stopping you cooking, because I found a bit of the opposite.
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.
To each their own, I found it made it really un-fun to cook anything that required more than two pots because I didn't want to do the dishes.
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.
In my family, this is my primary responsibility (it just so landed that way) and to be honest, it's not really that hard. I didn't even grow up with one and found it trivial to identify the things that the article says:
- 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.
I'm not a fan of dishwashers. You have to handwash the dish, then put it through the dishwasher, then handwash it when it comes out. It seems a lot easier to just handwash it once at full effort.
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.
Because everybody is replying obliquely to this: You should not have to do either of those things. If your dishwasher is working properly, you should be able to put fully-dirty dishes in it and remove fully-clean, dry dishes from it. This is how my dishwasher works and how all dishwashers I have ever owned work.
If your dishwasher does not generally work in this way, it is not working correctly.
My mother had a dishwasher in the late 70's that didn't work properly. I think it was very expensive at the time.
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.
No one is "replying obliquely", I don't think. Generally when I post about this, there's a profusion of indignant outrage (usually about how I should use their magic ritual to propitiate the dishwasher), and one or two people also willing to spend the karma points to say that tracks with their experience.
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.
> how I should use their magic ritual to propitiate the dishwasher
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.
The pre-washing is silly, but the post-washing is totally mental. Why on earth would you post-wash a dish? Your dishwasher must be very dirty. Clean the filter, and also, run a few cycles with a couple of bowls facing up in the bottom, then discard the giant globs of dirt that will collect in them when the cycles are done. This is how to rehabilitate an old dishwasher, assuming it is mechanically working ok.
Not to mention if your dishwasher has a sanitize cycle, you are very likely making the dishes dirtier and spreading new bacteria onto them by post-washing them.
Why bother with the dishwasher if you're already washing the dishes? I don't do any of those manual steps and my dishes come out clean. Modern dishwashers and soap are very good at the entire process.
1) you don’t need to wash the dishes before loading the machine. There is a filter you can clear food out of but most people don’t know about it. Scrape off the solids beforehand leads to less gunk in the filter.
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
My wife is convinced that you need to hand wash dishes before putting them in the dishwasher, so she doesn't use the dishwasher (it came with the house). I actually thought the two types of people in this article were going to be A) people who hand wash dishes before putting them in the dishwasher; and B) people who just put them in the dishwasher and trust it will do its job to clean them.
It's worth mentioning that pre-washing the dishes too clean is actually worse, because the enzymes in dishwasher soap are activated with the organic matter in the food debris.
Wow, I've never seen the two-handwashings version of this complaint! Also, that remark about how people perceive you is worrying. Who are you hanging out with?
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).
Superstition is mostly just holding beliefs that you refuse to test. You can find plenty of that among dishwasher users, but I think you've also demonstrated a fair amount here.
The level of vitriol, and arbitrariness of the various rituals different people are absolutely convinced I must immediately use to see the light (I don't even own a dishwasher, lol), don't really inspire much confidence.
well, you do seem to hold a belief, that people with dishwashers must pre and postwash dishes by hand.
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.
Buy a new dishwasher. I had an insidious dishwasher that went through its entire cycle, but sometimes refused to make things clean. After weeks of trial and error and a few new parts, I finally determined the control board was popping all the detergent into the tub after just a few minutes in the first cycle and then draining and restarting the main cycle with just water. Everything mechanical was working perfectly, but it was literally being stupid at its job. I just couldn't trust it to not do that again, and decided to scrap it and upgrade on a Black Friday sale.
Modern dishwashers are great. I was firmly of your opinion for years, stubbornly a hand washer. Now I rinse dishes until there are no chunks left, sauce, grease, etc is all OK. Put them into the washer, and most evenings decide it's full enough and click start. The next day clean dry dishes are loaded directly into the cabinets.
I lightly rinse the worst dishes while loading until the water gets really hot at the sink next to the dishwasher. Having that prewash be very hot does a lot to make sure it gets it good in my experience.
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.
Modern dishwasher soap contains enzymes that are activated by proteins. Pre-rinsing prevents those enzymes from activating. The dishwasher might do a better job if you don't pre-rinse.
Not at all my experience. I rinse the dishes before they go in as they will likely sit for days and days before I fill up the dishwasher.
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.
Of course, there may be a tipping point where that "simplicity" is just shipping the complexity out to somewhere else. In this case, perhaps this would arise as extra water treatment plants due to the extra water used by hand washing. Obviously not just from you, but if a large amount of us did it this way.
That's my case. My old place had a brand new one and it did everything perfectly. My new place has one that's pretty old and not only does it need a pre-rinse, it doesn't even dry things (and unlike my old one, it needs a rinse aid)! And if it breaks, I'm sure the landlord will replace it with an empty area under the counter.
I think older dishwashers are more likely to have built in garbage disposals which is actually a huge win. On newer dishwashers one of the biggest problems is that people don't clean the filter regularly
If you stuff something covered in egg yolk in there it's coming out with egg yolk on it. If you don't scrape whole chunks of potato off the plate, you're rolling the dice with whether you pull it out of a filter or out of the thin hose between the dishwasher and the drain. The dishwasher's not magic - if it takes a scrub to get it off, you need to scrub it.
I don't know about handwashing after it comes out though, that's crazy.
Egg yolk is no problem whatsoever for a modern dishwasher and detergent. And obviously you don't put whole potato chunks in the machine. Don't be stupid.
re: hard water: your dishwasher has a setting for that. Set it correctly and make the dishwasher salt compartment isn't empty and your dishwasher will deal fine with hard water.
This is a geographical difference. North American market dishwashers don't typically have that; people use whole-dwelling water softeners that feed all washers (including human).
Water softeners aren't actually standard issue in all dishwashers, but if you're replacing your dishwasher it isn't hard to find one with that feature.
I've just been told that it's not standard in North America, but it's definitely a standard feature where I'm at. I've got the cheapest IKEA dishwasher and it has that feature.
Interesting cultural differences cropping up in unexpected places I suppose.
Ok. I quickly rinse the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher, and put them straight back to the cupboard once it's done. I've been washing dishes by hand for 15 years and now I have my first dishwasher. So I know the difference, and I'm loving it.
I don't even rinse - I just throw bigger chunks of food to the garbage can and that's it. I event let the sauce to flow to the bottom of the dishwasher.
We are on a well (rural area). The water is so hard here that when the house was built, they needed both a water softener and an iron filter to treat it.
I had an issue this winter with my septic system freezing up and in order to prevent an overflow before the tank could be pumped, I was told to put the treatment system on bypass (water softener cycles dump a lot of waste water down the drain). Even with the hard well water going through the dishwasher, it never failed to clean the dishes properly. This dishwasher is 22 years old.
These dishwasher discussions to me always are a bit frustrating because so much of it depends.
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.
Not the OP, but this is how my parents use the dishwasher - I think a lot of people don't realize that you don't need to pre-handwash for modern dishwashers.
Especially if you use a small amount of detergent in the pre-wash compartment. Most people (at least in Europe) just use a single tablet in the main wash section. I've seen a massive improvement by putting a teaspoon amount of detergent in with the pre-wash. The ever-wonderful Technology Connections sent me down this path.[1]
Without detergent in the pre-wash compartment, only water is used to pre-soak the dishes.
