Posted by JumpCrisscross 4/14/2025
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).
Yes.
Likely dishwashers for the NZ market are designed to actually spend sufficient time heating the water.
My impression from watching the TC videos a while ago is that at least in the US, (many) dishwashers probably only do a insufficient time interval of adding more heat to the water.
It makes sense that different markets developed different ways; the brands that optimize for the local trends (cold vs hot water) can skimp on some features and have lower costs.
https://aurorixs.shop/product/watts-500800-instant-water-recirculating-pump-system-with-built-in-timerIn the summer... this is central Texas, so the sun helps keep the water in the pipes hot, so I imagine that the pump is on less often than in the winter. I've not checked though. My gas bills are not out of the ordinary, so I think it's not a ridiculous waste.
The reason cold or luke-warm water is a problem is that the programs are extremely simple and just assume the input is 110-120f and won't stall the cycle for waiting for the target temp.
Temperature sensing is extremely simple and cheap. Bi-metal contacts have been used since the dawn of electronics, and the solid state versions are also really simple. (Making components that are temperature invariant is the hard task.)
A bi-metal contact is only good for a single temperature, I think? (can be adjustable like thermostats) (I'm sure many but not all dish-washers probably do only need a single temperature...)
My dishwasher has a scalding 75°C option.
Source; that time I replaced my fucking dishwasher because I couldn't figure out why it kept leaking so much everywhere.
I’ve since moved and use the powder with my current one, as recommended by Technology Connections, and have had good luck.
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'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".
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.
Are US washing machines connected to hot water as well?
Remove solid gunk. Load dishwasher. Make sure you have Rinse-aid in the dishwasher. Run. Done. Comes out clean.
And yes they’re toxic. Of course they are! Next, let us coat all surfaces with antimicrobial toxins, starting with everything in the hospital, and your infant’s diaper-changing stations, and your stapler at work.
It will be just like Nethack, where you open a spellbook to read it, but it is “coated with contact poison!” so I hope your Unicorn Horn is available.
Home dishwashers, the ones that take 4 hours on average, are not going to result in the same thing. Claiming such would be like claiming you won't use dish soap since technically it can still be left on your dishes when quickly washed.
I 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?
I've never had one that took 4 hours. The most is about 2.5 hours.
If you've got both available, I can't see any reason why you'd choose to hook it up to cold. That just means it takes longer for your dishwasher to heat up.
It doesn't necessarily take longer to heat up, they are pretty much instant since they are designed to heat as needed locally as needed (don't need to heat a large volume of water) and they are at least as fast to provide hot water as a central hot water tank. They can be gas or electric powered depending on what is available/cheaper in the region and you never run out of hot water with an inline heater.
Even if you do have a central hot water tank, it's possible that heating water locally at the dishwasher is faster depending on distance to the tank. Anecdotally, I used to wait for hot water in the kitchen when I lived in Canada and I no longer do in Europe where I have no central hot water tank. In North America, recent high end home kitchens feature a local inline heater for hot water at the kitchen sink even though a central hot water tank exists.
Do you also have hot water plumbed washing machines?
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.)
The electric grid is three phase; 60 or 50 hz depending on where you are in the world. The voltage varies considerably, long distance transmission is in the kilovolts, or higher.
"split-phase 240V" happens at the transformer near your house, in North America. I don't know as much about the rest of the world, but I've always understood it to be ~440v split phase because it allows longer wires between the transformer and the house.
> "split-phase 240V" happens at the transformer near your house, in North America. I don't know as much about the rest of the world, but I've always understood it to be ~440v split phase because it allows longer wires between the transformer and the house.
Where I live, we have three phase 480/277V for commercial. I believe that is standard in North America, but I'm not really sure.
It's really more that historically Americans have been fine with drip style coffee makers instead of drinking pour overs or 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.
Central America, parts of South America, Japan, and Taiwan are also ~110 volt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_electricity_by_country#/...
1. Powdered detergent people who sprinkle some soap in for the prewash
2. Tab people who attest that they need to pre-rinse their dishes before they put them in the dishwasher
I've seen the technology connections video, continue to use pods, and continue not to pre-rinse the dishes
Other's results may vary, but I found my dishwasher would eventually get clogged with the TC approach, even though I clean the filter regularly and wasn't putting in dishes with absurd amounts of food still on them. Since I switched back to pods and prerinsing, the clogging went away. Maybe my dishwasher or the install has something goofy about it, but it was definitely a failed experiment for me. Although I still think the TC argument is a solid one in theory.
