Nowadays the default eco cycle that is used to rate European dishwashers typically takes about 3 hours or more, and drying could indeed be better, but other than that, I can't really complain. You can still select a 1-hour 70° heavy duty cycle if needed.
Same with washing machines. My wife gets annoyed, but as far as I'm concerned, I don't really care whether the default cycle takes 1h30 or 5h.
I suspect (both because of the color separation and the reference to towels) you have confused laundry machines with dishwashers.
One doesn't usually separate dishes by color before washing them in a dishwasher, and even if for some reason one did, one still wouldn't usually wash towels in a dishwasher.
You don't need to separate any of those things when doing laundry. You're just making more work for yourself.
Modern laundry washing machines also have a "finish at" timer. I set mine to finish at 8am so after breakfast I empty it out. If we really need to do 2 loads a day (it happens sometimes with a family) then the second one is done around lunch time.
Without kids, we have no need to wash several loads on the same day. We separate colors, whites (mostly bed sheets) and towels, but they don't amount to a full load at the same time and get washed on their own periodic schedule, which never overlap.
I do the dishes one load at a time (wait for the dishwasher to fill up so I’m not running it empty) and let my European-make dishwasher run overnight when electricity is cheapest and cleanest. But laundry requires being hung or transferred to the dryer immediately after to avoid things getting stinky - and I usually have multiple sorted loads (whites, colors, delicates) that I can’t just throw all together so I actually do get annoyed at how slow my front-loading washing machine is.
While you obviously don't want to leave washing wet for many hours all the time, if they are getting stinky within a few hours you likely have notable bacteria and scud build up in your machine that could be resolved. That has been my experience. Do you do a semi-regular hot cleaning cycle? (My washer has one built in and prompts you to run it every 40 cycles) but you can just do a hot, empty load as a substitute. Possibly ideally with some washing machine cleaner though I don't use that often. There is also the option of pulling it apart for a deep clean.
It doesn't work with every laundry layout (luckily does for me) but I have found leaving the door open so it can dry out is very helpful to prevent mould built up on the doors etc at least. Not sure how much it effects the bacteria/scud/etc - could even make scud worse to some degree since deposits dry out I guess.
Another tip that I only recently learnt is that you can dry washing with a dehumifier at a rate not that much slower than a clothes dryer (6-ish hours). Also at a rate cheaper or comparable to a heat pump dryer. That may be a good option for your staged washing if you're happy to hang the clothes out.
On my washer at least the hour cycle does a pretty good job of things though in theory you're supposed to only wash like 3-4KG instead of 8-11 like in the 2-3 hour cycles.
Two things I am reasonably sure matter but have not looked into the research and need to get around to doing is:
- I have to wonder about the impact of long washing loads on clothes longevity and wearing out of the fabric, especially with fuller loads.. that's a lot of rubbing.
- The washing powder I currently like the most definitely gets caught and leaves residue.. in particular it builds up -inside- the detergent drawer and becomes so glued on even a pressure washer and screwdriver takes a lot of effort to get it off (clearly needs CLR or some such). I am sure some detergents are much better at not building up SCUD compared to others but this seems to be a not well discussed/reviewed fact.
From an Appliance repair/reseller "Bens Appliances and Junk"
"Clean a Washing Machine Inside: How to Remove Mold, Soap Scum and More with a CHEAP Organic Cleaner" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOXM81Zk_As
I didn’t really mean “immediately” so much as “you can’t leave it overnight then possibly forget about it the next morning,” but yeah, it seems to depend on the weather and other things (more on that below). Hasn’t happened in a while. The washing machine is clean, I scrub out the mold in the detergent tray regularly and have always left the door open. I used to run the cleaning cycle from time to time but don’t think it is necessary since I do whites with plenty bleach at scalding hot temps often enough. It happened with our old top loader, too. More than anything though, you can smell a moldy washer and ours doesn’t smell and a freshly washed load normally doesn’t either.
It seems to be the Lake Michigan water we are hooked up to responsible for the stinky occasions. I read up about this a few years ago and they actually monitor for the levels of the molecule (I don’t think it was bacteria?) that gives wet clothes their stink since it is rampant in the Great Lakes and they are constantly adjusting because it’s expensive to counteract more than they feel they need to. My guess is that they got their act together in recent years. Another point in this direction is that it happens some summers to towels used after a shower while they’re hanging to dry. I’m pretty sure it’s just the water.
Oh, and in answer to your question, we definitely noticed the euro-style front-loader was harder on the clothes than the old American top-loader – though it also did get more stains out. But yes, we too fill it up properly to capacity to avoid the waste of running it empty or mostly so - and I guess the increased friction would contribute.
I found the link I had archived three years ago (when I mentioned researching this some years back): a Chicago Tribune article from 1994 [0]! There are lots of other search results that discuss the byproducts of various algal blooms contributing to a particular stink in Lake Michigan water, some mention the active carbon filtration and another [1], the use of ozone to neutralize the responsible compounds, but only the 1994 article actually names the responsible compounds: geosmin and 2-methylisoborneol (2-MIB). (I remembered geosmin – the sometimes nice, sometimes not, smell of the earth after a rain – while writing my reply yesterday but could not recall the second compound for the life of me and I knew/know geosmin wasn’t solely responsible for the smell on its own.)
There’s also this 53-page survey of contributors to taste and smell in water supplies from the Illinois State Water Survey out of UIUC that I would love to get around to reading (or at least skimming through): https://www.isws.illinois.edu/pubdoc/C/ISWSC-127.pdf
> Possibly ideally with some washing machine cleaner though I don't use that often.
For the record, those cleaners are usually pure sodium percarbonate (commercially sold as Oxiclean/Napisan). When combined with a hot cyle (60 degrees Celsius or higher) it does a good job sterilising your washing machine.
Drip-dry (usually whilst completing other loads) on a drying rack. This often removes most moisture.
If still damp, put the laundry in the dryer for a quick cycle.
This maximises the efficiencies of each mode: drip-drying tends to quickly shed the initial bulk water through, er, dripping. A warm-air dryer is relatively ineffective when laundry is dripping wet, but is quite good at removing final traces of moisture.
If you have time, a fan blowing over a drying rack will also speed drying.
Outdoor lines can be quite effective especially in hot, dry climates. Less so in rain or fog.
> A warm-air dryer is relatively ineffective when laundry is dripping wet, but is quite good at removing final traces of moisture.
I thought that’s what the centrifugal action was for (even with no heat involved); basically emulating gravity to get the clothes to “drip” outward into the perforations. I imagine it achieves greater than 1g making it actually more effective than traditional drip drying?
High-speed spin is a feature of top-load, or even more so, front-load washing machines. The latter will spin at 900--1200 RPM, and the resulting laundry is best described as "damp" rather than the "wet" of a top-loader, which typically spins at about 800 RPM.
The tumbling motion of a hot-air dryer is more to circulate the laundry and expose it to airflow than to generate centrifugal drying.
Note that airflow alone will dry clothes (though more slowly), and that leaving your dryer on a low-heat setting is not that much slower, whilst it tends to be far less harsh on fabrics. Much of laundry wear occurs in the dryer rather than the washing machine.
What I don't understand is why my (most?) washing machine(s) doesn't have a "delay" setting to hold for 6h or whatever overnight and then finish before rates spike in the morning.
Then the water in the water heater is nice and fresh for my shower too.
My front-loading Whirlpool has a delay start and I wish it had delay end instead! I end up pessimistically delaying it less than the ideal amount just to make sure it finishes by the time I’m up in the morning.
The only appliance I have with a “delay end” or “schedule end” feature is my Zojirushi rice cooker (and ironically I never use the timer feature there).
I had the same reaction as lathiat, if your washer smells bad because clean wet clothes sat in it for a couple hours you "probably" need to clean it. I also think people have a bad habit of closing the front door of front loaders between use.
You a front loader open? Thats weird to me; itd be like leaving a cabinet open - unsightly and a bruise waiting to happen when someone thoughtlessly walks through it.
US front load washers are designed to require the front door left open after or between uses. Otherwise they can and will develop mold. (Ask me how I know.) The idea is that they are usually located out of sight or at least out of the way in the US, so this isn't a big deal. Sometimes that assumption isn't true, which can generate a major hassle.
Not only mold in the tub, but the pull-out tray thing where you put the detergent. Switching to powder laundry detergent made a big difference until I was able to upgrade to a top loader.
It's the same. You're supposed to keep the door open. Also, some water tends to stay in the detergent tray, so it's best to take it out after each cycle, empty it and put it back, but don't close it all the way.
So essentialy, when the machine is idle, you end up with both the tray and the door open.
My Father in Law got one recently that has a fan to blow the gasket dry after use, so you don't have to have the door left open. There's a small grill on the top of the door that the air exhausts out of. It's something I'm looking at when mine dies (since it is something like 12 years old, even if it wasn't used for 6 of them).
If you need the dish or garment now (or quickly), it's an issue.
If you're not going to be in, or need to process multiple loads (more likely for laundry than dishes) then long cycles turn the process into an all-day, or multi-day, function.
I still prefer hand-washing dishes in most cases as it occurs in parallel with meal prep and eating (fill sink, soak cooking and prep pots and utensils whilst eating, finish and wash table dishes afterward, pop onto a drying rack. Ten minutes. Can be a conversation / bonding time with a partner, or a good time to listen to audiobooks, podcasts, music, etc., if solo.
With a dishwasher, I'm constantly fishing out, and hand-washing, pots, utensils, or dishes that I need either before or during the wash cycle (which takes > 1 hour). Hand-washing that item alone? 1 minute tops.
If you have a large family, there's potential time savings. Solo or couple? Not so much.
As for efficiency: for dishwashers vs. fill sink / soak / scrub, there's little effective difference in water or energy, and the cycle time is far shorter.
> With a dishwasher, I'm constantly fishing out, and hand-washing, pots, utensils, or dishes that I need either before or during the wash cycle (which takes > 1 hour).
It doesn’t have to take any extra time at all. Just buy more dishes next time you go to the store and you’ll stop running out of dishes during the day, then you can run the dishwasher once at night and never have to hand wash dishes again.
It's so horrible that I can't get a washing machine that's fast. I don't care about the other metrics, just get it done perfectly. That's the most important.
I totally do not agree with the "don't prewash in the sink" bullshit. It's based on specious reasoning about how "well" automatic dirt sensors can work. And, it does not necessarily waste water. "it depends" -eg if you wipe the plates with a cloth, there may be less running water.
Dishwasher checks by consumer groups do not test egg protein, or avocado. They need to test with real world, tight locking protein and fats.
And with lentils: the amount of fine gritty fibre which can remain in suspension is just fantastic. And then in the rinse cycle, it sits in the feet of plates and cups.
I also believe that electro-coupling between different metals in cutlery means they age faster if you don't space them properly. If they touch, they can make a circuit.
What I've noticed is it's heavily dependent on the dishwasher.
I've not had the privilege of having a new dishwasher till my most recent place, all the dishwashers prior have been 10+ years old. This new one though which is a Miele dishwasher has maybe 1-2 dishes that need to be manually washed per week at the very most. Whereas my older dishwashers it was anything from an extra 1-2 dishwasher loads per week worth of failed cleans.
More likely a reflection of my partner and I's diet. A lot of broths, soups and similar. Even 30 minutes of the plate being static in the dishwasher means the food dries on and sticks.
We don't rinse our plates, just scrape them. If I have to hand wash 1-2 bowls and plates over the week it's a non-event. We're still saving a lot of water compared to hand rinsing all of our dishes before putting them in the Miele.
IDK I eat oatmeal every morning and only run a load every few days.. Dried on oatmeal is not match for the normal cycle even at half-load setting. Nothing survives the enzymes in modern detergent and the cascading coverage of my dishwasher..
It sort of depends? For most stains it works just fine, but it's hit-or-miss for vegetable matter. Spinach especially has a tendency to stick to things and then get rock hard in the drying cycle. For those I manually scrape off the spinach with a fingernail -- it's usually only one or two flakes -- before sticking it in for another cycle.