Then there's the way my mother-in-law uses the dishwasher: turn on the faucet as high as it goes, then rinse each dish so much it could just go straight in the rack, then load the dishwasher, then FINALLY turn the water back off.
https://archive.is/ZkQJA
My mental model for diswashers got a lot better after watching some Technology Connections: https://youtu.be/jHP942Livy0
Best advice from TC: verify the water is hot before starting the dishwasher. Especially if your water heater is located a ways from your kitchen and the pipes aren't well insulated.
Cold water only connection for all dishwashers I've seen in New Zealand. Dishwashers have an internal heating element.
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).
> Are modern US dishwashers plumbed into hot water?
Yes.
It is unsurprising that it varies by country, etc. Below is pure speculation while eating a snack:
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.
The plumber recommended not using hot water from the boiler, since it takes so long for the hot water to start coming through it wasn’t worth it.
I have a hot water recirculator for this. The price I pay is that instead of waiting for hot water at the kitchen sink I've to wait for cold water, as the hot water is recirculated through the cold water pipes.
I have seen a return loop on the hot side, but not returning through the cold side. Do you have more info on this? (I do wonder if recirculating hot through a pipe next to a cold pipe would result in heating the cold)
The thing consists of a) a pump that goes on the output of the water heater, and b) wax-based valves that go between the hot and the cold under each sink where you want hot water without having to wait a long time. The valves turn on when the water on the hot side cools, and they close when it gets hot. The pump stops when the valves and hot faucets are all closed, and it has a timer for scheduling hours of operation. I believe it's this:
So you’re always pumping hot water through your pipes? Does that not end up wasting quite a bit of energy? I guess in winter it’s not a big problem since you’re heating your house anyway, but presumably in summer it is just adding unwanted heat?
In the winter, as you note, it's not much of a waste, and it helps keep the pipes from freezing.
In 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.
That sounds like a great way to get Legionnaire's, unless I'm missing something.
I've been doing it for 15 years. No legionella here.
I have to ask, showers?
Yes - over the last decade or so they removed the heating element in most US dishwashers. So they either are connected to the hot water line, or have a mechanism to heat the water (or both).
I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure that even today almost all US dishwashers have some mechanism to heat the water, just maybe not the giant exposed element in the bottom like older ones. Water out of the tap is going to be on the low end of usable dish-washing temps at the very beginning of a cycle, let alone 45+ minutes later.
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.
I forgot about the exposed element. These days most plastic spatulas withstand high temperature. Back in the day I think every North American family had at least one yellow spatula destroyed by the element.
My dishwasher doesn't have a big exposed heating element in the pan but it still has a water heater to it. It still gets the water very hot even if I start it without getting the hot water flowing first.
Is it still possible to plumb hot water into such dishwashers? Then the heating element have less work...
I bet some manufacturers don't even use temperature sensors in many models, and just assume an approximate incoming water temperature, and heat for a fixed time period according to calculations on amount of water in the system. This guess comes from the impression that cheap temperature sensing circuitry isn't the most reliable long-term.
I bet you're wrong. Is there a website where we can make an adjudicated bet JUST against each other. How many dishwashers come without a hot-wash option? Any dishwasher that didn't heat water enough would struggle with hard fats.
My dishwasher has a scalding 75°C option.
How did you conclude that they aren't the most reliable long-term?
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.)
If true, that is a recipe for a lawsuit if it went wrong.
For me, moving away from pods to a dishwasher liquid (cascade 3x from Costco) made the most difference. I add some liquid in the prewash and some in the main compartment. I had to figure out the right amount to add in each via trial and error. I don't pre rinse or run the hot water beforehand, my dishes come out clean.
We had to switch from pods to liquid because the pods make way too many suds, so the emergency float shut off was getting stuck.
Source; that time I replaced my fucking dishwasher because I couldn't figure out why it kept leaking so much everywhere.
I had the opposite problem. I used the gel and the dishwasher wouldn’t completely drain. I had someone out to look at it and they couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I tried a pod as a last ditch effort and it worked.
I’ve since moved and use the powder with my current one, as recommended by Technology Connections, and have had good luck.
I'm surprised you made the switch to liquid and not to powder. It's so much cheaper and not as fussy as liquid. That plus a tiny bottle of rinse aid that lasts forever winds up giving me the cleanest dishes.
I tried using powder as well, but the dishes weren't coming out as clean. I will give powder another shot when my current liquid runs out
We use pods, don’t mess with pre-rinse, dishes come out clean. Don’t worry about water temp. We do use jet dry otherwise the dishes come out wet.
There are no dishwashers in Europe that can be connected to hit water. I had no idea that this is a thing somewhere.
Are US washing machines connected to hot water as well?
Yes! US washing machines have dual water intakes: one for cold and one for hot.
I wonder how much this really matters. For me my dishwasher is far enough from the hot water heater that it generally takes several gallons for the water to run hot. But the wash cycle is 2+ hours long and uses very minimal water (~3 gallons/cycle). Even if I preheated the lines using the tap near the washer, it wouldnt even be lukewarm by the end of the wash cycle.
I recently moved into a home where the previous tenants told us they didn't use the dishwasher because it didn't actually clean the dishes. Having seen TC, I checked the kitchen tap and sure enough it behaved like yours: it took a good 60 seconds to get hot.
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.
I think the most crucial factor is that the initial pre-rinse cycle is usually relatively short, so pre-heating the water means that cycle is done with hot water. My dishwasher at least starts out rinsing for maybe 15-20 minutes before draining and refilling the tub. I also think there is likely some effect in that the main cleaning cycle will at least start out with hot tap water.
The first cycle in the wash is where the hot water makes the biggest difference.
My dishes have gotten a lot cleaner since I started running the tap.
Trying this tonight.
How'd it go?
It worked much better. The silverware were perfect. Usually there are a few that need to be hand-washed.
Awesome, spread the word!
> I wonder how much this really matters. For me my dishwasher is far enough from the hot water heater that it generally takes several gallons for the water to run hot.
(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".
2+ hours long??? Surely you're exaggerating
A lot of newer dishwashers have longer cycles to reduce water usage (and I presume get government environmental certifications like EPA Energy Star?). More soak time means less water needed.
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.
Mine (Bosch 500 series) has a super long drying cycle, what feels like 30+ minutes after it's done washing.
My generic GE dishwasher defaults to a few hours, it feels closer to 4h than 2h. There is also an overnight mode that seems to take almost 8h. And then a quick wash mode that takes 1h.
2.5h here.
The best way to do that... Pre-rinse!!!
Pre-rinsing uses way more water than is typically necessary just to get the water hot, especially given that to be an effective pre-rinse you're going to want the water to be hot already before you even start.
You don't rinse everything! There's always a few items that need an extra squirt before they go in. (Like pots and pans.) By the time those few items have an extra squirt, the water in the pipes is hot enough to start the dishwasher.
Don't. I used to do it till I read an article telling me not to do that.
Remove solid gunk. Load dishwasher. Make sure you have Rinse-aid in the dishwasher. Run. Done. Comes out clean.