Almost everyone I know still does excessive rinsing in the sink first. I have never done this and it’s always been fine.
I learned some things from the TC videos, but it was more about refining things, it didn’t drastically change what I was already doing.
But that thing had a powerful masticator. It would slurry up almost any foods. There was a very coarse filter about half the diameter of the drain hose but outside of that there was never anything left in the pan.
It would also monitor the turbidity to determine if it needed to flush the current pan water and add fresh water. It had a soap dispenser so it could re-add soap if needed. That thing was an incredible dishwasher. I still miss it.
This is because the sanitizing stations are not ready for this kind of mash - they expect cleaner water + oil + larger particles. What they get instead is a substance that kills the bacteria in charge of the sanitization.
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 once stayed with family at a vacation rental where the dishwasher left things worse than we put them in—a thick gray residue plastered over everything. We were going to be there for a week with 30 people, which meant we had a lot of dishwashing to do, but by the time I became aware of it the rest of the family had already given up on it and had started washing dishes by hand.
I took one look at the output and knew immediately what was wrong thanks to TC. An hour later (it was that bad) the dishwasher was working flawlessly and we saved hours in dishwashing time over the week.
(We also told the rental owners that their cleaners weren't taking care of the dishwasher. I didn't ask for them to pay me for the time, but I probably should have!)
The filter can also clog up and a layer of water will form above it which can impede the rotation of the sprayers and then it really doesn’t work well.
Now I just worry about buying new bowls. Will the bowls fit nicely given pitch and angle of the of the dealies on the rack? The bowls I inherited from my grandmother fit so nicely in any dishwasher I've loaded them into, but now they're starting to crack...
The article mentions that newer detergents do better with unrinsed dishes. And I remember a commercial about a dishwasher that could eat a cake. My old model sure couldn't do that! If I wasn't careful I'd find hunks of food sitting inside after it ran. It also used to be that putting thin tupperware on the bottom rack was a sure way to melt it. Now I can't remember the last time that happened to me.
Things that used to provably matter... now don't.
On the other hand, I have a family member who loads the spoons in a big pile, and they stick together and don't get clean. Or, I had roommates who kept putting my good knives in the dishwasher, and the finish got ruined. That stuff still matters.
I like the article's conclusion: we can just get the answers, and update our knowledge. We don't have to treat this like a pre-internet argument, where we just went in circles repeating heresay.
My partner loads the dishwasher like a raccoon on meth. I do it like a software engineer who's been thinking about The One True Way To Organize Things for decades.
Cleanliness is fine either way. But I really hate that she can't fit a full day's worth of dishes in there so I have to do an extra load later.
This blog excerpt explains the idea [1]:
> Knowing this week was going to be a lot, I’ve been living by “run the dishwasher twice”. What the hell does that even mean?! Essentially it means to do whatever is the path of least resistance to get shit done. The advice came from a therapist to a woman who was feeling very low & was struggling with everyday tasks such as doing the dishes. She didn’t have the mental capacity to scrub dishes before putting them in her crappy dishwasher so she wasn’t doing them & they were building up & causing her more anxiety. Her therapist said not to rinse the dishes & just run the dishwasher twice, even three times if that’s what it took to get them clean. It was a game-changer for her, one that enabled her to do a small task in an imperfect way just to get it done.
I wish the OP article had dug a little bit deeper into the psychology behind daily task conflict in relationships. The dishwasher is one of many microcosms (laundry, car, pets, etc) that I wish I'd paid more attention to in my relationships, because these conversations really do reveal relationship dynamics around HUGE issues like compromise, empathy, perfectionism, and judgmental behavior.
[1] https://thebackfenceblog.wordpress.com/2021/08/27/run-the-di...
We've found that if we can't do a 10min tasks once, we won't do it twice either. We'll do dishes tomorrow. It's fine.
I used to try the do-a-little-whenever method when I was single and the only outcome was that I spent all day every day dealing with dishes and had a constantly dirty kitchen.
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.
Sometimes it helps to stop thinking and start doing. I’ve been there. It takes practice.
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.
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.