If it weren't for the internet, it never would have even occurred to me to 'prewash in the sink', how difficult is it to wash a single plate anyway, at the point I'm 'prewashing' each plate I may as well just wash it in the sink?
The best I can come up with is that maybe it's advocates have a lot left on the plate, and where I would scrape into compost if that happened are using a sink garbage disposal grinder thing?
If it's just some kind of saucy residue like goes into my dishwasher (without any need for any kind of 'prewashing') then any machine that can't cope with it needs returning.
What are you concerned about that will survive 100°C? Or even 70 if you want to retract that hypothetical, since I'm not aware of any consumer dishwasher that will boil it's contents.
My dog (a dachshund/rat terrier mutt) once dug up and ate whole bulbs of garlic from our garden. Terrified, we took him to the vet. The vet said "if garlic was likely to hurt terriers, there would be no terriers."
I'm not suggesting anyone run out and feed their dog a bunch of garlic on purpose - that would be dumb - but if you look at the toxicity data, a 30 lb dog would need to eat something like 200 grams of garlic to have a serious problem.
Truth be told (which will stick it to the "that's disgusting" response), we don't do it very often, and definitely try to stay away from the bad-for-dogs foods (onions, garlic, grapes, chocolate). The bulk of the pre-washing happens in the dishwasher or in the sink.
"Consuming as little as 2 grams per pound of your dog’s weight can cause observable changes in a pet's stomach, and larger amounts can damage the blood. For reference, each garlic clove weighs an average of 5 grams. For a medium-sized dog weighing around 25 pounds, treatment will be needed if they ingest 50 grams of garlic—approximately 10 cloves, or half of a garlic bulb."
I've put stuff absolutely covered in peanut butter, egg, bottom of air fryer, hot pot pan, etc in the dishwasher without prewash. Always comes out clean.
Yes, I'm not sure I'd call it 'pre-washing' (it's just washing?) but we agree. To be clear I don't 'pre-wash in the sink', I was saying it's absurd to me and didn't even occur to me as an option or a decision I was making not to - I also don't 'pre-wash' my clothes, for example - until seeing people (mostly Americans perhaps) talk about it online. I don't think I've ever even heard of it in person, nevermind known someone do it.
Rarely, because I eat my food (I said 'if that happened'). But if I make stock say, I'll end up with a lot of salty sludgy vegetable mush, and yes I'll compost that & no I'm not worried about the salt.
Maybe it’s your dishwasher or you are not putting powder in the pre-rinse compartment in addition to the action pack or powder in the main compartment. It doesn’t matter how old or baked-on the food residue is, and it can be baked-on cheese, egg, meat, burned gravy, whatever and it’ll reliably come off in the (European) dishwasher each time, every time.
Even when I was in a rental with a crappy American unit from the 80s, it would still get everything though I often had to use the extended “pots and pans” cycles for that to happen.
But yes, utensils can and do corrode in the dishwasher over time if you have different metals thrown together in the high-temp, high-conductivity alkaline bath.
"if you use a 2hr + programme then nothing survives the caustic soda"
Sure. The point is, normalising "you have to wash dishes for 2 hours" and saying "shifts stubborn stains" is really overdoing it. If you can get some of these foods off the plates before they dry, and can do a shorter wash, its win--win
By letting the food “sit,” I save water two different ways: no need to rinse off proteins or sauces, and no need to run the dishwasher with a less-than-full-load (which wastes both water and electricity).
To be honest, since having kids and their being at a certain age, we now run the dishwasher filled to the brim every other day at most, so it’s a moot point. But in all cases, it runs while we’re sleeping and it makes no difference to me if it takes an hour or six.
The only time I’ve ever wished it finished faster is on the occasion of hosting guests and having more than the regular expected daily churn in dining ware. And that doesn’t happen enough to matter.
Not for any residential, standard 24" below the counter, dishwasher sold in the U.S. after 2010 and before October 2020 that I've seen, hence why it was a noteworthy change.
You should double check if the express cycle actually attains the same cleaning performance, because that would be pretty surprising.
I did see examples when shopping that were in advertisement only. i.e. the 'express cycle' skipped something, the drying stage, or rinse stage(s), etc.
Not only is it discontinued, but it doesn't seem to have info. on when it was introduced. Can you link a model that is confirmed to predate November 2020?
> It's well available at retailers in Canada. I could go purchase one this afternoon.
How is that relevant to the fact that the manufacturer has discontinued it?
Retailers can sell products they have in stock even if they are no longer manufactured.
Looking at the instruction manual it's clear that both the 'Express' and 'Speed60' modes are skipping some steps of the cleaning process as it says:
Normal
Recommended for daily, regular or typical
use to completely wash a full load of
normally soiled dishes.
Speed60®
Cleans freshly soiled dishes with easy to
remove soils.
This cycle reduces cycle time while still
including drying.
Express
Cleans lightly soiled dishes and reduces
overall wash time. Use this cycle to clean
glasses and dessert dishware that may
need to be reused at the same event.
You were asking for a machine to wash dishes in an hour with a dishwasher available between 2010 and 2020. This machine clearly fits that bill. Now you want something that is also available now (but not from a store only from the brand's website), and it needs to use an identical cleaning cycle to the normal mode.
You've moved the goalposts so far they're onto an entirely different field here.
> You were asking for a machine to wash dishes in an hour with a dishwasher available between 2010 and 2020. This machine clearly fits that bill. Now you want something that is also available now (but not from a store only from the brand's website), and it needs to use an identical cleaning cycle to the normal mode.
You've moved the goalposts so far they're onto an entirely different field here.
So your going to pretend the first part of my comment doesn't exist?
It seems a bit self-defeating to be honest since I can't see how anyone will pay more attention to your views after.
Since it appears your confused as to what the article is about, let me spell it out step by step:
It's clearly not moving the goalposts because the whole point behind this change was that it was spurred on by recent dishwashers, circa 2020, that don't clean as well, so giving an example of a dishwasher that doesn't clean as well in a faster mode, is pointless. Since that is already understood as a possibility by everyone who read it.
It's not some hidden secret that all dishwashers can be sped up by lowering the bar in the cleaning cycle. What's interesting is if it's able to maintain the same level of performance in less time, typically at the cost of increased energy and water usage, hence the nominal basis for this rule change by the DOE in 2020.
> So your going to pretend the first part of my comment doesn't exist?
First half of which comment?
> Since it appears your confused as to what the article is about, let me spell it out step by step:
I was replying to your comments, not the article. Your comments specifically asked about machines that had quicker modes. Your comments didn't have any of the details you're now providing. I haven't read the article and don't have any interest in doing so.
I love my Bosch washer. Bought one for my house, my rentals, my cottage. Whisper quiet and food is never stuck on the dishes after a load - unless someone packs the unit wrong.
This is definitely not true. I have 2012 and 2017 dishwashers that each have this. They also wash just fine. Really not sure what the article is on about.
I grabbed that SKU off my Abt invoice but it's actually a SHX65T55UC/07 per the door label. It's a 500 series model. SKUs change all the time, especially after 7 years.
- The dishwasher runs balls-out for 40 minutes so it's noisier. (Bosch sells a lot of units on its reputation of being ultra quiet)
- Manual mode doesn't check the soil sensor while washing.
- There is no drying cycle, which is the bulk of a two hour wash.
So if you're okay with that, Manual works just fine for most everyday loads and is pretty much the equivalent of the old school DWs and how they worked.
For example: "And yes, it is crazy, if not also bad environmental public policy that the federal government regulates the robot in my kitchen that cleans and dries the dishes; and keeps changing the rules to the point that the machine first invented in 1886 no longer accomplishes its purpose."
Having grown up rurally on a limited water supply, I know you can do the dishes for a family of four in about 10L/2.5 gallons of water. You just have to scrape off all the solids first (four-legged helpers excel at this). If you want you can have a second small rinsing sink.
When I moved to a city I found a lot of people wash with running water or change at the first hint of it getting dirty.
However now I live in a city and have things to do, a dishwasher is great because no matter how long it takes I’m not doing the dishes.
Ok, I'll agree that you CAN do it. However, outside of camping, I don't think I've ever seen someone actually do that. But, I'll concede that. My dishwasher uses 3.15 gallons on a normal wash cycle, which I don't feel too bad about.
Technical. A lot of NZ is mountainous country with volcanic soil on top of impermeable clays, which means there's very little groundwater. Some of the alluvial areas have plentiful groundwater and they use wells, but the majority of rural areas just use rainwater. It's cheap and easy to collect.
That makes a lot of sense. I didn't think about the volcanic soils and their relation to ground water challenges. I imagine they might also get a good bit of rainfall often so that might make it even easier for rainfall collection. Thanks!
Some people don't have a great well, and you can't pull much water at any given time. Or in the rainy season it's great, and in the dry season it's not. Or you might rely on water supplied by a water truck, in which case, you're going to be real conservative, cause that's probably not cheap.
You'll need to measure the amount of water you use in the process. Modern Energy Star-compliant models use less than 4 gallons per load. And don't forget to wash the same number of dishes as a full dishwasher load!
You haven't seen the shit I throw in my dishwasher every few nights. Seriously. It is jam-fucking-packed to the gills with the nastiest, filthiest, greasiest crap you can imagine. That it uses only a few litres of water to clean it is a miracle in itself, not to mention the countless hours it's saved me from scrubbing.
In my house, the dishwasher is orders of magnitudes more efficient than hand-washing.
Yeah, you honestly don't even need worry about anything besides the labor efficiency, because that alone is already a big deal. I guess some people just forget that labor saving devices were invented to save labor. Maybe they re-use the same dish over and over, don't bake, and don't cook with any fats or something.
Either your dishwasher isn't very good or you aren't using it properly. You should be using powder in both boxes so the prewash cycle and the main cycle can work [1]. Pods? Waste of money!
Again, what do you mean by "efficient"? I value my time over anything else, so for me handwashing is not efficient at all, unless it takes shorter than loading and unloading the machine.
The average person uses 4X as much hot water hand washing a full load of dishes compared to a dishwasher. A modern dishwasher uses 3-5 gallons of water per load. Do you use less than a quarter sink worth of water to wash a full dishwasher load of dishes, including rinsing? It's possible, but not easy.
The major concern with water is hot water use, as that adds a tremendously greater amount of energy to the equation. A typical sink or tub holds ~2--5 gallons filled to the brim, which is rare when dishwashing (1/2 to 3/4 fill is more typical, particularly accounting for displacement by dishes.
Rinsing is done with cold water. Options are to fill a second tub (or refill the washing tub after the suds-based wash), passing items under the tap, or using a sprayer hose (the most effective and efficient option in my experience). Total water use is typically less than that used for washing itself.
With dishwashers, it's rare that I don't have to further rinse or clean items, so the nominal usage is understating actual usage.
> With dishwashers, it's rare that I don't have to further rinse or clean items
Even when they do, I just leave them for the next cycle. Unless the next cycle was already going to be at capacity, the added water/energy use for re-washing is minimal.
For me, normally if something didn't get cleaned well it is because the dish either wasn't loaded quite right or it moved in the wash cycle. That improper positioning then preventing the sprayers from really hitting the dirty spots very well.
When hand-washing, it's possible to examine the dish or utensil, and scrub harder, let soak, or give a special treatment such as baking soda (tea and coffee stains), ammonia (heavy baked-on grease), oxalic acid ("Barkeeper's Friend") to polish copper or remove some forms of burn, scouring pads (typically plastic, copper or steel wool, may include soap or other chemicals for treating hard-to-remove foods, such as S.O.S or Brillo pads). Dishwashing machine detergent is another option (a little goes a long way, though as the detergent itself dissolves poorly, it's necessary to spread and/or circulate it over dishes where used). Vinegar + baking soda paste is useful for baked-on grease. Chlorine bleach may be used to remove some organic stains or disinfect where needed (this last is rare in my experience), though it should not be combined with ammonia-based products.
Knowing what cleaning treatments work and when they're appropriate is another bit of practical knowledge often lost. There's also knowledge of what chemicals not to use together
It's also possible to pre-soak specific items, either in the sink or by filling them (e.g., pots and pans) and letting them sit on the sink. Many people self-sabotage cleaning by failing to give the cleaning solution time to work, which can be a few seconds for light soiling to hours for chemical stains or baked-on stains.