Rinse aids are toxic substances that will harm your stomach.
previous hn article and discussion: “Gut epithelial barrier damage caused by dishwasher detergents and rinse aids (sciencedirect.com)”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38275060
There is no research that states such. Most online articles are referencing a study done on professional dishwashers, in which they complete their task within 2 minutes and some rinse aid was still found on the dishes.
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.
> Home dishwashers, the ones that take 4 hours on average
I've never had one that took 4 hours. The most is about 2.5 hours.
There is absolutely no need for rinse aids if you already wash the utensils with water before putting the in the dishwasher. This is good practice.
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?
All restaurants and food service facilities use “rinse agents” or “drying agents”; they simply never have the time or capacity to air-dry dishes and silverware, so eff whatever the training courses tell us to do, from the County Department of Public Health. Just slather everything with chemicals and make sure nobody can smell them from the dining room or taste it on a spoon.
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.
If you're going to spend time doing that, why not just wash the dishes by hand anyway?
That takes significantly longer and uses significantly more water.
I can't recall ever using a dishwasher that had a connection to the hot water line.
I've never had one that wasn't connected to the hot water line.
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.
Well both are not always available. In many countries, there is no hot water tank/line. There are only inline heaters or very small tanks locally where needed (each bathroom and kitchen sink). Then, you buy appliances such as dishwashers and clothes washers that also have inline heaters built-in (and you don't need to think about this, in such a region, this is the default thing that is sold).
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.
Everyone in the uk has a central hot water heater, and nobody has a hot-water plumbed dishwasher. Presumably the 230V supply is enough to heat the water up quickly.
Do you also have hot water plumbed washing machines?
In the US, yes washing machines are generally connected to both hot and cold water. Unlike dishwashers which need to get even hotter than hot water, washing machines generally don't have any internal heating element at all.
Our dishwashers in Europe must be connected to cold water (I just checked a manual)
If it takes x gallons for your hot water to run through, and your dishwasher only consumes <x gallons before stopping long enough for your hot water line to cool again, then connecting your dishwasher to your hot water line would both waste hot water and never get any.
Not sure why you were downvoted. This sounds like absolutely crucial advice for people in countries where dishwashers don't heat the water on their own. I've never seen one like that in my life, but yeah, sounds important.
When the dishwasher has to heat the water, it's slower than from the water heater.
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.)
I know this is common knowledge now, but just for people who might not realize it: a typical North American NEMA 5-15R receptacle will indeed deliver 120V 15A electricity, but the electrical grid is split-phase 240V. Right across from my dish washer is an electric range; most of these require 240V 30A or 50A receptacles (I think mine is 30A, but I could be mis-remembering.) So it's not like we couldn't have higher power dishwasher, but if you already have central water heating it's kind of senseless to heat the water at the dishwasher.
Ah, I forgot about North America being 120 V, that would indeed explain it. IIRC that's also why electric kettles are not really a thing there while being ubiquitous where I live.
Most people I know have an electric kettle here in the US. Every office I've been to has had one in the break room. Anyone who drinks tea or eats a lot of ramen or drinks anything but drip coffee will have a kettle.
It's really more that historically Americans have been fine with drip style coffee makers instead of drinking pour overs or tea.
I think that has more to do with Americans not drinking a lot of hot tea.
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.
This is popular in the Netherlands (the only country in Europe where I saw this)
(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#/...
I feel like the two types of dishwasher people are clearly delineated by those who have and have not watched the Technology Connections videos on dishwashers.
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
How about a third :)
I've seen the technology connections video, continue to use pods, and continue not to pre-rinse the dishes
There are two types of PEOPLE, there's lots of different animals /jk
Many types... I've seen the Technology Connections video and use whatever, mostly liquid detergent. After running a few experiments and coming away unimpressed, I've kept on pre-rinsing.
I've seen the video and tried switching from pods (which I assume is the same thing as a tab, just never heard that name before) to powder with some power in the prewash compartment without prerinsing 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.
Pod is with liquid, tab is with compresse powder.
Some brands like Cascade produce solid compressed powder tablets. Same general concept as the pods, just no fluid load or pouch
Dishwasher companies have tried for a long time to get people to stop pre-washing their dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. I remember ads from the 80s or 90s with people putting full cakes, or a baked on lasagna pan into the dishwasher and it coming out clean.
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.
And you have no residual food in the filter to clean out on a very short and regular basis? You do clean the filter out, don't you?
I had a GE Profile dishwasher from the 2000's when I moved into my current home. It was abused by the previous owner and sold as not working. I completely rebuilt it and it worked great for a while until it's logic board died and replacements were hard or expensive to source.
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.
A masticator is what I am missing in a dishwasher. We do not have that in Europe (not the faucet electrical thing that mixes and destroys organic dtuff you put in the faucet - this is forbidden)
For most of the article I felt like the author's learnings were pretty obvious, particularly in regards to the water jet direction and the minimum necessary dish arrangement. They didn't even get into detail about the heat and steam.
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.
I clean out our dishwasher filter every few months and I've never seen any residual food get caught by the filter. As long as you scape off the food bits it's fine. It'd getting to the point where I'm checking the filter less and less often.
I’m a Bosch dishwasher powder soap with some in the bottom for presoak but still pre-rinse type person. Clean the filter once a month (takes 2 minutes literally) use jet dry (or equivalent) and I have zero complaints about how my 20 year old dishwasher performs!
I too have a Bosch dishwasher and use powdered soap. I also add in some citric acid to help with the really hard water we have in my area. I pre-rinse everything though.
If it's a Bosch, it's probably got a salt compartment and a way to configure it for the water hardness.
Pods work fine without prerinsing
You know, the hot water tip is great, but cleaning the filter is really the best thing I’ve found to keeping it working well. Residue always seems to indicate a dirty filter.
I think it depends on the kind of residue. If we're just talking about caked-on stuff that you recognize that didn't wash off, I'd start with hot water and adding the pre-wash powder. But if you get stuff on your dishes that you don't recognize... yeah, that's a filter.
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!)
I’m mostly referring to my own dishwasher which I use all the time and understand. But for a long time I never cleaned the filter and then one day I did and suddenly everything made sense.
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.
I can't decide if it would be cool to live next door to him or if I'd never get anything done ever again.
Note that European dishwashers are quite different in a few aspects.
Welp, thank you for that. About to use my dishwasher for the first time since childhood.
I used to be uptight about how to load the dishwater until I put away a load that was packed by my partner, "like a raccoon on meth", and noticed there wasn't a difference in the cleanliness.
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...
Some things won't matter, some will. I think it's changed over time as dishwashers and detergents got better.
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.
Another example is plates tall enough to block the top spinner. Or plates pressed together so much that water can’t get in between.
When I was cleaning my dishwasher I realized there are two ways to configure it: with a in-sink garbage disposal, and without. If you don't have the garbage disposal part hooked up there is simply nowhere for the chunks to go and they accumulate at the bottom of the washer beneath a filter.
What do you mean by finish? I put all my knives in without issue but probably wouldn't do wooden handles
> I used to be uptight about how to load the dishwater until I put away a load that was packed by my partner, "like a raccoon on meth", and noticed there wasn't a difference in the cleanliness.