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 inherited a dishwasher and became more uptight after:
- dishes that left the soap partially unused
- wet dishes
- melted stuff
- stuff that blocked the upper rotating thingie
- stuff that fell into the heating element and bottom rotating thingie
maybe seeking a racoon-friendly dishwasher would be a relationship saver.
If 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.
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.
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.
No way. Not if you're washing with a scrub sponge and scraping the corners of everything. The argument for the dishwasher is that you're not using an old sponge. If your sponge is not nasty, washing by hand should be as good or better.
People are lazy. They only look for dirty spots and go for those. They intentionally or intentionally avoid cleaning some areas. Dishwashers don't care what 'looks' dirty - they just keep washing.
Even if you think it's clean by hand, chances are there's far more residual residue and bacteria you can't see that a dishwasher wouldn't have any trouble with.
99% of the problem with dishwashers are that people use them wrong:
* They don't clean the filter and spray arms regularly
* They use the shitty pods instead of powder, which is the most effective since it can have bleach
* They don't put some detergent in the pre-wash
* They have a unit that doesn't pre-heat the water and need to just run the faucet for a bit to get the water hot
* They don't use a rinse aid
If you can avoid those 5 mistakes, a dishwasher will always way out-perform hand-washing. Even dirt cheap basic units you see in low end apartments will do an amazing job if actually used correctly.
Like the article mentioned, to get the best result you need to have your dirty dishes line up with where the water is coming out. So if you need to wash something on multiple sides (including top), handwashing will be better.
Hot water is not what cleans your dishes, it's the pressure from the water washing things out (helped by soap). Heat just softens the gunk and oil. Plus you can wear gloves and/or let dishes soak in hot water so that's not even a factor.
By the way, many microbes can survive heat (in spore form), even boiling hot water. Nothing can survive being washed away by soap though. Well, they could survive, but they won't be on your dish.
As a microbiologist I'm aware that what looks clean can have leftover residue. How are you measuring cleanliness out of a dishwasher? I'm guessing by eye, the same way you're measuring hand-washed dish cleanliness.
The way you talk about dishwashers is like you think they're autoclaves, which can actually break spores down using a high heat only achievable in a high-pressure tank (higher than boiling temperature, around 120 celsius). Your dishwasher is only getting about 50 to 60 degrees celsius.
So no, a dishwasher will not always out-perform hand-washing. And if you're using a new sponge, I bet you the result is comparable or better if your hand-washing technique doesn't suck and you should get about the same result with cold water if you use enough soap.
So how are you measuring, if not by eyeballing it? Can you swab it and check for microbes? Did you?
> If you can avoid those 5 mistakes, a dishwasher will always way out-perform hand-washing
> Even if you think it's clean by hand, chances are there's far more residual residue and bacteria you can't see that a dishwasher wouldn't have any trouble with.
The inverse statement is just as likely to be true depending on the shape of the dish used, where it's placed in the dish-washer, etc.. You think just because the corners of a weirdly shaped dish doesn't have obvious gunk after coming out of the dishwasher that they are clean? Well, I trust my hand scrubbing method more since I don't have a camera to see where and for how long the water landed in the dishwasher.
You could swab a plate, do a dilution series and count colony forming units but there's no guarantee that the growth conditions of your petri dish will reflect what can grow in your body (i.e. will the spores germinate in your petri dish?)
What is well known is that washing with soap trumps heat (except 120+ degrees celsius), and you don't need to kill bacteria for a surface to be clean (in fact it's better to wash them off than to kill them). The fact that hand-washing is better for scrubbing corners with soap is obvious. Case in point, this burnt/sticky rice leftover on a pot that I stuck in the dishwasher a few hours ago as a test: https://imgur.com/a/wfnxMnZ
> What is well known is that washing with soap trumps heat (except 120+ degrees celsius)
The dishwasher uses heat and soap. And it sprays things off, while we're at it.
> The fact that hand-washing is better for scrubbing corners with soap is obvious. Case in point, this burnt/sticky rice leftover on a pot that I stuck in the dishwasher a few hours ago as a test
I will happily agree that hand washing tends to win on mechanical grounds. I think that if the machine can spray off the dishes to the point of being visually clean then it probably left them sanitized as well (again, hot water and soap and spraying is compelling to me), but if there's stuff stuck on the dishes then yes obviously a person scraping it off is going to be better at removing it.