The automatic dishwasher is also hard on the actual dishes and utensils, in my experience, and tends to pit or damage ceramics, glassware, and stainless-steel or aluminium utensils and pots.
And when washing a large number of items, ironically, filled basins to soap and rinse may use less water than multiple dishwasher loads. Though again, when the difference is measured in single-digit gallons (or up to around 20--40 litres), the overall efficiency savings largely pale against other household water usage (bathing, handwashing, laundry, other food prep, etc.).
Again, I see no reasonable basis for shaming those who prefer hand-washing. Cycle time and efficacy can be markedly better, total water and energy efficiency are comparable. Machine-washing is more consistent over larger populations (given equivalent equipment), though might degrade with age of the machine. It's mostly a ... wash.
A 2.5-5gal sink (lets average it at 3.75gal) filled 3/4 of the way twice is 5.6gal (2.1825 * 2). My dishwasher uses 3.5gal for a larger load than what I'd like to do in a sink. 5.6 > 3.5.
The difference between the most efficient machine vs. hand-washing methodologies are really too small to matter. A gallon or so of water either, way, most especially if cold, isn't worth worrying about.
There are other sources of inefficiencies in using a dishwasher as I've noted above.
My point isn't to browbeat people into hand-washing dishes. Rather, it's to point out that there are real advantages to doing so, and if that's what you prefer you shouldn't beat yourself up over it on account of efficiency arguments.
A few years back I'd looked up the actual research on hand-washing vs. machine washing. The most-quoted study (where any study is quoted at all, rather than vague hand-waving) is from the University of Bonn, Germany:
"A European Comparison of Cleaning Dishes by Hand", Rainer STAMMINGER, Ricarda BADURA, Gereon BROIL, Susanne DÖRR, Anja ELSCHENBROICH. University of Bonn, Germany.
- Practices for hand-washing vary widely. Some are exceedingly efficient. Some are stupendously wasteful.
- There's a considerable variation by country, or by region of the US.
- The best hand-washing methods beat dishwashers. Many of the rest come close.
Among the most efficient hand-washers are Germans, Californians, and Australians. The latter two live in areas where water is chronically limited. The least efficient: Russians.
If you fill a sink basin or small dish bucket, you've got about 2 gallons of water accounted for (the most efficient dishwashers use at least 4, many use 6 or somewhat more). Rinsing may in another basin, or under the tap in the sink.
If you live in a multi-person household and can fill a dishwasher every day or so, and hate doing dishes, the dishwasher makes sense.
If you live alone or can't fill the dishwasher, or would be washing dishes anyway, hand-washing may be more effective.
Either way, so long as you're not performing the Russian method: hot water tap full on during the full period you're washing dishes, hand-wasing can be the most efficient water- and energy-wise.
And if you hate hand-washing, and have a dishwasher, then use it.
Neither side in this discussion should be browbeating the other
I do imagine there are some who truly are more efficient handwashing than using a dishwasher, but from your link:
> Additionally it was shown that new dishwashers are able to reach at least the same performance with significant less amount of water needed as any test person
Also, the chart shows the average water use for a lot of these countries is somewhere close to 100L of water. Even for the lows of Germany/GB the average is around 50L. 3.5gal is only ~13L of water. So by this document my dishwasher is 3.8x as efficient as the average German doing dishes and almost 8x more efficient as many other countries, but I do agree this study doesn't exactly have massive sample sizes and there's a massive range of variability.
I do generally agree though we're (usually) talking about somewhat insignificant amounts of water "wasted" either way. I use far more water for bathing, drinking/eating, and flushing throughout my day, and we're talking about a few hundred kWh of energy used over a year when my monthly usage is >1000kWh. In the end I agree, people should generally do what's comfortable for them, save for just letting the hot water run while doing a lot of dishes. But this idea that the average person handwashing dishes is radically more efficient just isn't reality, and most people would have to seriously try to be more water/energy efficient than most dishwashers on the market today.
The average person's techniques for washing dishes by hand just isn't as efficient as any modern dishwasher. That's probably fine, but also lets not ignore reality.
> Moreover, the current standard requires standard residential dishwashers to not exceed 307 kWh/year and 5.0 gallons per cycle for the “Normal” cycle. 10 CFR 430.32(f)(1)(i). Consistent with the results of the Department's evaluation of dishwashers offering a 60 to 90 minute “Quick” cycle, DOE's has identified an innovative opportunity for the further development of a dishwasher model offering a “Normal” cycle of one hour or less.
I think the issue is that manufacturers struggle to get good cleaning performance subject to the 307 kWh/year, 5 gallon per cycle rule unless the cycle is very slow, and the DOE has indicated that it will allow more water and/or more energy usage for faster dishwashers.
(Speaking of water usage, I find it odd that dishwashers don't seem to do a final spray with fresh (non-recirculated) water. I would gladly use an extra 1/4 - 1/2 gallon per load to get a freshwater rinse at the end.
P.S. What's up with kWh/year anyway? Surely it should be kWh per cycle with an added restriction on additional power used when not running.
No, it's not obvious at all as various models can have different numbers of modes, so even averaging them out for a usage/cycle average number wouldn't yield any meaningful info.
e.g. A fancier model with several 'Eco' cycles and only one higher power mode will appear better than simpler models with fewer modes, even though the simpler model might actually use less energy.
In fact it would be very counter-intuitive and highly misleading.
I had an old Bosch dishwasher with a pre-heater and a macerator. It heated the water hotter than modern ones. What I noticed was there was no need to prewash dishes. Slob roommate left spaghetti sauce in a pan all week while you were gone. Dishwater would strip that right off.
If you compare the energy efficiency of my old one with a new ones where you have to pre-wash your dishes with warm water the old Bosch wins both in energy and water use.
Commercial dishwashers are only sterilizers. They don't do the cleaning that a residential dishwasher does. They expect as input dishes that are visually "clean", having been scraped and sprayed by hand before going in. The 60 second cycle just cuts remaining grease then kills all the germs with harsh chemicals and then rinses.
If you think residential dishwashers are bad at getting plates clean of dried-on gunk, commercial dishwashers are 100x worse, as that's not their job. The pre-washing everyone gripes about shitty residential dishwashers now requiring is an expected and designed-for staple in a commercial dishwashing process.
Yeah, you need to pair it with a person who’s entire job is to spray and scrub the dishes before loading them.
That said the high pressure sprayer before the dishwasher is enough to get almost everything off dishes except hardened melted cheese. If it didn’t spray everywhere I’d want one for my house.
> Commercial dishwashers are only sterilizers. They don't do the cleaning that a residential dishwasher does.
I “learned” this in college, too. And then I did a bit more research and discovered that the dishwasher was very much capable of cleaning, but only if it had appropriate detergent or cleaning solution. But commercial dishwasher cleaning solution is nasty and highly basic, so apparently whoever was in charged decided students shouldn’t have access to cleaning solution. So we only had sanitizer, and the dishwasher only sanitized.
After a discussion with the facilities department, I got cleaning solution and its feed line, and the dishwasher magically started washing dishes!
One should still spray the food off first, but commercial dishwashers wash just fine.
I worked in a commercial kitchen that had all 3 (wash, sterilize, rinse) of the fluids properly stocked. (In fact, they didn't own the dishwasher or fluids, but subscribed to a machine rental, maintenance, and refill contract, which was just "x loads for y dollars per month, rain or shine", to make costs predictable for the low margin small restaurant.)
You still need to thoroughly clean the dishes before they go in, otherwise in 1-2 loads the filters are completely clogged. They are absolutely not designed for dishes to go in that have any residual food on them.
In a residential setting if you're going to clean the dishes to that extent, you should just finish washing them, as it's basically the same amount of time for a household's amount of dishes. The only time a commercial dishwasher makes sense is if you need to do dozens of plates and cups and kilograms of silverware.
Commercial dishwashers are a bad choice for residential use.
There are low temperature dishwashers that sanitize with a sanitizing solution (generally chlorine based) and high temperature dishwashers that sanitize with heat.
If I ran a restaurant, I would go with high temp to avoid residual chlorine taste. And I would skip the rinse aid, thank you very much.
> If your water is hard, rinse aid helps a lot to make the glasses and dishes look good.
Or if you want a decent job, install a reverse-osmosis water filtration system in the central water piping that takes out all the nasty mineral salts responsible for the hardness and limescale. Also makes cleaning way easier.
Famously the Romans liked to found cities where the water was hard. But the preference persists for some people today. (And the reverse osmosis thing is a big investment, and might not be feasible when renting.)
It would be nifty IMO if dishwashers had two water feed lines, one for wash and one for rinse. Then plain water could be used for washing and expensive softened or other low-TDS water could be used for rising.
Or bonus points for a dishwasher that uses RO concentrate/brine for washing.
My recently purchased residential dishwasher actually says in the manual that you can use a 10% citric acid solution as rinse aid. Bought a 5kg bucket at the weekend and made some up - works a treat.
My parents have an older Bosch from before the present regulatory lack of efficiency by design. It's amazing how well it performs. It's been repaired a few times and hopefully they can still keep getting replacement parts for it for a long time.
Might be a Bosch thing? I have a fairly new one (7 years old now) and it's fantastic about not needing a pre-wash for everything except egg yolk and oatmeal. Those two are evil.
The cycle is very long, though. Mostly I don't mind, as I tend to run it overnight.
You probably measure your temperature in something like Kelvin (or Celsius or Fahrenheit), too? Instead of taking the ideal gas law pV = nkT serious and measuring temperature in units that are implied by T = p V / n * k, ie energy per degree of freedom.
I think that now DOE appliance standards, for all appliances, are now in annual consumption terms. They used to use different terms for different appliances that could convert to annual consumption (e.g., for dishwashers, it was "Energy Factor", which was cycles per kWh.)
> Surely it should be kWh per cycle with an added restriction on additional power used when not running.
That would be strictly more complicated, though I don't think passive draw is a big things for dishwashers.
To add to that. kWh/year obviously defines an underlying assumption of the number of cycles. That definition just allows to also account for standby time. Hence it's a better overall number to target.
307kWh/a and 5 gallons are a lot. Nowadays there are dishwashers that use 2.2 gallons and 76kWh/a (assuming 0,46 cycles per kWh which I think is the DOE limit) and they clean a full load adequately.
Even the cheapest models should be able to meet the DOE limits and clean the dishes completely.
Yes, the Eco cycle often takes a very long time. However, modern machines are significantly better than the DOE limits even on a one-hour cycle (I assume your machine uses 10 litres, not gallons).
I always wonder how much saving water and electricity washing dishes actually matters in relation to everything else we do. In the US people run their HVAC basically 24/7 either heating or cooling for a lot of the year. Our televisions, video game consoles, and computers are giant electric space heaters that run all day long. So what's the proportional burden of warming a few gallons of water? And I do mean warming, because people who wash dishes by hand don't make the water nearly as hot as what dishwashers use.
(Note: All of this applies to Australia, if it's much different for your country, please share!)
The one that pains me is ovens. They are hugely power hungry and here many models have a very tiny amount of insulation (unless you get a "pyrolitic" model that heats up to 500C to burn the oil off, they have better insulation by requirement of that).
We have no energy rating for ovens, so no real incentive to improve. The vast majority are also installed by builders when the house is built, so consumers never even make a choice in the first place. You can also imagine that also pushes most builders to the bottom end of the market. I'm also still always surprised how expensive ovens can be for how simple they are.
Most of them now also have a fan to run air around the the outside of the unit so it doesn't overheat the cupboard around it (but not all) which is perhaps also a hint at the poor insulation. The cheap builder model I most recently pulled apart had such poor insulation and gaps all around it.
"The running costs are calculated based on running the oven at 170°C for one hour, three times per week for 10 years at 30c per kWh. Where available, the fan-forced function is used, otherwise, the fan-assist is used. For models without either function, the top and bottom elements (convection or traditional bake) are used."
That's also probably generous since you often run a higher temp and I suspect 200-220C might make a big difference in that cost.