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.
On the other side of this argument, I've seen "just run the dishwasher twice" used as shorthand for giving yourself permission to do whatever is needed to get the job done and not letting perfectionism paralyze you from making progress.
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...
> On the other side of this argument, I've seen "just run the dishwasher twice" used as shorthand for giving yourself permission to do whatever is needed to get the job done and not letting perfectionism paralyze you from making progress.
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.
Oh no. 2 loads mean 2 unloads. I cannot exploit my children anymore (their words, not mine) because they are gone so you better concentrate to put everything in one to.
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"Give yourself permission" here means acknowledging you're doing a "good enough" job (for now) instead of a "perfect" job, and not beating yourself up about it in the short term. The Wiki article on self-compassion [1] has more context on the therapeutic value of practicing self-compassion and the impact on measurements of life satisfaction/happiness, curiosity, resilience, etc.
Depending on the task/behavior, you may carry the same attitude into the medium/long term, OR figure out how to course-correct medium/long term to align with your values. E.g., if one of your core values is militant conservation of water, either because it's expensive or one of the disappearing resources on Earth, you might strategize ways to conserve your energy to do the best possible dishwasher-loading job every day. That's what I was getting at when I said these type of tasks are "microcosms" because sometimes they reveal misalignment of values.
Why do you say "therapist" here (with the air quotes)?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-compassion
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You are being incredibly judgemental about people you don't even know.
You say that like it is a bad thing.
It is, dude with the award for most cowardly hacker news behavior.
Cowardly?????
> This is lazy and wasteful.
Modern dishwashers are incredibly efficient. They consume insignificant amounts of power and water compared to heating or cooling your home, or taking an extra shower.
Your opinions are your own, but I don't have the slightest hesitation in running an extra dishwasher cycle if it makes my life the slightest bit easier.
I remind you of what I was replying to.
>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.
This is not about efficiency of the use of the earth's resources. It is about the modern-day priests of America (therapists) telling people that it is okay and good to simply put no effort into anything. That it is acceptable to "struggle to wash dishes" Instead of this person being checked into a mental hospital, instead they are given a coping strategy.
What next? Not doing well in school? Don't worry about it, just use AI to cheat! Not making enough money? Just steal, what's the big deal? Don't beat yourself up, you don't have to be perfect, just get through the day with all your fucking spoons.
One shouldn't ever be anxious about such things as being wasteful. Mindful, sure, but not anxious - being anxious about such things is actually a pretty good reason for therapy.
That’s not what they said. Don’t be anxious about being wasteful, don’t be wasteful! It’s not some lofty goal or something, but a part of growing up and being a responsible adult.
yes, but if trying not to be wasteful creates an anxiety, then you need to treat the anxiety first. in that case giving yourself permission to be wasteful is what matters, and responding to that by telling to person not to be wasteful is counterproductive.
No, that’s just the wrong way to think about it. It’s something that needs doing, so you do it. Are you anxious about going to the toilet? You’re not. You do it as it’s necessary.
Sometimes it helps to stop thinking and start doing. I’ve been there. It takes practice.
There are people that are anxious about going to the public toilet so I would say your argument is invalid.
Speaking of wastefulness and dishwashers, I rent an apartment which does not include a dishwasher. In fact, no apartment I've ever rented included a dishwasher, although many have included a clothes washer and dryer installed.
My kitchen does include a garbage disposal, which is a nuisance, because even though my ex-girlfriend called it "dispose-all", it disposes of nothing, except it effectively annoys 10-30 neighbor families if you manage to clog up the lateral drainpipes, and I don't rely on it to chew up food or any solid waste at all. The only reason I activate it is because it speeds up the draining of water in the dual sink. And also because, if I don't run it on a weekly basis, the motor will seize up in a way that requires a maintenance call, and you don't want to call in maintenance.
Anyway, I wash my dishes by hand, and the bane of my existence is dirty dishes in the kitchen sink when I'm quite hungry and it's 7am and I just want to get breakfast started, but the sink isn't clear and everything I need is dirty, and needs soaking time before the residue will budge, and so I end up punting and ordering delivery anyway.
Washing dishes is a pipeline, a process, that can take 2 hours, or it can last 12 hours, or it can take 3 days to complete. I often don't get around to that magnificent endgame of putting away the dishes but I leave them in the drying-rack until I need them again. It's like my "L2 Cache" for kitchenware, that drying rack. And guess what, when I go to wash dishes again, I often discover there's no room in the rack, and I rip out my hair a little bit and I stop washing the dishes long enough to empty the rack, and then I'm exhausted and I go to lie down in bed instead of washing dishes, or starting dinner, and guess who's ordering delivery again?
So one of the sanity-preserving hacks I've developed is using paper plates, paper bowls, plastic cold cups, and plastic flatware. And this works great for cold cereal, and the raw eggs I drink, and microwaved frozen meals that I can plop into a bowl or put on a plate in order to cut them into pieces.
And I thought that cloth napkins and dish towels were cool, because I was Saving the Earth, and for a couple of years I owned not a single roll of paper towels; I used cloth napkins and I laundered them, and now I use both, and if something is going to stain my precious cloth, then I use paper towels or a disposable sponge on it first.
And they called me "wasteful" for using disposable kitchenware, but in reality I only own a single tablepspoon and a single teaspoon. I own about 3 forks, and 2 butter knives. I recently purchased a set of 4 identical steak knives, because a good sharp knife to cut meats is essential. But most of my flatware is disposable, including semi-disposable chopsticks (set of 8 for about $4).
And guess what? None of the delivery services include plasticware anymore. None of the restaurants tuck it into your bag. They used to give you, like, a packaged knife-fork-spoon-napkin-salt-pepper, sealed in cellophane. Then COVID-19 happened, and plasticware is a cost center, and restaurants hate delivery services for many reasons, and no restaurant carries knives, even plastic butter knives. They are still usually sending me plastic straws, but I nevertheless keep on hand a stock of plastic bendy-straws to use with every beverage.
So basically whether I order delivery or I make food at home, my plasticware suffices, and yeah, it's wasteful and I do not wash or rinse or reuse any of them, and I don't really care, because it is a sanity-preserving strategy that works quite well, because it is much easier to just tuck into a meal when I have flatware ready to use.
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That's the real difference. I'm playing Tetris, and getting an amazing score. She's leaving a bunch of stuff on the side for the next cycle, or hand washing them.
Crushing the high score here too. Just recently got an entire line of colored kids plastic glasses on the top rack, I swear it made a do-do-do tone when I stopped that last cup in there. :)
For some reason my husband insists on using the "1 hour speed wash" setting and can't figure out why dishes are coming out still dirty...
the only reason to have particular care is to avoid chipping
What I notice is that the dishes and glasses don't chip when I put them in and I do when anyone else does. Don't matter if there are more clean dishes per load if they're broken, people.
You are thinking like someone who buys the dishes, rather than someone who wants the person who buys the dishes to get off their case about it so they can do something more interesting.
Similarly, I used to stress about loading the dishwasher when I was a teen. I would spend so much time loading it that I have myself a neck ache from leaning over and I could have saved time by washing the dishes by hand.
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.