> machines wash 1000 times better than hand ever could, uses less water, and doesn’t dry out your hands
"Ever could"? "1000 times"? And yet you have a problem with me saying hand-washing CAN be better when have dishes with corners or need to wash both sides of the dish. The next commenter said:
> Even if you think it's clean by hand, chances are there's far more residual residue and bacteria you can't see that a dishwasher wouldn't have any trouble with
I invoked being a microbiologist to make the point that I'm already aware of the fact that looking clean doesn't equal being clean. None of my arguments rely on my authority as a microbiologist. Anyone with decent reading comprehension can evaluate the broken logic: he's mixing up the fact that cleanliness is not just what something looks like with the idea that the dishwasher must do a better job than hand-washing because you can't tell if something is really clean or not. That makes no sense, and seems to be some kind of appeal to technology or modernity.
> I think that if the machine can spray off the dishes to the point of being visually clean then it probably left them sanitized as well
This is the exact point that the guy was saying is NOT the case, and as a microbiologist I agreed with him even though it's irrelevant to the argument since neither of us has tested the dishes.
>The dishwasher uses heat and soap. And it sprays things off, while we're at it.
My whole point was that soap and mechanical washing trump heat. My faucet sprays water, and I can evaluate the cleanliness without waiting 2 hours to see if the probabilistic machine jet spray left residue on my dishes or not.
Glassware looks yuck when washed by hand - even with a lot of care. A dishtowel will get glassware mostly shiny but it takes way more work and dishtowels are just icky (past trauma of smelling a rank dishtowel, or watching someone wipe their mank hands or face on a dishtowel, plus you know most people wash them with underwear, fabric can't be hygienic).
It most certainly does not in any dishwasher I've ever interacted with. Glassware is one of those things that I can very easily get cleaner than a dishwasher.
But just like looking clean doesn't mean being sterile, sometimes you can have benign residue such as mineral deposition which are not dirty per se.
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.
The more dirty dishes you have the better the dishwasher becomes in terms of active work but in no scenario is it actually faster.
You do not. We are comparing the time it takes for a man to wash a dish versus the time it takes for that man to put that dish in the dishwasher, not versus the time it takes for a machine to wash that dish.
Unloading is the most annoying part, and needs to be done anyway however you wash it. So, not a huge chore.
Most importantly, I live in a small apartment and I hate the noise it makes.
Also, I’ve worked as a dishwasher and don’t want to do more of that ever.
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..!!
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's a great feature, but since the dishwasher has a standard height to fit under the counter, it means the bottom rack is a bit shorter than standard and I have to be very careful stacking plates to avoid blocking the washer arm. And there are a few large plates which I'm sure would fit in most washers which I have to wash by hand, like a caveman.
On balance it's a good feature though.
https://www.macknife.com/collections/original-series
And the Victorinox "Swiss Classic Picnic Knife", very sharp, good for slicing fruit, spreading hummus, cutting bread & cheese, etc. Also available serrated but I figured the straight edge would be more useful overall for spreading stuff on bread -- and it is, this lives in my lunch bag along side a Snow Peak Titanium Spork:
https://www.victorinox.com/en-US/Products/Cutlery/Paring-Kni...
(shown here in Red and Black, but if you look around it's available in many other colors). I've found the Victorinox Fibrox line of knives to be a great affordable, high-quality option.
> like to actually clean our utensils and dishes…
If only there was some other way to clean things...
It's therapeutic, takes a few minutes, and makes me conscious of how many dishes I should be using (e.g. as few as possible). If I have to pre-rinse dishes for the dishwasher, I might as well just rinse it fully then and there.
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.
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.
I've always done this out of stubbornness. If I have to turn on the faucet then I might as well just wash the dish by hand. If the dish is still dirty after a cycle then I'll do exactly that and let it air-dry.
It's a dishwasher, not a dish re-washer.
My wife and her family are all freakin' religious wash first, then put it in the dishwasher. My father in law snapped at me about this once. I'm going to send this to him.
Scrape, load, and then run Quick Rinse. Much more efficient than rinsing by hand!
You can also do this for drawer style dishwasher. Giving it quite an inconspicuous look.
But I am a bit surprised that more people who entertain a lot don’t have two dishwashers. But they probably have staff for that in many cases.