It's a good reason to make use of appliances like air fryers (which despite the name are mostly just ovens), they heat a much smaller space and use a lot less power as a result.
Unfortunately the ever shrinking house makes storing and using such things increasingly difficult. Microwaves are also only 50% effeceient (a surprise I recently learnt).
I know why we don't have it, and energy ratings are partly a proxy for it, but I always wished the average consumer had easy ways to be more informed about trade-offs exactly like this article talks about. You can trade energy effeciency for a slower cycle - that's partly why most washers these days have many different cycle options - you're trading one thing for another - but most of the time they just tell you the name of the situation they are supposedly for without even a hint at maybe how much more or less energy or water or delicacy you are trading off. The same reason product reviews are never clear cut because everyone has different priorities :)
> We have no energy rating for ovens, so no real incentive to improve.
If energy prices reflect externalities, you wouldn't need any special regulations or official ratings to give people incentives to get improved appliances.
Energy costs are already giving people incentives to do so, but perhaps they aren't high enough?
Energy ratings inform the customer when they're buying; without them, customers often aren't even aware of their energy use before they buy and install the oven, let alone the comparative efficiency of each oven.
That may be true if they at least knew how much energy the oven would use, and, if they actually made the purchasing decision.
There is no way to know how much the oven is using. Even noce purchased, most people have no idea how much energy in their home is used by what (they just get a single bill and for an entire 2 months period).
Lastly as noted, at least here, the majority are installed by builders and included in a package price - the consumer doesn't choose and most builders don't offer an option. Many more would also be chosen by landlords for those who rent, rather than home owners. Or may have been chosen by the home owner that built the house you then purchased.
Thus I would say the number of consumers that directly choose and purchase the oven they use would be a low percentage, and the cost to replace it is high enough to make that unlikely and not have a great payback period.
If energy was more expensive, people would care and take this into account when making choices.
Eg in Germany people routinely check out how good the insulation on eg the windows is when they choose a place to buy or rent. That's because energy is expensive in Germany, and it gets cold enough in winter that you need to heat.
If energy is cheap enough, people can be rationally (!) ignorant about these issues.
I don’t have hard numbers, but: the “7th generation” Miele combi-steam oven heats up absurdly quickly, only uses a 20A/240V circuit [0], and stays hot for quite a while if you don’t let it do its automatic cooling cycle. There’s just not enough power available to it for it to be inefficient — it can’t cost $310/year for electricity at $0.3/kWh to use it for 150 hours per year. The oven itself is not cheap, though.
[0] At least here, a 208V element is not available. It works at 208V but not as well.
US takes great pains to reduce power use, like the ones mentioned in the article but as you point out HVACs at offices work 24/7 at a very cold temperature, so much so that most people bring jackets to work. Cranking the cold up by 1-2F in hotels and offices will probably be imperceptible, yet may save a tremendous amount of energy.
Yep. Offices should basically be as cold as realistically feasible for the group working there, but no colder. Few things make me less productive than being in a hot environment: about 69F/20C is my ideal, and if it has to be either direction from there, it should be colder. Anything over about 74F interior temperature and my ability to do much critical thought is basically gone; I have no real heat tolerance but can deal with cold for ages.
This is a huge argument in favor of WFH: fewer/no arguments over office temps, a debate about as old as time itself, and particularly a place where it's going to be extremely difficult to get varied groups of folks to all be comfortable and agree (imagine someone super petite vs someone with a good bit of body mass, or someone who grew up in Norway vs someone from Singapore, or even just guys and gals who statistically tend to have different circulation, fat levels, etc. leading to different preferences in ambient temperature).
Years ago I worked in a moderately large mostly open-office place. My room (with devs) housed 6. There were two open areas with around 80-100 people in open cubes, then... there was a small hallway closed off with 5 offices - the 'executive' hall.
One exec guy would turn the AC on high because there was little circulation over there. He liked it 'cool'. I was on the other side of the open area, in a small office. I'd come in in July, and the thermometer on my digital desk clock said 63f. I could not move my fingers to type efficiently because it was so cold. My fingers ached. I brought in a space heater and was chastised that I was "making a big deal out of nothing". 100+ people were consistently uncomfortable to make sure one person was comfortable. The energy waste had to have been enormous.
The days this guy was in it reminded me of working in foodservice, having to stock the walk-in cooler on delivery days. Yes, by afternoon, it was bearable, but 63f was just too cold to work effectively. Dozens of us were impacted, but the one top exec needed his comfort the 3 days a week he was in.
I'd call that below "realistically feasible for the group" then, for sure. If you can't even move your fingers, that's a bit far down the "keep it cool" spectrum :)
... man, people need to toughen up. You can't think in 74 degrees? If it was 80, okay maybe I could sympathize. But 74 is colder than what I have mine set at home regularly.
74's a rough guesstimate (I don't sit here with a thermometer all day, after all). Some days my tolerance for thinkable heat is certainly higher. But in general, some folks just don't do warm rooms, and it is what it is.
Outdoors we at least have airflow to wick heat away. Indoors, it's just stale, warm air (there's other trains of thought that discuss the impact of CO2 in rooms on deep thought; I don't have any such studies handy to link at the moment but it does come to mind tangentially).
> Outdoors we at least have airflow to wick heat away. Indoors, it's just stale, warm air
Our bodies generate a pocket of heat that we end up sitting in without airflow. Years ago I bough an air circulator (a fan designed to push a lot of air slowly across a room, instead of blowing on a person) specifically to deal with this, and it brought my room-temperature-upper-tolerance from ~76 to ~80 without any need for AC.
TV, game consoles, most computers (assuming you aren’t mining Bitcoin or something) are basically a rounding error compared to HVAC, and water heating.
It was a lot worse in the 90's, but modern electronic devices sip the juice. I bought a meter to put on an outlet to measure my amperage, and my whole office: Mac, PC, work laptop, cable modem, router, and 1 access point uses 1.5 amps. If I run a AAA game on my PC, it ramps up to about 3a.
People who point to electronic energy usage need to leave my clock cycles alone, and either direct their anger towards the world's elite, with their private planes and yachts, or just shut up completely.
And Microsoft can suck my nuts with their default settings for power savings. Why would I buy a sports car and let someone keep a software governor on the engine?
Do you have a source for that? I've always heard it, but... I've also watched a lot of people wash dishes in ways that waste lots of water unnecessarily.
I'd be curious how the study was conducted, and if they have video of the study participants washing their dishes.
I have always heard that but I never understood how that's possible. I filled a rice bowl with water and reuse that same water to wet all the dirty dishes before rubbing, then rinse with cold running water from the tap.
The majority of the energy used in dishwasher is from heating up the water. If you wash with cold water, you are using less energy than the dish washer.
Fill up the sink high enough to submerge cooking pots, that's most if not all the way there.
Edit: I just measured my kitchen sink and pot for this, 17x19 and 4 inches high = 5.6 gallons. If I go all the way to the sink's overflow at 6.5 inches high, that's 9 gallons.
No, you're not. Water isn't free, and a good dishwasher is more water-efficient than you. Water requires a LOT of energy to pump, so less water means less energy.
From earlier comments, it appears that a dishwasher will consume at least 2.5 gals per cycle. No way does hand washing use 5 to 7.5 gallons of water per wash.
Being a single guy, I stopped using my dish washer for the several dishes I dirty every day and always hand wash. I first put in about an inch of hot water and wash the utensils. I turn on the hot water again to rinse the utensils with the cast off water going back into the wash sink. The rinse sink is used only to hold the clean, rinsed dishes. I continue on washing each item this way (from cleanest to dirtiest). Most of the time when I'm done the sink isn't half-full.
Because I can only use water cool enough to put my hands in, the dishes are not as clean as what a dishwasher can do, but, again, no way does a single wash consume 5+ gallons.
The standard way my family would clean pots and pans by hand is to fill the sink and let them soak for a bit before scrubbing them. With my current sink, that's just under 9 gallons of water.
> it appears that a dishwasher will consume at least 2.5 gals per cycle. No way does hand washing use 5 to 7.5 gallons of water per wash.
Rinsing dishes requires fresh water from the tap, which runs somewhere from 1-2 gallons per minute. After filling a sink (or bucket) with water and rinsing everything, it's easy to use 5+ gal to wash dishes.
In regards to saving water, there can be huge benefits to doing so. I'm on the Utility Board overseeing the municipal utilities for my city (electricity, water, wastewater, trash). Our city is growing rapidly, and expanding a sewage system is extremely expensive. We're a city of ~60k and are spending ~$200mm to expand our wastewater treatment plants. And densification means current sewage lines can't support the buildings that need to be built.
More efficient appliances mean less water going through the sewer, and less wastewater that needs to be treated. Which means lower capital expenditures, which eventually come directly out of your pocket.
Side rant. Convenient how we've created a problem that requires huge infrastructure investment. This was a solved problem with septic tanks, that we could have spent many many multiples of money on improving and making ridiculously fancy with sensors and motors and and and. But alas, government is the Big Job Creator. Got to feed that beast.
I don't buy this cynical take. The current water treatment plants are much more complicated than a simple septic system which lack economies of scale and can still lead to ground water pollution.
Also, we've apparently transitioned from waste water being something that had to be dealt with to an actual asset. It can be cleaned to partial usage (and used for agriculture) or directed to help refill specific aquifers.
My cynical take is that companies have offloaded the responsibility for being "eco-friendly" on the consumer rather than the companies themselves that use 1000x the energy.
For anyone who is upset with the performance of their dishwasher there is a really really easy thing to try.
First, replace your pods with a box of powder detergent, then add some detergent to the prewash cup on your dishwasher in addition to the normal dispenser. If your dishwasher doesn't have one you can just put some on the door before you close the washer. This gives your dishwasher detergent to work with on two of its cycles rather than just one and in my experience it makes all the difference on really difficult dishes.
The pods are effectively identical to the powder detergent but at a huge cost premium and don't give you the ability to adjust your amount of detergent to match the water hardness in your area which can result in a film on your clean dishes.
Alternatively you can test this by just throwing an extra pod in the bottom of the dishwasher to start with. If it works well then you can consider switching to powder to save costs.
Also helpful: running the sink's hot water before you run the dishwasher, until it heats up, so that the dishwasher has access to hot water from the moment it starts.
Yes. North American dishwashers don’t heat the water during the prewash cycle because the duration in time is too short and the 120V electrical service can’t supply enough power to heat the water quickly during that time.
European dishwashers use 240V (like everything else in the house) and so they can heat water much more quickly.
This electrical difference is also reflected in the fact that electric kettles (for boiling water) aren’t nearly as popular in North America as they are in Europe. Technology Connections also did a video on this topic [1].
As a former British person I'm not sure this is true now. The 220V supply part is true, but you can buy electric kettles at Costco and they boil plenty fast on 120V and everyone who drinks tea has one in my experience.
Just checking Amazon, most popular local (230V) kettles are 2200W, with some 2400W options. Checking Costco, US kettles are 1500W. Assuming equal efficiency, the European kettle takes between 62% and 68% the time it takes a US kettle to boil the same water
Of course equal efficiency isn't necessarily a given. The insulation and the design of the heating element can have a notable impact on heating time. And for small amounts it likely doesn't matter that much. But assuming equal construction it is still a very notable difference.
I still use the pods in the main dispenser, for convenience, but after watching the TC video, I started dumping a spoonful of loose Oxyclean into the washer before closing the door. That also provides detergent during both cycles, and the difference in cleanliness is night and day.
I would strongly suspect it's not going to hurt anything. If your dishwasher is leaving residue of cleaners, that's another story, that needs to be fixed whatever you're using.
Also worth checking your dishwasher manual to see if it has a minimum temperature requirement for the incoming water. If it does, run the kitchen faucet till the water gets as hot as it can before starting the dishwasher. Many cheap dishwashers have a heating element which cannot heat the water to the required cycle temperature unless the incoming water is hotter than a certain temperature. More expensive dishwashers can work with cold or hot water.
My belief is that manufacturers use the same heating elements between europe (240V, but often piped to the cold water line) and North America (120V, but usually piped to the hot water line).