IMHO the main advantage of neatly loading dishes neatly is that unloading becomes a 60 second exercise as opposed to a 5 minute one. It's not so much that I don't have 5 minutes to spare, but my back appreciates it if I can get it done quicker. I get 4 plates with each hand, silverware is already sorted neatly... it's just overall a better experience.
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.
I think that heavily depends on the specific dishwasher.
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.
I like to re-try everything a new way occasionally even if I've been doing it one way for 20 years.
I view it as an area where diminishing returns are almost as soon as you get started. Using a dish washer is already getting a TON of work done for me that I would otherwise have to do. Trying to squeeze any extra from it is kind of silly. I'll always have to run it some more tomorrow.
The only trick is to not block anything from the water, or a direct reflection of it. Other than that, it's a free-for-all.
>and noticed there wasn't a difference in the cleanliness.
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.
> dealies
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.
In one of my jobs (civil service) I had to pack and unpack a cheap dish washer, for a horde of unruly kids each day.
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.
The author evaluated their position, measured the situation, sought more information, adjusted their position, independently tested it and updated their position
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.
I had a much less rigorous version of this in mind after reading the article but this is exactly what I enjoyed about it. I think you're right that this isn't frequently documented and maybe if it was such responses to problems would be more common.
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It’s always been like this, but the old media landscape prevented the coarse and low class from succeeding by making navigation of all the subtle prestige granting institutions of the upper class a prerequisite.
Big "im14andthisisdeep" energy.
12 actually. Or are you trying to insinuate that my nephew doesn’t exist and that my comment is a fabrication?
They’re just talking about the energy your 12 year old nephew has.
I appreciate this, thank you. I frequently misinterpret this sort of thing.
(It is/was a subreddit where many observations of this nature are posted.)
I believe the appropriate response is TIL?
I'm surprised this Jon Richardson bit hasn't been posted already. It's an incredible piece of comedy, even moreso given that it's about loading the dishwasher.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ymh8o6GI_g
I’m in the process of adding a second dishwasher in the house. One for clean plates and one for dirty plates.
You joke, but I use my dishwasher exclusively as a dish rack. It's just so much faster to do the washing by hand.
This makes zero sense. Are you considering the machine time or just loading? Also, machines wash 1000 times better than hand ever could, uses less water, and doesn’t dry out your hands.
> machines wash 1000 times better than hand ever could
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.
Dishwashers, with rare exception, are much better at washing dishes than people are. They can use water temperatures that would burn skin, pressures that would bruise, and can keep going at it for HOURS without getting tired.
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.
Good tablets come with a built-ij dose of rinse aid now. The modern multicoloured ones work much better than the compressed detergent ones.
Tablets still can't be split into pre and post-wash and they tend to WAY overdo the amount of detergent, because the manufacturer has no idea how hard your water is.
To be fair, I have no idea how hard my water is either.
And yet I've never had any cleaning issues.
You're missing the point. I'm not talking about people lazily washing their dishes by hand. I'm talking about focused hand-washing of dishes with many corners, vs. sticking them in the dish-washer.
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.
> 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.
So how are you measuring, if not by eyeballing it? Can you swab it and check for microbes? Did you?
Why would that matter? I'm not the one who stated opinions as fact:
> 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
You did in fact make several claims of fact, and then followed up with an appeal to authority as a microbiologist. Having those credentials means you probably could have verified your claims, but you don't appear to have done so, so we get to hand-wave at each other.
> 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.
I find it hard to believe that you're still doubling down but only selectively detecting unsupported "claims of fact" without support especially since I made weaker, more situational claims. The original poster commented:
> 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 shiny from a dishwasher.
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).
> Glassware looks shiny from a dishwasher.
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.
Maybe glassware is just easier to evaluate whether it's clean or not?
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.
It makes perfect sense. It takes about 20 seconds to wash 1 dish.
If you're only using one dish, then sure it's probably better to wash by hand. No one I know has ever suggested running a dishwasher for one 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.
I'm usually getting ~40 dishes and ~40 utensils into the dishwasher per load, which at 20 seconds each is like half an hour. I can load the dishwasher a lot quicker than that.
You also need to count the time for it to wash them and unload them. Washing is async which means its less active work, but it’s definitely includes in how long it takes.
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 need to count that time. There are very few situations where the time which is not active work time matters. Dishwasher uses up less of your time (and saves money, energy, water). Note the origin statement: It's just so much faster to do the washing by hand. It's completely wrong, but makes clear what kind of time is to be measured here.
> You also need to count the time for it to wash them
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.
The time the dishwasher takes to wash the dishes is time you yourself can use for literally anything else. Not to mention the savings on the water bill and the much higher quality of the wash. The only objection I can think of is if you do not have enough dishes, which means the dishwasher "locks in" the dishes for some time, but the real solution to that is to simply get extra dishes so that you have some to use while the dishwasher is running – seriously, it will pay for itself in no time.
Sure. I'm in a household of 2 and wash after every meal. It takes 5-10 minutes, and I'm thorough. Then unload it once a day.
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.
I’m not joking. I am indeed in the process of doing so. Working on the placement at the moment. Requires extending the counter.
Also, I’ve worked as a dishwasher and don’t want to do more of that ever.
Even if the washing happens when you're sleeping?
Hah, we have a habit of using them as a drying rack after handwashing too. With the lower rack pulled out and resting on the open door, so air circulates well and things dry pretty fast.
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...
Dishwashers are a lot more water efficient than most people hand-washing.
and you can put on a podcast
Ah yes, the genius lazy method You just need to keep in mind that there's much less space in a dishwasher than in a closet
There’s actually a 3rd type that I discovered while house sitting: people who load their knives pointy side up. Absolutely insanity.
I don't understand what's wrong with this.
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..!!
It's easy to cut yourself emptying the dishwasher if knives are point up, but since you're in the kitchen which can have slippery floors and there's usually an open door low to the ground and a lot of moving back and forth there's also a small risk of slipping/tripping and falling onto the knives final destination style and impaling yourself on them. Ideally pointy things point down and spoons go up.
Dishwasher utensil baskets have compartments tall and narrow enough that the knife is not going to fall out. I haven't had that happen ever in my life. Even with heavy handles. (If it's as large as a chef's knife, however, that lies down flat in the upper rack.)
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...
It seems like the comment you're replying to is likely referring to butter knives. But if your paring knives match your other flatware it seems like a pretty reasonable confusion.
This is a mistake you only make once. Lesson learned when I put a boning knife through my arm in the dish rack one day. Cost me a trip in the ambulance. Absolute insanity– correct! I don't even know how it got in there with the rest of the utensils. But I triple check the sink area every time now.
Buying a dishwasher with a third rack right at the top for cutlery fixes that.
I have a dishwasher that does this. It was in the house already, I used it for at least a month wondering why it didn't have a proper place to put cutlery before I tried cleaning the top and realized there was a drawer hidden there!
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.
Some dishwashers have an option to change the height of bottom rack by moving upper rack up or down. You should check that, maybe it's you dishwasher too.
This is the absolute best feature any dishwasher can have. I can’t go back to having one of those awkward cutlery baskets now. Besides doing a terrible job with the cutlery, it just wastes so much space that could be used for plates and cups.
