Posted by JumpCrisscross 4/14/2025
Thus instead of stressing how to tetris pack everything. Turn your brain off and put less inside. With less dishes it is easier to avoid mistakes.
If you want to observe the world as a pro-dishwasher person does, replace the word 'dishwasher' above with 'toilet'. We see dishwashers as objects that serve us so well, that the alternative choice is fairly disgusting by modern standards.
Recent UK dishwashers use less than 2.
Just do your dishes by hand. If you have a big family with lots of dishes, what a great opportunity to teach kids some good habits.
- Buy more utensils and plates than you need. It's just me and my partner but we have something like 20 mugs in the kitchen, 12-18 plates etc. Who cares?
Doing the dishes just once a day saved water, energy and time.
I don't believe cooking has spare moments, eg there is never a time when I could take out my phone and watch something for 30 seconds. I think that means I am filling the spare moments with efficient task scheduling (chop while sauteing) and washing dishes is just making it take longer.
Well, you've got interactions of dissimilar habits, which is one of the most worthwhile things to address.
Then you have the advanced appliance which is somewhat likely to have been optimized for not exactly either one (or more) of the users' desired or even imagined scenarios or use cases.
So they all tend to use it differently, to different effect.
More than two types right out of the gate, the robot has it's say, with strong influence even when it's a simple automaton, from helpful to agonist.
Nature's way of influencing you to limit your feasting to special occasions . . .
tldr sometimes it really does just seem like superstitious voodoo is really what matters with dishwashers
The old water heater was probably set to 110°F or something, and the new one to 140°F.
Now, this article suggests that the first handwashing can be skipped with contemporary detergents, which is useful information if true, though I think it wouldn't help in the social situations the article talks about since it makes it look as though you're cutting corners.
If your dishwasher does not generally work in this way, it is not working correctly.
She used it's crumminess as justification both to wash all of the dishes manually, and to never buy another dishwasher again, since she would obviously have to wash all of the dishes by hand anyhow. The thought that technology might improve over time never seemed to occur to her.
I get the idea that she was not alone in that.
I'm willing to believe commercial-grade dishwashers are actually effective, because only very occasionally do restaurants give me dirty dishes or cutlery. In personal homes, however, I've only encountered totems and superstition, but unlike internet commenters they don't usually get super outraged.
Maybe you are just wrong and basing your opinion on old, obsolete data? Granted I haven’t had to do any ritual of any kind using dishwashers for the last 20 years… but yeah. It’s not like I’m the one pointlessly wasting time hand washing dishes.
2) a cycle will typically be much hotter for much longer than whatever you do manually. So the dishwasher is what I trust to fully disinfect my dishes
3) a family of four cooking at home will need a full load every day so it’s a lot more efficient than manually washing and drying everything, especially when both parents work
The water probably doesn't get hot enough, unless the dishwasher has a sanitize cycle.
Seriously though, your opinion is common (maybe not majority, just weirdly not as rare as you would think).
I sometimes wonder about it, and I generally land on these explanations, in decreasing order of how common I think they are ("you" below refers to the representative of all people, not you personally):
1. You experienced a partial failure a number of times in specific cases (e.g. a fluke of loading/shapes where a spot just doesn't get clean, or maybe you were expecting it to accomplish the impossible task of cleaning a left-out bowl of mini-wheats). This soured you and caused you to over-compensate forever after.
2. You have very high standards for "clean" (e.g. faint streaks on glass is unacceptable).
3. You over-load it or never clean the filter.
4. Washers and/or detergent were indeed crappy, and are now better (maybe true, but I'm not sure I buy this as a significant reason).
5. You use detergent packs or you don't call for hot water before turning it on (even I'm guilty of these, and don't have issues).
> > The entire concept is flawed and can't possibly work and wastes more time than it will ever save.
> List of tips for proper usage
It's when visiting other people's homes that I encounter dishwashers and weird superstitions relating to dishwashers.
You could consider placing this belief in the open for people with dishwashers to contradict a sort of test, but you don't appear to consider it that way. Do you still think that everyone in this thread with a dishwasher washes their dishes by hand before and after they put them in the dishwasher?
You're accusing people who use dishwashers of a profoundly inefficient process. I think that you don't recognize this as insulting, but I also think that you derive a sense of superiority from this accusation, and if you are holding onto this belief in spite of people's insistent contradiction, then I think that this amounts to superstition and vitriol on your part.
US dishwashers tend to assume the incoming water is from the hot water line and is pretty hot. It takes a bit for the tub to actually get the water very hot, so you'll end up spending most of the pre-wash step with only mildly warm water if you don't get the hot water there first.
Once the water gets to temp I just toss the rest into the dishwasher.
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.
A quick rinse only decreases chances of issues.
Also, waiting 3 years to load the dishwasher until full to run it will make food hard on it.
Have to choose the poison.
Even the article has this little caveat that's not so little: you don't need to prerinse unless it involves protein, which is actually a lot of dishes potentially.
It depends on how long it takes you to load the dishwasher, as you're pointing out, and all sorts of other things.
I've also noticed that consumer outlets frequently complain that people don't clean out their filter enough, which damages the dishwasher, but that filter is probably clogged by stuff that doesn't get rinsed off the dishes.
We have a dishwasher, we use it, but I have always kind of felt like dishwashers were the one appliance I could live without (and have for years at times, even when we owned one). If there's lots of dishes or lots of people, they're useful for us. But we don't have that many people over usually, I can't put certain things in ours because they don't get clean, there's always things I don't want to or can't put in the dishwasher, so I end up washing things with them, there's things that I will have to pull out anyway or run a very empty load, and so forth and so on.
I guess I feel like they're useful to have around but other appliances (range, fridge, washing machine) have been much much much much more important to me.
What?
I don't know about handwashing after it comes out though, that's crazy.
https://www.geappliances.com/appliances/dishwashers-with-pir...
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.
Interesting cultural differences cropping up in unexpected places I suppose.
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.
You have never actually used a dishwasher have you.
Without detergent in the pre-wash compartment, only water is used to pre-soak the dishes.
https://shop.miele.com.au/en/cleaning-and-accessories/miele-...