No matter what, North American dishwashers will only be able to draw 1500w, and probably less because they're not always on a dedicated circuit, and have other power needs than just heat. So it's probably not a "cheap diswasher" vs expensive one issue.
The amount of water heated up in each cycle is small enough that 1500W is not the limiting factor. Maytag recommends connecting to the hot water outlet and recommends a minimum temperature of 120F [1].
The Miele user manual for their USA models recommends connecting to the cold water inlet unless the hot water is known to be heated by a very efficient source [2].
It doesn’t. They just assume that the user is looking for the most efficient solution. There are pros and cons though. The delicate crystal cycle uses a very low temperature and will only work with cold water. Some of the faster cycles will only be as fast as claimed if the supplier water is already hot.
I haven't checked code - but since my wiring had the dishwasher and garbage disposal shared on a single 20A, I would expect that each now have a requirement to not consume more than 1200W.
At 1200W and a 2.5 gallon wash cycle, I'd expect heating from 70 to 130F would take about 20 minutes. Unless the pre-rinse cycle was extended, I would expect this would mean the soap was released at the start of the wash cycle before the water was to temperature.
Why would it be the only option? It seems to be the standard in Europe, but not sure why you couldn’t connect it to the hot water line instead. This is especially true if you have an efficient hot water source like solar or a heat pump water heater.
You have to hire (or be) a plumber to make the change. Often getting access to the pipes can be tricky. Depends on how your house is though. Sometimes this is as simple as connecting the hose to the other valve already in place, sometimes this means opening up the wall to get access to the pipes.
Normally the only pipe that's available to dishwashers is the cold water pipe.
However, even if you had hot water available, it would actually be to hot. The hot water entering can be much hotter than the required 30C for the lowest setting, so the dishwasher would need to cool the water.
In the U.S. dishwashers are almost always installed directly next to the kitchen sink, where either the cold or hot line can be easily tapped with a tee valve. I guess plumbing/kitchen layout is done differently in Europe.
As for heat setting, what’s the reason to be concerned with tap water being too hot? I don’t think plumbing code would allow water to be available at the tap that was hot enough to actually damage any type of utensil/drinkware/etc? I presume the only reason there might be a lower heat setting is simply for energy savings, which is kind of moot if you’re instead pulling hot water from the efficiently heated water supply.
1. He points out that a powder Detergent by itself is less effective than a combination of powder and gel. Something that the pods provide built in.
2. His own experiment with the prewash were completely underwhelming, showing nearly identical results in addition to not proving any different in the final result.
I couldn't find where he says the powder alone is worse than powder and gel. There is a section discussing how any gel detergent will have at most one out of enzymes and bleach- is that what you're thinking of? The actual test you refer to happened in the first video. I don't think it's too surprising. Dishwashers work pretty well!
America's Test Kitchen, back when it was good (AKA when Chris was in control), said that the easiest thing to do was just use the pods that had as many colors of liquid as possible. With that advice, I've had good results 100% of the time.
>said that the easiest thing to do was just use the pods that had as many colors of liquid as possible. With that advice, I've had good results 100% of the time.
this seems like bad advice. Setting aside the question of whether the colors actually do anything, once this "advice" is known it's only a matter of time before inferior brands add a mix of food coloring to their detergent pods to look more premium.
> America's Test Kitchen, back when it was good (AKA when Chris was in control), said that the easiest thing to do was just use the pods that had as many colors of liquid as possible.
1. I don't see any/much difference in pre- and post-Christopher Kimball ATK. The rest of the senior staff is basically the same, so I'm not sure what would have changed.
2. What exactly is so special about the colored liquids? What is the chemical make-up of them and their purpose? And are the liquids the same between difference brands? Is the red of one the same as the red as another? Or is the red of one have an equivalent to another (brandA->red = brandB->blue)?
Because unless you know what the liquids are/do, you're just cargo culting. By some account the liquids to nothing practical:
> Chemistry expert and former detergent chemist here, chiming in. Modulo some small semantic differences, you're 100% spot on. Functionally, there is zero difference in the formulations. Every powder dish detergent on the market comprises the same functional components, though the exact chemicals selected may vary. It's always some combination of detergent, anti-deposition agent, water conditioners, strong base, oxidizers, enzymes, buffers, "processing aids", and what I call "foo foo juice" - colors and fragrances.
> 1. I don't see any/much difference in pre- and post-Christopher Kimball ATK. The rest of the senior staff is basically the same, so I'm not sure what would have changed.
The direction completely changed. Now it's all about fancier foods and restaurant stuff. Compare an episode from 2010 to now. Complete difference.
> Because unless you know what the liquids are/do, you're just cargo culting. By some account the liquids to nothing practical:
Uh, yeah, by definition I'm appealing to authority. Namely the authority of the people who did the comparison testing in America's Test Kitchen. That's literally why I watch it: because they know better than me and they put in the work.
> The direction completely changed. Now it's all about fancier foods and restaurant stuff. Compare an episode from 2010 to now. Complete difference.
Is the fanciness of ATK any different that CK's Milk Street? Season six of the latter had Jordanian, Brazillian (pizza), Turkish, falafel, Mexican, Greek cuisine; season five had Ethopian, Japan, Ukraine, Crete, etc:
If anything it's Kimball that seems to have gone in the high falutin' direction. Regardless: if fancy is where the viewers/audience numbers are now, then that's the direction that either/both shows have to go to. What was done in 2010, or whenever, is irrelevant if the landsacape has changed.
> That's literally why I watch it: because they know better than me and they put in the work.
That's fine, but the authority should at least explain why so the more curious viewer could dig into things more. The YT link to the Technology Connections videos is to a comment by a chemists that breaks things down:
> Some pods, such as our top pick and runner-up pick, contain additional liquid cleaning agents in separate chambers that release when the PVA film dissolves. This design keeps liquid and powder separate until they are dispensed, allowing detergent boosters that best operate in liquid form to combine with powder detergent during a dishwasher’s cycle, enhancing their effectiveness.
> Because unless you know what the liquids are/do, you're just cargo culting
Right. Specifically, its the kind of advice that even if it works on the market at the time it is written, if it gets popular, it is very trivially subject to gaming in the way that gives truth to Goodhart's Law. "More colors of liquid in the pod = sells better" is an obvious target for trivial optimization with no change in substantive composition.
> [...] an obvious target for trivial optimization with no change in substantive composition.
On the other hand, if they care enough to manufacture the pods with multiple liquid compartments, why not put the good stuff in them? I don't think the chemical composition will meaningfully change the cost.
I think the point is that those pods with all the colours of liquid as well as the tablet of powder at back are actually no more effective than plain old store brand loose powder, yet they cost 5 times as much.
Those colored pods made little sense to me. Do those different liquids get released at different times? Saw someone test it out on YouTube that showed not be the case. Or do they have some sort of unstable reaction when they get mixed? If not, then, what's the point?
That was probably their brand-neutral way of saying to use Cascade Platinum. Not to sound like a shill but that’s the only product that’s actually worked well for my current dishwasher. Everything else leaves a lot of residue or doesn’t actually clean.
I found good results with the pods too - either cascade platinum or the finish powerball ones.
One other thing made a difference between good and bad cleaning in a load - plates near the dispenser.
The detergent dispenser is in the door and putting plates on the bottom rack sort of between the bottom rotating arm and the dispenser seemed to interfere with the pod. It would prevent or delay dissolving the pod and mixing with the water. leaving some free space in the bottom rack in that location was key.
Technology Connections' videos are a bit long for my taste. This one and its follow up really only have a few takeaways:
Dirt sensors might mean that deliberately leaving crud on the dishes (rather than rinsing first in the sink) leads to longer and better washes
Run your kitchen sink hot water a little before starting to get warmer water into the dishwasher
The first cycle is just water, before the detergent tray pops open, so put detergent into the pre-wash tray or just straight into the tub to make it do more cleaning in that cycle
But don't put two pods in, i.e. one in the detergent tray, and another detergent pod into the tub because these pods are very concentrated and harsh and will damage plates. Only add a little extra powder
I really don't understand why people espouse this channel. If you watch it for entertainment sure, I suppose this video is better than watching some guys video essay about Man of Steel, but if I just want to learn about something asking me to watch 30 minutes of drivel makes no sense.
I love his videos. They are not tutorials and so do not need to be concise and to the point. They are video essays from which I learn many things in a good amount of detail, and i have a fun time doing it because he writes entertaining scripts.
I almost always learn things for fun, not because I'm deliberately trying to better myself (turns out self improvement comes easily for me when I don't overthink things).
I'd much rather watch a 30 minute video that's entertaining and teaches me something than skim read a document for a few minutes.
He also tends to go into all sorts of interesting tangents that I probably wouldn't have even found out about if I was researching this stuff myself.
I think his videos go much deeper into topics I didn't realize I cared about and I find them fascinating for it. It's not about the destination it's about the journey.
> Run your kitchen sink hot water a little before starting to get warmer water into the dishwasher
Note: this only makes sense in the US (or wherever else it's common for your dishwasher not to heat its own water).
> But don't put two pods in, i.e. one in the detergent tray, and another detergent pod into the tub because these pods are very concentrated and harsh and will damage plates. Only add a little extra powder
I'm not sure damaging your plates is the reason to avoid the extra pod. Plates are often made of some glass-like or ceramic-like material and not that easily damaged by chemicals.
Don't know about the pods, but for a while we used DIY dishwashing powder with soda crystals as the main ingredient, and after a while you could definitely notice slight scratching of glassware, and any printing would fade pretty heavily. Not sure if that's a chemical process or simply the abrasiveness of the powder.
Oh, dishwashers are definitely hard on printing on glasses.
I'm not sure about scratches. I can imagine you would get scratches if your detergent (especially crystals) doesn't completely dissolve? I mean, people even sometimes use sugar as a scrubbing agent. Dissolved sugar can't scratch anything, but sugar crystals can.
> this only makes sense in the US (or wherever else it's common for your dishwasher not to heat its own water).
American dishwashers heat their own water too - I think this is for cases when the dishwasher has a time limit on how long it will spend heating up the water (perhaps to meet expectations on cycle length).
American dishwashers hook up to the hot water line, vs the cold water line in some other countries. They do have their own heaters, but household models are limited to 1200-1800 watts.
The pre-wash/pre-rinse cycle may only give enough time to raise the temperature 10-15 °F before the regular wash cycle starts. I do not believe they will delay the start of the wash cycle due to the water not yet being to target.
Starting with cold water reduces the effectiveness of the initial rinse, and may reduce effectiveness or prolong the wash cycle.
I'm not sure exactly what you're saying here, but I'm assuming you mean they run each source in separate lines. That's the same in the US. The point is that these pipes aren't well insulated so the line has probably cooled even though it is a "hot" line. Running the water a little bit flushes the cooled water out so that only hot water goes into the dishwasher. Because even though it is a "hot" line it gets cold over time if it isn't being cycled. Maybe in the UK you're much closer to the hot water source, but in the US houses are often so big and poorly designed that you need to run the water a bit before you get really hot water from the tap.
At least in Germany, dishwashers are hooked up to the cold water line. No matter what I do with my sink, the dishwasher will never get hot water on its inlet.
> > Run your kitchen sink hot water a little before starting to get warmer water into the dishwasher
> Note: this only makes sense in the US (or wherever else it's common for your dishwasher not to heat its own water).
I don't think this is a US-vs-world issue. Other countries' dishwashers are also connected to the hot water supply.
Rather, Technology Connections is suggesting a hack.
Your dishwasher, wherever in the world you may be, will start up by using whatever water it can get for an initial rinse of the dishes, and it will measure how dirty the water is after this initial rinse.
Normally this water will be tepid. But if you make it hot by running your hot tap first, the hot water will rinse more dirt off the dishes than tepid water, the dishwasher will detect more dirt, and so it will assume the dishes need more aggressive cleaning, and adjust its program accordingly.
> Your dishwasher, wherever in the world you may be, will start up by using whatever water it can get for an initial rinse of the dishes, and it will measure how dirty the water is after this initial rinse.
> Normally this water will be tepid. But if you make it hot by running your hot tap first, the hot water will rinse more dirt off the dishes than tepid water ...
I might be misunderstanding you, but this definitely doesn't apply everywhere.