Why are pointy knives going in the dishwasher, though?
Some of us aren’t Kobe beef chefs and like to actually clean our utensils and dishes…
If you have any knives with wooden handles and you want them to last, probably shouldn't be putting them in the dishwasher.
> like to actually clean our utensils and dishes…
If only there was some other way to clean things...
I haven't owned any kitchen knives with wooden handles for years. Probably part of the gradual replacement of plastic for wood that's happening just about everywhere.
Which other ways are there without burning a layer off your skin and that clean as well as a dishwasher machine?
I do this, but I'm also against pointy knives. There is no reason for a knife to be pointy unless you are a professional knife thrower.
I've had so many fights about this. "They wash better, just be careful!" Absolute insanity is right.
What we really need is the double-wide or triple-wide dishwasher. If everything fits in one load, you're always all clean in the morning and all dirty in the evening. Now it's just a daily habit of putting things away in the morning and popping things in after you're done eating each meal.
How about just keeping two dishwashers? One starts full of clean stuff and you use it like a cupboard, taking stuff out of it as you use it. The other starts empty and you add stuff to it after using it until you have transferred everything from one to the other. Then you run the full one and start again.
Ours is a Fisher & Paykel dual dishdrawer, which does exactly that, in the space of a single unit.
I saw this "hack" on instagram or something and if I ever get a kitchen big enough for two dishwashers I fully plan on doing this.
Doesn't really need two dishwashers, just two set of racks and a cupboard that can accommodate the other set.
Why don't we just build the dishwasher into the cabinets? Then putting them away and washing them is the same chore.
You can purchase dishwashers designed to have a cosmetic door overlay.
You can also do this for drawer style dishwasher. Giving it quite an inconspicuous look.
Do you get through more than one dishwasher load of dishes in a day? That seems like an awful lot of dishes.
You're American right?;)
We would probably call it a “freedom”washer though.
Please. It’s welcome that compared to fridges dishwashers are pretty standardized.
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.
> Here’s the third big thing: Rinsing isn’t necessary. Oma Blaise Ford, a senior executive editor at Better Homes and Gardens, told me that overrinsing is “one of the most common mistakes in modern dishwasher loading.” She recommends scraping leftover food off your dishes into the trash with a rubber spatula and immediately loading them into the machine, without even turning on the faucet.
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.
I don't know how many arguments I've had with how many partners I've had about this.
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.
If it's not full enough to run, but you also don't want wet food residue to dry on and stick, most dishwashers have a "Quick Rinse" setting that's designed for exactly this purpose.
Scrape, load, and then run Quick Rinse. Much more efficient than rinsing by hand!
Hell is other people’s dishwasher organization strategies.
Dishwasher testing needs material analogues to:
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.
My favorite dishwasher hack: one bowl, one spoon, one fork. Use them for everything.
Seriously! Family of 5? Five bowls, five spoons ... Maybe have some extras in a hard to find place on the rare occasion of entertaining.
My desire to share a meal in my home is not fully dead but I admire the efficiency.
Ha! To clarify, one set per person. Each person only uses and is responsible for their own set.
When I was in university with three roommates we had one roommate who would leave all the dishes dirty in the kitchen, so when he left for Christmas break, the three of us made the executive decision to go down to one set of dishes per person.
An elderly friend of mine who lives alone keeps his most used dishes in the dishwasher. Need a clean dish? Find one in there. Have a dirty dish? Put it in the dishwasher? Can't find a clean dish? Run the dishwasher.
Maybe not quite efficient from a water/energy/soap perspective. But efficient for his time and attention.
Convenience is the root of all evil.
We recently had someone at our house to repair our dishwasher, because we suddenly started hearing a horrible grinding sound when closing the door.
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.
I think probably the latter. Either that, or your dishes are made out of tungsten or something. (If so, I'd love to see your dish collection. That would be rad.)
I have heard that there are "commercial" dishwashers which can clean a load of dishes in under 20 minutes. Is that true? Has anyone tried one of them?
More like 90-120s. There's the type that close from the top (expensive) and the conveyor type (more expensive), but they're incredibly fast, mostly because they blast near-boiling water at pressure-washer velocities. They also don't typically have a "drying" cycle -- because the dishes are so superheated they dry themselves in another half minute. Downside is no plastics or anything else meltable. See https://www.cafemutfak.com/en/blog/content/industrial-dishwa...
Having worked in a commercial kitchen, I can say these dishwashers are not really made for the same purpose as home dishwashers. The commerical ones with the 2 minute cycle kinda suck at cleaning, probably because of the shorter cycle and minimal design. They don't remove stuck-on food. They only remove what can be removed by spraying water for a short while. What they will do well is sanitise your dishes, because the water is fucking hot. It was an art form in the kitchen to find the most efficient balance between prescrubbing/presoaking the dishes and getting them through the dishwasher.
I worked at a Pizza Hut in college that had one that washed a full load of dishes in just a few minutes. I'm blanking on the exact time, but I'm almost certain it was under 10 minutes. It got extremely hot, so it probably wouldn't work for a lot of dishes people have at home, but it was very efficient! We saved at least a few hours of labor a day from it, and an unquantifiable amount of sanity.
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.
I've used the type that are common in bars/pubs/nightclubs in the UK and Denmark. They take 20 minutes or so to heat the water, then each cycle is just 2 minutes or so. The glasses are loaded on trays, so it's best to have a place to load up a tray and another for them to cool down.
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-...
Yep, I’ve only volunteered in commercial kitchens for events and stuff before, and the ones I’ve been in have essentially an assembly line for dishes from sinks to a dishwasher box that took 2-3 plastic cubes of dishes, and washed them in like, 5 minutes. No drying though.
Sure, but you'd need to be quite dedicated to install one in a home:
- 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.
I used a commercial dishwasher in an Airbnb that had the fittings for a catering operation. It had an initial heat up time of like twenty minutes, after that each cycle of dishes took like... two minutes? Maybe five.
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.
Yes they're in every restaurant
I'm the sloppy person at home, but I hate seeing dirty dishes, so I do the dishes. I squeeze every bit of space out of the dishwasher. There is One Right Way to do it. That said, if someone throws dishes in there willy nilly, I couldn't care less, as long as it gets done. It's basically Postel's Law: be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send/do.
One thing I learned is that a dishwasher is a machine does the work for you, so you can relax.
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.
The article says 3-5 gallons for a dishwasher cycle, but this is loads!
Recent UK dishwashers use less than 2.
I just wash dishes by hand while I wait fo the kettle to boil for my after-food cup of tea.
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.
You don't need to pre-rinse.
I write my posts with a chisel and clay tablet because it makes me conscious of how many words I should be using (e.g. as few as possible). No, writing words is cheap now, so I can use more words.
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.
> If I have to pre-rinse dishes for the dishwasher, I might as well just rinse it fully then and there.
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.
There ain't no party like a Hacker News talking about dishwashers party because a Hacker News talking about dishwashers party don't stop!
>Bringing any kind of technology into these sacred spaces saves time, but it can also alienate us from the labor of caring for those we love. Maybe this is why so many people don’t trust, don’t use, or want to command their dishwashers. “The strong opinions associated with how to do it could be people trying to retain some semblance of control in a world where technological devices are doing things so much for us,” Janning said of the dishwasher. “I do wonder if there’s a little bit of fear of losing the humanity associated with our domestic lives.”
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.
Or a bidet…
HN seems to be out to disprove the assertion that there are two types.
"10" Types.
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 . . .
The dishwashers in my various homes these past 25 years have served as extra plate storage with only occasional running to keep them in working order. Otherwise, we just wash our dishes by hand. I don't see the point of letting your dirty dishes accumulate in the dishwasher or the sink for that matter, when it is a simple and pleasant task to just clean them, dry them, and put them away. The alternative is pretty disgusting. As you cook, simply use spare moments to clean pots and pans as you go. Those can't go in the dishwasher anyway, so nothing gained there. Moreover, you have to clean the dishes before you put them in the dishwasher in any case so that the dishwasher can actually get them clean. Dishwashers feel like a double-taxation chore. You're already scraping off food, running the plates under water, and giving them a brief scrub even if you're using a dishwasher. And then you have to wait for the thing to finish while that dish or utensil is unavailable. Plus the little soap packets or pills or whatever are another hassle.
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 pans that can go in the dishwasher, or just accept they will have a reduced lifespan.
- 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?
why would I want to clutter my life with more than needed? Why would anyone want to be surrounded by dirty dishes, even in a partially loaded dishwasher? It takes time to fill one up unless you're feeding a lot of people at once. If it's not full, then either it's partially full of dirty dishes, or the sink is, or the dirty dishes are just lying around. All three of those options are disgusting. "Who cares?" Why not just live in filth? Why take out the trash before it overflows? Why clean up food mess from the counter or floor before it attracts vermin? Why bother keeping things neat and tidy?
Dirty dishes, that are <12 hours old, out of sight in a shut dish washer, are hardly problematic.
Doing the dishes just once a day saved water, energy and time.
"Pleasant task" sounds like an oxymoron to me. We have video games now, the spectrum for "pleasant" has shifted and household tasks are toward the bottom.
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.
Different strokes for different folks. The day I stopped having to hand wash dishes because my apartment had a dishwasher was a great feeling. Handwashing dishes is for suckers (and so is pre-rinsing).
My work had a dishwasher that performed terribly when we first moved in. About 6 months later we complained and they replaced it. Worked slightly better, but still sub par (dishes came out gray with bits of food still on them, with or without prewash). About 6 months later, the water heater leaked and had to be replaced. For the past year since then, the dishwasher works amazing (no prewash and dishes shine). I don’t know what transpired to cause the change. I was guessing that somehow the aging hot water heater just leached too much mineral into the water or something that the soap formulas could not overcome?
tldr sometimes it really does just seem like superstitious voodoo is really what matters with dishwashers
Water heaters have different temperature settings that are supposed to be adjusted depending on the occupants of a building in order to avoid scalding.
The old water heater was probably set to 110°F or something, and the new one to 140°F.
If I don't like how the dishwasher did, I just run it again. Either the plates are coming out clean, or I'm buying new plates.
Okay - here is the deal. If it not water soluble or emulusifiable - it goes in the bin. No wood or knives, aluminium only the pieces you don't care. Order them so any piece has at least some waterflow and arms spin. Small stuff - top basket. Throw some detergent in the container and a dash outside for the pre rinse cycle. Here is the most important part - ignore the auto/eco and other planet saving or smart programs. Put it on big pots and pans heavily soiled - instead of 60C those programs operate on 75 to 80C degrees. If you can't fit everything in one go - the sink makes good temporary storage area.
You have to special kind of person to obsess over dishwasher.
> Here is the most important part - ignore the auto/eco and other planet saving or smart programs.
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.)
I refuse to use a dishwasher. I don’t think it makes anything faster or better. When I was a child in the seventies my household chore was loading the dishwasher, but my mom always said I did it wrong.
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.
Everyone always says that they can "wash dishes faster than the washer", and maybe that's true, but loading the dishwasher takes like five minutes of active effort, then you're done. It might take three hours to finish washing them but you're not involved.
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.
It's interesting how you talk about dishwashers stopping you cooking, because I found a bit of the opposite.
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.
To each their own, I found it made it really un-fun to cook anything that required more than two pots because I didn't want to do the dishes.
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.
The trick is to only own/use one set of dishes. This effectively prevents you from letting them pile up.
You will not live in a place without a dishwasher, while I refuse to use them, ever.
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.
In my family, this is my primary responsibility (it just so landed that way) and to be honest, it's not really that hard. I didn't even grow up with one and found it trivial to identify the things that the article says:
- 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.
I'm not a fan of dishwashers. You have to handwash the dish, then put it through the dishwasher, then handwash it when it comes out. It seems a lot easier to just handwash it once at full effort.
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.
Because everybody is replying obliquely to this: You should not have to do either of those things. If your dishwasher is working properly, you should be able to put fully-dirty dishes in it and remove fully-clean, dry dishes from it. This is how my dishwasher works and how all dishwashers I have ever owned work.
If your dishwasher does not generally work in this way, it is not working correctly.
My mother had a dishwasher in the late 70's that didn't work properly. I think it was very expensive at the time.
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.
No one is "replying obliquely", I don't think. Generally when I post about this, there's a profusion of indignant outrage (usually about how I should use their magic ritual to propitiate the dishwasher), and one or two people also willing to spend the karma points to say that tracks with their experience.
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.
> how I should use their magic ritual to propitiate the dishwasher
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.
The pre-washing is silly, but the post-washing is totally mental. Why on earth would you post-wash a dish? Your dishwasher must be very dirty. Clean the filter, and also, run a few cycles with a couple of bowls facing up in the bottom, then discard the giant globs of dirt that will collect in them when the cycles are done. This is how to rehabilitate an old dishwasher, assuming it is mechanically working ok.
Not to mention if your dishwasher has a sanitize cycle, you are very likely making the dishes dirtier and spreading new bacteria onto them by post-washing them.
Why bother with the dishwasher if you're already washing the dishes? I don't do any of those manual steps and my dishes come out clean. Modern dishwashers and soap are very good at the entire process.
1) you don’t need to wash the dishes before loading the machine. There is a filter you can clear food out of but most people don’t know about it. Scrape off the solids beforehand leads to less gunk in the filter.
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
> So the dishwasher is what I trust to fully disinfect my dishes
The water probably doesn't get hot enough, unless the dishwasher has a sanitize cycle.
My wife is convinced that you need to hand wash dishes before putting them in the dishwasher, so she doesn't use the dishwasher (it came with the house). I actually thought the two types of people in this article were going to be A) people who hand wash dishes before putting them in the dishwasher; and B) people who just put them in the dishwasher and trust it will do its job to clean them.
It's worth mentioning that pre-washing the dishes too clean is actually worse, because the enzymes in dishwasher soap are activated with the organic matter in the food debris.
Wow, I've never seen the two-handwashings version of this complaint! Also, that remark about how people perceive you is worrying. Who are you hanging out with?
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).
Funny how easy it is to s/dishwasher/llm in this subthread.
> > 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
I just wash my dishes.