I don't know how this works in the rest of the world, but in the Netherlands at least my dishwasher is only hooked up to the cold water, running my tap will have no effect on the temperature of the water my dishwasher receives.
I bought a new dishwasher (and it's not as good as the old one :/), in the instruction manual it says you can use some configuration to tell it it's hooked up to hot water.
It makes sense to hook it up to a hot water line, given things like solar collectors and heat exchangers heating / pre-heating water.
I can't speak for every person's experience, but what I believe is that most dishwashers being sold today, anywhere, are capable of being connected to domestic hot water, or cold water. They will work with both. That's not the same thing as saying every dishwasher being sold can do this, but check your instruction manual. Perhaps it can. As per a sibling comment, decide holistically if that would be a good idea or not.
Unless someone can point me to the existence of regulations saying something like "it's illegal to connect a dishwasher to a hot water line, it's gotta be cold water that the dishwasher heats up itself", then my expectation is that most dishwashers can be connected to either hot or cold, and will heat the water to the correct temperature.
Looking at EU regulations, as far as I can see, they don't regulate the intake temperatures that dishwashers have to accept. What they do regulate is energy usage labelling, and mandating there must be an "eco" mode, what the eco mode must do, and if you get to select multiple modes then "eco" mode must be the default. https://commission.europa.eu/energy-climate-change-environme...
> I can't speak for every person's experience, but what I believe is that most dishwashers being sold today, anywhere, are capable of being connected to domestic hot water, or cold water. They will work with both.
This is not my experience. Nowadays appliances such as washing machines and dishwashers, in Europe at least, only have a cold water inlet.
Apparently modern appliances use so little water overall that it's no longer efficient to connect them to a hot water supply, since they will stop drawing water before the hot water runs through the pipes, and therefore it just wastes the hot water.
Many European machines accept hot water. Any Miele does, and my entry level Bosch (in UK) accepts up to 60C but you have to set some obscure setting on the machine (the manual explains). But I find even cheap machines wash pretty well even without this, and you are right about it it being hot only if the machine is right next to the boiler.
That's OK, that's your choice. I believe most dishwashers will work with either.
My dishwasher is connected to a hot water tap and also heats its own water to exactly the correct temperature... it just doesn't need to heat it as much because it's connected to a hot water line.
It doesn't specify a minimum temperature although I assume it'd have to be >=1°C. But it is clear you can connect to either a hot or a cold water line.
Sure, it optionally supports it, but that's an extra water line that'd need to be run.
And what for? Whether the instant water heater or the dishwasher heats the water, it's still going to be the same amount of electricity, the same cost.
Have a look at the overview on Geizhals.de - Almost all current models have optional hot water intake nowadays (like 95%+ of the models from AEG/Bosch/Siemens/Neff/Bauknecht/Miele). This is to further advance the energy-rating. Doesnt apply to the cheaper manufacturers though.
> Other countries' dishwashers are also connected to the hot water supply.
I think it is more a 110V vs. 230V household power issue. For 110V countries like the US the amps needed to heat up the water would be pretty high or the heat up would take very long. In Europe however I have yet to come across a dish-washer that is connected to the hot water supply.
I'm in the UK and have a dishwasher connected to the hot water right now. There is not some country-wide uniform "we".
The manual makes clear this is quite OK.
They work with either hot or cold water. They will heat the water to the temperature they need. They don't work with _too hot_ water, hotter than they would heat it themselves (e.g. >60°C), but that's also outside the range of most domestic hot water supplies (which per BS 8558 should have a draw-off temperature of 50°C at sinks).
Pick any dishwasher at random, go to Specifications -> General -> Water fill. Every single one I picked, all from different manufacturers, said "cold or hot"
I wasn't able to find manufacturer recommendations from Argos, but I did find two Swedish manufacturers that support either hot or cold water, but recommend that you use the cold water line. One of them claims that detergents are designed to work better when starting with cold water (presumably this is not the case in the US, where hot-water-only machines are the norm).
> Connect the machine to cold water if possible. Then the dishwasher itself heats up the water during the washing phase and the final rinse, which means that you save about 20 percent of energy. Today's dishwasher detergent works best and tablets dissolve better when the program starts with cold water.
> Dishwashers connected to cold water use around 30 percent less energy than dishwashers connected to hot water. A dishwasher connected to cold water only uses hot water when it is really needed.
Just a note on the hot water supply: Whether this happens depends on three factors:
- Does the dish washer support it? Not all do in the EU.
- Did the plumber install a warm outlet when they set up the connection for the dish washer?
- Does it even make sense from a holistic perspective?
The latter depends on the specific circumstances. For instance, I live in a country with district heating, and here it makes sense, because then I can use cheap heat. My dish washer supports it. But there's no warm outlet installed by the plumber, and currently the heat is mostly from coal, whereas the electricity is mostly renewable, so for the time being I just let it be.
> Plates are often made of some glass-like or ceramic-like material and not that easily damaged by chemicals.
A ceramic is a glass (or the other way around), just of a different material composition. And yes, a dishwasher can easily damage both glassware and ceramic dishes depending on how the glass (or glaze, in the case of a ceramic dish) was formulated.
A common durability test for ceramic engineers is indeed — placing it in the dishwasher.
FWIW, his videos are long because they're not designed to convey a few practical takeaways—they're usually deep dives into the way that the tech works, and he gets into all kinds of details that aren't useful if all you want is the tl;dr "what should I do with this" information.
However, those details are exactly why I follow his channel! I'm a million times more confident repairing my own appliances than I was before I found his videos, and it's not because he has videos on how to repair my specific appliances, it's because his deep dives into a wide variety of appliances have given me a good intuition for how these kinds of machines work.
He also shows off good features that are worth owning, making us more confident buyers as well. For instance I feel his video on smoke detectors should be required viewing to any responsible homeowner/renter. And he showcases the decline/lack of adoption of proper features in consumer appliances, i.e. all toasters should be variations of the Sunbeam T-20B IMO.
Yes! I actually found him through his Sunbeam toaster videos after my wife and I inherited one—I wanted to better understand how it works. They're every bit as cool as he says.
I've seen a handful of his videos but not the one on smoke detectors. I replaced our batteries this week (once one of them chirps and I hear it, I replace them all, or else they end up with drastically different states of battery power -- which is at least a little bit funny... How do they all not drain power at a similar rate?) and it got me thinking about how very little I understand about these critical devices.
> How do they all not drain power at a similar rate?
I do not know if each smoke detector drains power at a similar rate (maybe some are in hotter or colder locations in the house), but I do know that the total energy in each battery can vary as well.
Slight variations on the electronics give slightly different characteristics, and hence different power draws... but also, the batteries are also going to have slightly different capacities, so you have random amounts of power draw clustered around a given value, and random amounts of capacity also clustered, so combined you might end up with a detector drawing 70uA on a 540mAh cell, and one doing 50uA on a 560mAh cell, but the cell voltage they start chirping at is exactly the same.
>But don't put two pods in, i.e. one in the detergent tray, and another detergent pod into the tub because these pods are very concentrated and harsh and will damage plates. Only add a little extra powder
This is a strange optimization choice. I'd much rather replace plates slightly more often vs. spend time each night handwashing or rinsing dishes. My philosophy is to put everything in the dishwasher regardless of 'diswasher safe'. If it breaks, I replace it with some other dish/cup brand. In a short time you are left with durable cook and glassware that the dishwasher can clean by itself.
Dishwasher pods are a lot worse than powder. The pods contain plastic which dissolves in the water. The powder used to contain phosphates (which caused a major disruption to aquatic ecosystems) but doesn’t anymore.
Just as a data point, in the EU phosphates in dishwasher detergents are banned since 2017. Laundry detergents are phosphate-free since 2013. All other detergents are limited to some amount, but I can't find which.
As it is often the case in the EU these regulations are aimed at consumer level products. Industrial level products are regulated differently, if at all. I don't know details.
In France, the "lower-end" pods are wrapped in plastic, but it doesn't dissolve, you have to remove it manually. The more expensive ones use that as an argument: "no need to unwrap! just stick in the machine!". I'm not convinced that for the cheaper ones the wrapping is necessary, but at least it doesn't go (directly?) in the water.
> In a short time you are left with durable cook and glassware that the dishwasher can clean by itself.
While I quite like this Darwinistic approach, I've not actually had this problem other than with printed or gilded patterns. Although I need a better solution for my grandmother's EPNS spoons.
I think that this advice from Technology Connections is bad advice. I was having huge problems getting my dishes clean in early-mid 2020. I thought my dishwasher was broken and needed to be repaired, and then it started working again.
What made it stop washing? I had switched to powdered detergent because I couldn't find pods due to COVID shortages. When I found pods again, I bought them. I've never had problems since.
I don’t know if this happened here, but sometimes if the soap door is time released water infiltrated the chamber and it cakes up and doesn’t release properly. My observation is this happens less often with pods likely because they don’t dissolve rapidly enough.
The colorful liquids (or equivalent) in the pods are surfactants and other fun things that are not practical to formulate as powders. So they really do clean differently.
Of course, there are other ways to formulate things, but they all have tradeoffs.
I can't find any pods that are just water-soluble wrappers of the powdered detergent. All of them have additional compartments in the pods for other chemicals, and all the pods do clean a hell of a lot better than just powdered detergent.
I had switched earlier this year after seeing the Technology Connections video, and I'm ready to switch back. The pods are just better.
> to match the water hardness in your area which can result in a film on your clean dishes.
Or invest in a water softener. They’re a one-time expense and almost no maintenance (aside from a small expense/maintenance for salt), and are beneficial for a number of things:
- improved appliance longevity
- eliminating scale buildup on toilets and faucets
I wouldn't say almost no maintenance—the water softener is the single highest maintenance appliance I own. I can never manage to stay on top of the salt input that's required.
I fill mine twice a year, with about 5-6 bags each fill. Maybe there are different sizes, but when I was shopping around, most seemed to have about the same capacity.
So for me, I'd say something that takes me about 30 minutes to do (including the trip to get the salt) twice a year is fairly low maintenance.
Not an option for renters, who also don't have the luxury of the option of fixing or replacing bad dishwashers.
Also, when I lived in the Midwest I could barely tell the water softener was there. I would descale my kettle and the first pot already had a thick layer on it. I now use a countertop RO system.
> when I lived in the Midwest I could barely tell the water softener was there
I guess it depends on how hard the water is, I suppose, but could also be the type of softener. I'm not sure, I haven't done a lot of research on it, as it seems to just work.
But in my experience, I can tell a huge difference (vs. the house we moved from that didn't have a softener). I never see any scale on our appliances, faucets, shower doors, etc.
When showering, I can tell when I've forgotten to refill the salt just from the feel of the water.
When I was setting up our Bosch dishwasher, there was a water hardness option. The machine has a built-in salt tank and is fully capable of regulating water hardness on it's own. You just have to top it up every now and then.
The advice from that video to put powdered detergent in the prewash has been a huge improvement to our dishwashing. We now put the powder in the prewash section, but keep using tablets for the main wash just because of inertia I suppose, but it works great.
> Why anyone would pay $$$ to have water come with their detergent is beyond me.
I pay so that I don't have to add yet another thing to my increasingly limited free time. The older I get the happier I am to pay extra so I have to do less.
> The same for washing machine detergent. Why anyone would pay $$$ to have water come with their detergent is beyond me.
Because powder detergent (no matter if for laundry or dishes) has a nasty tendency to pull in moisture from the air, leading to it clumping up and getting ineffective. If you have a family with small children that produce a lot of dishes and laundry, you may get away with it but if you're single / DINK no way.
> In the same vein, antifreeze now comes "premixed" with water. Gaaaaah. I just keep looking till I find the lonely 100% antifreeze jug.
That one is because most people don't use distilled water to dilute, but tap water instead... which can carry serious issues, either because it dissolves the piping (see e.g. Flint water crisis) or because limescale builds up in the engine where it's hot and eventually clogs up, leading to engine failure.