It's when visiting other people's homes that I encounter dishwashers and weird superstitions relating to dishwashers.
Superstition is mostly just holding beliefs that you refuse to test. You can find plenty of that among dishwasher users, but I think you've also demonstrated a fair amount here.
The level of vitriol, and arbitrariness of the various rituals different people are absolutely convinced I must immediately use to see the light (I don't even own a dishwasher, lol), don't really inspire much confidence.
well, you do seem to hold a belief, that people with dishwashers must pre and postwash dishes by hand.
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.
Buy a new dishwasher. I had an insidious dishwasher that went through its entire cycle, but sometimes refused to make things clean. After weeks of trial and error and a few new parts, I finally determined the control board was popping all the detergent into the tub after just a few minutes in the first cycle and then draining and restarting the main cycle with just water. Everything mechanical was working perfectly, but it was literally being stupid at its job. I just couldn't trust it to not do that again, and decided to scrap it and upgrade on a Black Friday sale.
Modern dishwashers are great. I was firmly of your opinion for years, stubbornly a hand washer. Now I rinse dishes until there are no chunks left, sauce, grease, etc is all OK. Put them into the washer, and most evenings decide it's full enough and click start. The next day clean dry dishes are loaded directly into the cabinets.
I wasn't sold on dishwashers until I learned that they use less water than handwashing
I get rid of bigger chunks only and left sauce and grease. My dishwasher has no problem with that.
You absolutely don't need to handwash the dish first when using a modern dishwasher. You just need to scrape off large scraps into the trash.
I lightly rinse the worst dishes while loading until the water gets really hot at the sink next to the dishwasher. Having that prewash be very hot does a lot to make sure it gets it good in my experience.
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.
Run the hot water at the sink until it's hot then the dishwasher should have hot water from the start.
That's what I do, but while I'm running the water I might as well rinse a few of the dishes and put that water to work.
Once the water gets to temp I just toss the rest into the dishwasher.
Modern dishwasher soap contains enzymes that are activated by proteins. Pre-rinsing prevents those enzymes from activating. The dishwasher might do a better job if you don't pre-rinse.
Don't most dishwashers pre-rinse anyway?
They do. Most also have 5 min cold water rinse programs.
Not at all my experience. I rinse the dishes before they go in as they will likely sit for days and days before I fill up the dishwasher.
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.
Of course, there may be a tipping point where that "simplicity" is just shipping the complexity out to somewhere else. In this case, perhaps this would arise as extra water treatment plants due to the extra water used by hand washing. Obviously not just from you, but if a large amount of us did it this way.
You have to clean the filter more frequently, is the trade off. Not a bad one IMO.
> You have to handwash the dish, then put it through the dishwasher, then handwash it when it comes out.
What?
I think a lot of dishwasher opinions are based on how your mom told you to wash the dishes 35 years ago.
To be fair some people rent places with really old dishwashers.
That's my case. My old place had a brand new one and it did everything perfectly. My new place has one that's pretty old and not only does it need a pre-rinse, it doesn't even dry things (and unlike my old one, it needs a rinse aid)! And if it breaks, I'm sure the landlord will replace it with an empty area under the counter.
I think older dishwashers are more likely to have built in garbage disposals which is actually a huge win. On newer dishwashers one of the biggest problems is that people don't clean the filter regularly
If you stuff something covered in egg yolk in there it's coming out with egg yolk on it. If you don't scrape whole chunks of potato off the plate, you're rolling the dice with whether you pull it out of a filter or out of the thin hose between the dishwasher and the drain. The dishwasher's not magic - if it takes a scrub to get it off, you need to scrub it.
I don't know about handwashing after it comes out though, that's crazy.
Egg yolk is no problem whatsoever for a modern dishwasher and detergent. And obviously you don't put whole potato chunks in the machine. Don't be stupid.
GE machines come with a garbage disposal built-in. Be as stupid as you want, things are still coming out clean.
https://www.geappliances.com/appliances/dishwashers-with-pir...
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Most people don't wash the dishes coming out of the dishwasher.
I guess you might legitimately be confused about that.
Anyway, the other poster wasn't trying to rebut you, they were prompting to explain why you do those things.
re: hard water: your dishwasher has a setting for that. Set it correctly and make the dishwasher salt compartment isn't empty and your dishwasher will deal fine with hard water.
This is a geographical difference. North American market dishwashers don't typically have that; people use whole-dwelling water softeners that feed all washers (including human).
Oh huh, that's pretty wild. Learned something new today!
I don't think I've seen salt compartments in dishwashers in North America.
I have one in mine. though it's a bosch which is german owned.
Only Bosch and Miele have them, that I've seen.
Water softeners aren't actually standard issue in all dishwashers, but if you're replacing your dishwasher it isn't hard to find one with that feature.
I've just been told that it's not standard in North America, but it's definitely a standard feature where I'm at. I've got the cheapest IKEA dishwasher and it has that feature.
Interesting cultural differences cropping up in unexpected places I suppose.
Ok. I quickly rinse the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher, and put them straight back to the cupboard once it's done. I've been washing dishes by hand for 15 years and now I have my first dishwasher. So I know the difference, and I'm loving it.
I don't even rinse - I just throw bigger chunks of food to the garbage can and that's it. I event let the sauce to flow to the bottom of the dishwasher.
We are on a well (rural area). The water is so hard here that when the house was built, they needed both a water softener and an iron filter to treat it.
I had an issue this winter with my septic system freezing up and in order to prevent an overflow before the tank could be pumped, I was told to put the treatment system on bypass (water softener cycles dump a lot of waste water down the drain). Even with the hard well water going through the dishwasher, it never failed to clean the dishes properly. This dishwasher is 22 years old.
I have hard water and my dishes are not made worse by the dishwasher. They actually come out better. Maybe depends on your detergent?
A dishwasher with a built in water softener fixes the problem. But really a whole home water softener is a good idea if your water is super hard.
I have a well so I have a water softener?
There Are Three Types of Dishwasher People.
There Are Two Types of Dishwasher People, and Then There Are Animals
made my day
Depends on 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.
These dishwasher discussions to me always are a bit frustrating because so much of it depends.
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.
> You have to handwash the dish, then put it through the dishwasher, then handwash it when it comes out.
You have never actually used a dishwasher have you.
Not the OP, but this is how my parents use the dishwasher - I think a lot of people don't realize that you don't need to pre-handwash for modern dishwashers.
Especially if you use a small amount of detergent in the pre-wash compartment. Most people (at least in Europe) just use a single tablet in the main wash section. I've seen a massive improvement by putting a teaspoon amount of detergent in with the pre-wash. The ever-wonderful Technology Connections sent me down this path.[1]
Without detergent in the pre-wash compartment, only water is used to pre-soak the dishes.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rBO8neWw04
It works even better if you add trisodium phosphate to the compartment.
I'm using the Miele dishwasher powder myself, mainly because it's the only one I could find at a reasonable price that wasn't tablets:
https://shop.miele.com.au/en/cleaning-and-accessories/miele-...
Then there's the way my mother-in-law uses the dishwasher: turn on the faucet as high as it goes, then rinse each dish so much it could just go straight in the rack, then load the dishwasher, then FINALLY turn the water back off.