I'll have to try Amazon. Anything other than tablets seems to have gone outright extinct in UK supermarkets. Some brands (e.g. Morrison's value) have their tablets in tear-open plastic sachets, so I can break it and put 1/3 straight in for the pre-wash, but I expect they'll switch to the dissolvable wrap type soon (which is probably a good thing for the environment)
Many people also don't clean their dishwashers regularly. You need to remove the filter on the bottom and wash it clean once a month, at least.
Also, the nozzles on the spray arms can become clogged. The easiest method to clean everything is to add one of those "cleaning" tablets to a normal wash. These are just Sodium Hydroxide, which chemically converts accumulates fats and greases into soap.
Conversely, my wife insists on not pre-rinsing the dishes and that filter gets real gross, real quick. Unless you mean the spinny arms, never cleaned those before.
At 15 years old it probably does have the grinder. They starting going away about then though, so hard to say without doing more digging than I care to.
I keep telling my customers that they don't "need" to patch their Internet-facing Windows web servers in the same sense that they don't "need" to replace the oil filters in their car.
Look, yes, you ought to replace the filter every six months to a year, but will your car stop dead the very next day if you don't? No!
It also won't stop the day after, or the day after that. Ergo, by induction, we come to the conclusion that the 2012 R2 server on RTM patch level is not professional negligence.
It’s a difference of degree, doses of magnitude of degrees. In fact, you should patch your serve on the order of years, just the same as your should patch your fridge filter.
This is probably a 'different problem', in that I have hard water, and calcium buildup is a thing here. It also builds on the plates and everything. So.. I do a full load, all dishes, with CLR. Yes, I do a second wash after.
To give an idea, if I put a pot full of water on the stove, and boil it to empty, I'll end up with a solid disc of calcium and other elemets at the bottom, about 1mm thick!
I have to use a lot more soap, for example, if I wash my hands, I have to wet them, then soap them up without them being near the water, then after they are very agitated, put them under the water. The soap instantly disappears.
I have a cooler with delivered water. I probably could drink the well water, how much calcium and such does milk have? But I'd have to test it more often.
The cleaning program is probably executed every two months or so. I'm assuming that the dishwasher can sense if the pumps it contains use more energy to pump water (I know pumps that can give the user this info but I think this is an estimate based on some magic numbers from the designers of the motor control software).
Phosphates keep the dishwasher clean for much longer. I just add the phosphates back to my powder. So much simpler and the environmental concerns have proven to be total bullshit. Phosphates can be managed at the waste water treatment facilities. Unless you are washing dishes in a river, the regulation should happen at the discharge point.
The pods are not the same, in a modern detergent formulation there are some chemicals that can only exist in liquid form and others in powder form. You can get hybrid pods.
( Myself I prefer Whole Foods 365 brand pods because they have all the detergent + enzymes but none of the ethoxylated alcohols or the worst chemicals)
Where I live you cannot get powder dishwashing agents in super markets and Amazon suggest weird imports at 10 times the premium.
I smash between a quarter and half the pod for prewash and the rest in the compartment following that technology connection video where he talks about the problem.
Although I generally like Technology Connections, I've always found that particular TC video hilariously wrong. Every dishwasher I've ever owned has been basically a sterilizing machine, not a cleaning machine. I always wash all my dishes by hand to the point where there is no visible food on them before I put them into the dishwasher, because if I don't do that half my dishes come out of the dishwasher with food crud still on them.
And no, I'm not talking about crappy, dirty, worn-out dishwashers. I'm talking about state-of-the art modern dishwashers. I thought it was normal for everybody that you had to wash all your dishes by hand before putting them in the dishwasher. I thought TC was basically making a big joke, but after TFA I'm thinking maybe dishwashers do exist (or did exist?) that actually ... wash dishes?? And don't take 4 hours to do it??
I've always thought clothes washers washed clothes but dishwashers don't actually wash dishes and everybody knows it. I thought it was just a universally shared joke that everybody was in on, like "Grape Nuts contain neither grapes not nuts, and dishwashers don't actually wash dishes because of course they don't."
Only now I'm beginning to think I've been out of the loop.
Yeah, you have definitely been out of the loop. I’ve used at least 5 different dishwashers in the past 20 years, and never had a problem with them actually washing dishes after just scraping off the food. Once in a while I’ll have an issue with something stuck on a utensil that was nested with another in the silverware bin, but that’s a loading problem not a dishwasher defect.
Dish washers clean dishes. If they aren't doing so for you, you're doing something wrong. I have never rinsed dishes. The only time something comes out dirty is if it's an oven pan that has something fiercly burned to it, or a pot of milk or something that I burned.
I think some dishwashers are somehow worse performers than others. In the flat I was in before, the landlord installed Ikea dishwasher was terrible (I don't know who was the actual manufacturer). If I'd put a butter knife in there that still had traces of butter going in, they would still be there coming out. Somehow, this even happened when using the 70 ºC program. I even tried using the most expensive pods, for the same result.
In the new flat, equipped with some mid-range Siemens, I don't have this problem anymore. I use the exact same pods, same butter, and same knives. Hell, even the "quick 1h 45º" program gets rid of pretty much everything, even using the cheapest pods.
Sounds like you are choosing appalling dishwashers. I don't even rinse my plates and they coe out absolutely fine. If they don't I know the filter needs cleaning or the machine needs servicing.
Having used dishwashers on three different continents (US, Europe, Asia), I can attest that they definitely do wash dishes. The only caveat I would add is that when my mid-1990s vintage US dishwasher broke, the modern replacement seemed to be far worse. The cycles took longer and dishes came out dirtier. I always suspected it was some energy efficiency mandate that ruined the dishwasher experience in the US as I have had no such issues in Europe or Asia. Maybe I'll try different detergents next time I'm back in the US...
> I always suspected it was some energy efficiency mandate that ruined the dishwasher experience in the US
The three biggest changes I've experienced:
1. Water usage has gone WAY down, especially for energy star washers. You may see 2.5 gallon pre-rinse/wash, 1 gallon rinse cycle usage now. Heavily soiled dishes are relying on the filtration system to remove the particles rather than spraying gunk back on the dishes.
2. Post-rinse drying cycles use hot water and evaporation/condensation (via stainless steel tubs) rather than hot air. For ceramic/glass this is perfect, but plasticware will not get properly dried.
3. Pre-wash detergent cycles have started to go away. I suspect this is because the additional agents in pods have made the pre-wash cycle less effective. However, this means there may be even less time before the main wash cycle for water to heat - it is hard to tell if there is a rule whether to delay washing until it has water to temperature if the source water was cold.
Using modern, mid-range dishwashers, I barely need to touch them before loading them. It was hard to break the habit of pre-washing, but that uses up a lot more water than the dishwasher itself (and energy, if you use hot water).
When I did clean them before washing them, so to speak, the short wash cycle would be enough. (Now I use the sensor cycle.)
What you're describing just isn't normal. There are some possible explanations. You might have really hard water. You might not be using high-quality, enzymatic dishwaster detergent. It's also possible that there's something wrong with every dishwasher you've owned, I guess.
I use powder in both trays, pre-heat the water, clean my filters, and run citric acid regularly. I still had issues when I lived in a place with hard water. I still sometimes get an occasional garbage smelling result now that I don't.
No amount of "aww shucks" and tier 1 support level of suggestion changes or downplays my observations.
I have found that the bad smell is usually a result of water sitting in the bottom of the dishwasher. and I think it may be due to water dripping off all the dishes after it has finished draining. I try to remember to push the drain button a few times a few hours after a cycle has completed to get all the water out of the bottom.
Does anyone turn the powder into tablets at home? I want to do this because I like the convenience of just grabbing a thing out of a bucket rather than dealing with loose powder. Do you do a mechanical press, or make a slurry in an ice cube tray and wait for the water to evaporate, or some other thing?
Either one sounds like more effort than just pouring the powder into the detergent compartment.
I can understand the convenience factor of pre formed pods, but if I have to spend 15 minutes a week making my own pods from powdered detergent, it seems like I’d be better off just using the powder as intended.
The convenience for me would be in time shifting the labor. Sometimes (read: often) I want to sit and zone out for 15 minutes, but I almost never want to deal with transferring a powdered substance from one container to another, especially not after the rigamarole of loading the dishwasher. In theory the powder could go in first, or at some other time, but my brain just isn't like that.
In my experience it is not the amount but the composition of the pod/tablets that makes a huge difference. My machine (Miele) on the same cycle program has excellent results with Dreft pods, Ok'ish with Sun tablets and very poor with Finish.
Pods aren't just "effectively identical to the powder detergent" they contain the rinse agent in the pod.
Using just detergent without rinse agent has always had poor results, and it's frustrating running out of rinse agent. Pods don't really cost that much more unless you're buying the ultra family size from Costco.
Not sure how relevant the energy consumption piece is if you just hook it up to the hot water instead of cold? That's what you're supposed to do anyway to get it to actually clean something, right?
AFAIK dishwashers all internally heat the water. The machines tell you to hook up to the hot line in the US (I've heard they say to use the cold line in Europe but I don't live there), but the chance of actually getting hot water from your line is pretty minimal because they only fill for a few seconds at a time.
Just run the tap at the kitchen sink until the water gets as hot as possible, then start the dishwasher. It'll get nice hot water straight from the pipe that way!
This works well unless you have a tankless water heater. Those are very bad for any appliances that fill water in short bursts, because they only heat while the water is flowing and the water only flows for a short time.
Yeah I am a big fan of giant tank water heaters. You can even set them up to run at the time of day when energy costs are lowest, if you have variable pricing, and the hot water will stay hot for a day or two unless you use a lot. Often energy prices will be lowest on the weekend which works great if you time your laundry cycles on those days!
You can also get small tanked or tankless water heaters that fit under your kitchen cabinet, and can help provide that hot water to your dishwasher. Which is especially important if your hot water heater is located far away from the kitchen and it would take a long time for actual hot water to arrive at your sink.
I would recommend that you look at them closely and get the one that fits your use case the best.
CR can also help here, because they will test them independently of the dishwasher.
Doesn't it fill several times, with long periods of time in between? If so, this trick (which I do use, personally, in spite of this criticism) only benefits the first of several fills. Better than none, though.
According to the Technology Connections video (linked several times in this discussion, including by me), dishwashers usually use their internal heating element to heat the water during the main cycle. The reason for running the tap is just to make sure the water is hot during the prewash cycle, since the dishwasher does not use its heater for that one (since the time is so short)
Maybe because our how water systems are more various, so you can't just assume that's always hot on demand when you want it? If you need a heating element in the dishwasher anyway it's not much of a feature.
I think it's: 1) might not be on-demand, so then your hot fill might not be hot at the right time; 2) if it is hot, it will almost certainly be <70C, which is typically the max cycle temp.. so you either can't have that or still need a local element to get it there; 3) even if it's hot enough, you also need cold fill, so you can mix and get the temperature(s) you need.
Frankly I think even with some assumptions about your market to ignore 1 & 2, 3 alone makes it more complex than just taking a cold fill and heating to temp within the dishwasher. I believe the very few models that do have a hot fill do it on an eco basis (you already have hot water use it here too) but the validity of that is disputed, and really the only obvious benefit is to the EPC sticker (characterising energy performance) which will appear best in class (the class of all dishwashers) just by not having a multiple kW heater, not accounting for that having been offloaded to the boiler.
I have a new dish washer and it works very well of you don't block the jets from the detergent pocket. However, it takes so long that I have determined that its not practical. I just wash by hand. Wondered WTF people were thinking with it taking so long.
It's a GE which has a food grinder in it. Very quiet.
Sure, the dishwasher takes a few hours, but it's rare I'm ever actually waiting on it. Load over the day, run in the evening after dinner, clean dishes ready to unload either right before bed or in the morning. The loading/unloading is much faster and easier than actually washing by hand, and it's more efficient than what I'd do by hand.
Does it have express wash? I have an issue due to low-ish water pressure upstairs and quite salty water from the softener where I need an extra rinse so I do an express main wash frequently.. Still clean dishes.
Surprising. I’ve found any dishwasher I’ve bought in the last 10 years has been absolutely _baller_ at washing dishes. Maybe it’s because I’m willing to spend the money on the good ones though.
Despite the internet providing a whole bunch of new ways to rate and compare things, the best way is still the same thing your mother and grandmother used:
My only problems with those listings are that they place a top premium on loudness of the dishwasher, and therefore they recommend Bosch as the quietest ones you can buy.
Whereas I place a top premium on the dishwasher actually getting the dishes clean, and then getting them dry afterwards. Bosch does fine on the first part, but without a heated drying cycle, they're rubbish on the second part.
I will never again buy another dishwasher without a heated drying cycle.
So, yes -- use those tests and listings, but make sure you fully understand the data behind them and assign your own priorities to those attributes that you value. Because what CR values may not be the same thing that you value.
I bought bosch to replace maytag or whirlpool, forgot which it was. Not impressed with bosch, quality of wash is slightly better than my old one. It is quieter, otherwise I don’t see much improvement.
Only annoying thing about upgrading to the euro dishwashers is that they're not hard-wired. So you have to install a receptacle in an adjoining cabinet and plug into that (or cut the plug and hardwire... but not officially recommended).
I guess it's because europeans typically take their appliances when they move instead of leaving them in place (as they typically do in North America).
Costco had the best pricing on Bosch in my opinion. Cheap delivery and removal of the old unit. Was really surprised how lightweight a washing machine is, but I guess it's just a shell with a pump thin metal+plastic drawers at the end of the day.
Not sure what you mean about hard wiring. Bosch dishwashers come with the option of either the usual plug, or a hardwire kit. Also, maybe it's a regional thing, but every dishwasher I've ever used (mostly cheaper brands that were in apartments) used regular outlets. You just cut a hole in the cabinet next to the sink, and the outlet was underneath the sink, usually next to the outlet for the garbage disposal.
I have installed my own dishwashers since the first house I bought, never seen one that had an electrical plug connection. Nor have I seen one on a garbage disposal for that matter, both are always hard-wired in my experience (I'm in the USA). I had assumed it was a code requirement since I'd never seen it done any other way.
For apartments, where tenants are more likely to abuse the appliances, a plug-in might make some sense, as it would make installing a new dishwasher slightly easier, and avoid needing to cut the power on that circuit to wire up a hard connection.
After a brief search it looks like Bosch dishwashers in the USA only come with a 3 prong plug. You have to buy a separate accessory if you wish to hardwire.
The most important things is to make sure the tub is stainless steel. Not a mix, all stainless (the outer shell can be whatever) . The detergent (what really gets stuff clean) is super nasty and will eventually eat the plastic.
That being said, next look at the brand. I have a Bosch and its great, super silent. If you hear a noise, you loaded your dishes too tightly and they're banging against each other.
I had not heard of the IER, and so looked them up:
> The Institute for Energy Research (IER) is a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit organization that, according to itself, conducts research and analysis on the functions, operations, and government regulation of global energy markets.[1] IER maintains that the free market provides the most "efficient and effective solutions" to "global energy and environmental challenges".[1]
> IER is often described as a front group for the fossil fuel industry.[2][3][4] It was initially formed by Charles Koch, receives donations from many large companies like Exxon, and publishes a stream of reports and position papers opposing any efforts to control greenhouse gasses. Thomas Pyle, president of the IER and its offshoot American Energy Alliance (AEA), was appointed to the US Department of Energy's transition team after the 2016 United States elections.
"Institute for Energy Research" aka "research ways to sell people more ~~energy~~ oil." A massive chunk of their donations come from Exxon who are very well known now to flood the information market with low-quality "science" to push their own agendas even if they know their agendas are not good.
You ever think a research group owned by Koch and Exxon are ever going to find that one should burn less fossil fuels? You think Coca Cola is ever going to tell you to stop drinking Coke? Given the fact they're massively biased on the subjects, shouldn't you then probably take their "studies" with at least 5 tons of salt?
I mean, c'mon now, they say stupid stuff like this:
> Since paper plates and plastic utensils are not eligible for government food assistance programs, the proposed standard will hit the poor especially hard.
Yeah, that's right, lets just slip in the idea of putting in some kind of government assistance to go buy disposable plastic right in this article. Who would stand to gain? Huh, Koch, the Koch family, Exxon, you know, their list of sponsors, etc. Its crazy to me how openly brazen and hostile they are with this logic.
Then they say stuff like:
> Manufacturers have warned reducing water and power in dishwashers has become increasingly difficult without impacting performance
But at the same time mention:
> While most dishwashers on the market meet the Energy Star Standard of 3.5 gallons per cycle
So we're already meeting half the standard and yet they act like its impossible to be at the point we're already at.
I don't personally care too much about these rules, but this article is a bunch of nonsense.
Even from their economic side of hurting consumers, they openly state it'll save >$600M in costs while only costing $125M to implement. So they're arguing against saving almost $500M in energy and water costs for consumers, not arguing that things will ultimately cost more. This article written by the energy industry is literally trying to convince us we should spend $500M in extra energy costs, and you're eating it right up.
If that whole $125M was done in just the first year of dishwashers sold in only the US market it increases the price of a several hundred dollar appliance by $15. Just the water saving costs alone is estimated at $30/unit, then an additional $7+/year in energy savings. If the thing only lives 5 years (dismal outlook, but lets use it) its saving consumers $65, 65 - 15 = a positive number, aka it will save consumers money, even if they're poor.
Where can I get black market dishwashers that use three times as much energy and water for my new build?
I've already manually removed all of the flow reducer bottlenecks in my showerheads.
If you want me to use less water or power, tax it more, don't render my appliances nonfunctional. Alternately, heavily tax the inefficient machines so they aren't cost effective for normal consumers/builders.
i believe those are sterlizers, not dishwashers. you need to do a thorough pre-wash before loading dishes into them. a domestic dishwasher is designed to be used by any idiot, and without following any real procedure.
they also release steam in quantities that will have negative effects in a kitchen that wasn't built to withstand that. commercial appliances are meant to be used in commercial kitchens with commercial ventilation.
With improved (and patented) design, they can flush much better. And they have better coatings on the ceramic, so that your "output" washes off much easier, and doesn't stick to the walls so easily.
The modern tests for toilets are much tougher than the old tests, and the best modern toilets will pass with flying colors on those tougher modern tests. Older toilets, and lesser quality toilets, can't hold a candle to the kind of performance you are able to get with the better and more modern toilets.
Toto is just one example. They're not the only one with top performing toilets. You can look on Consumer Reports to see the tests they run, and which toilets do well on those tests.
The high efficiency toilets use less water but higher pressure which means they still work quite well. Apparently they still make toilets which use the old design but still use less water. They have to be flushed a few times though. I assume they are significantly cheaper because why else would an ex-landlord have installed that in my apartment back when I was renting?
1. The old 5 gallon per flush kind. Didn’t clog all that often. Flushed very very slowly. Contributed to downstream clogs because the outflow was insufficient to get the solids flowing well through the pipes.
2. The early lower-water-consuming kind. These were awful. Replace them if you have one!
3. Modern toilets. They use 1.28-0.8 gallons per flush, they rarely clog, and they don’t tend to clog the pipes downstream. They are generally quite good.
4. Flushometer toilets. They are often messy - they flush loudly and spray water around. Eww.
Why go backwards?
Modern toilets are tested for their ability to flush well:
I can confirm this. My house had cheap low-flush toilets that were absolutely horrible. They clogged daily and were difficult to plunge and I began storing a bucket near every toilet so I could efficiently carry out the routine plunging sessions.
I was hesitant to buy new toilets because I figured they’re all low-flush, so what difference would it make? I found a top-reviewed model on Home Depot and it made a huge difference. Went from everyday clogs to a clog maybe once every few months. I replaced all my toilets and it’s the best home upgrade I ever did.
Have an acquaintance, whom I'll call "Big Shit", whose feces were so voluminous that they required custom (i.e., high-volume, larger diameter) toilets and enlarging the sewer line in the house.
Big Shit's oriental wife has broadcast his productivity to all of his friends, much to our amusement and disgust. Certain asians, unlike Americans, are not at all shy about discussing their (and their spouses') bathroom experiences in excruciating detail.
Oddly enough, dual flush toilets may have ended up leading to more water use at a macro level to the point that water companies are pushing to have them banned in the UK. They have a common fault which means they can continuously leak water without emptying the cistern (so the owner never notices).
Also I never know which button to press. Sometimes the big button is the one to press because UX people say it's the most visible, so that produces the smaller flush. If you want a bigger flush, use the smaller button. Sometimes (more logically) big button = big flush.
With a single control, it's more commonly hold for short flush, release for long flush, which is just madness.
Just buy a Miele dishwasher. They actually work and they work well. No need to bother with black-market or "vintage" or commercial stuff. Just pay the high price (ok, it's all relative) and enjoy never having to care about this crap again.
Source: owned too many dishwashers over the last decade. Paid money to make problem go away and to my surprise it actually did.
Eg it still benefits from adding a bit of powder in the special compartment that opens immediately (or alternatively, directly in the body of the dishwasher).
You also have to clean the Miele's dirt trap every once in a while. I'm informed American dishwashers have different arrangements that don't need cleaning?
It has a filter with a spinning blade slightly in front of it - a macerator - that chops up pieces of food until they are small enough to fit through the holes.
Heh. When reading that Wikipedia article, they only referenced European (and UK) countries in their "Adoption and Bans" section. That kinda made me view the entire world as "The US or EU/UK", and—with that anchoring—I assumed you must live "in the other one".
So, yeah. I guess those things are a quirk of the US only.
Quite a lot of online commentary is framed as "US or EU", or sometimes "US, EU and Asia". There are tens of other countries out there with hundreds of millions of people.
These are actually banned in most countries of Europe by laws and regulations because fatty foods lead to the buildup of fatbergs in pipes and anything that's not water and feces is prime rat food.
I don't get why the USA don't ban these, but then complain about rat infestations at the same time. JFC.
There aren't huge rat problems in the US, and having to clean out the sink drain filter multiple times per day is a disgusting waste of time.
I split my time between Germany and the US and the lack of a garbage disposal in the kitchen sink is a constant annoyance. (It's nothing to do with fatty foods; the reasoning provided seems like a red herring.)
New York's rat problem is world-(in)famous, as is San Francisco's.
> and having to clean out the sink drain filter multiple times per day is a disgusting waste of time.
Yeah, if you're peeling onions and potatoes over the sink instead of a bio-waste container. Do it like Germans do (in fact, if you look up your community's Abfallsatzung you may be required to) and you won't need to clean that thing more often than once every few months.
The hundreds of millions of homes in the US not in NYC and SF also ~all have garbage disposals and no major rat problems. (NYC banned garbage disposals until the '90s when it was lifted, and its rat population predates that by over a century.).
I don't ever peel anything over the sink, it's just the small particles of stuff from
washing that fills up the filter. This isn't a "you're holding it wrong".
I get the impression it's a similar objection to air conditioning: it's regarded as foreign, atypical, and unnecessary luxury, so plausible justifications about why it's bad are trotted out.
One of my favorite parts of visiting asia is discovering what fun new things have been electrified and automated. It seems europeans tend to have the opposite culture, and regard using electricity as vaguely sinful.
Here in Singapore those sink garbage macerator are not common, and I haven't seen them elsewhere in Asia so far.
(I'm considering whether it would make sense for us to install one.)
But in no country that I visited without those macerators do people clean their sinks multiple times a day. Are you sure you aren't 'holding it wrong'?
> I don't ever peel anything over the sink, it's just the small particles of stuff from washing that fills up the filter.
That's still weird. Standard German kitchen sinks have a very coarse filter [1], it's almost impossible to clog these up with anything but potato and onion peel segments.
I went jogging in Brooklyn (Williamsburg) and stepped on a huge rat. Poor dude was just having breakfast in one of the garbage heaps on the sidewalk. Never experienced that in Europe before.
In Utrecht The Netherlands it's common for bars and restaurants in the old town to have cats that stay with the location. Locations would change hands, and the cats stayed at that location.
I used to live there and the rodent problem is real. There was a great book about it a few years back where they wrote up a little piece on each cat at each location. And yes, I had a cat in my house because without a cat you get mice.
Paris is also notorious for its rat problem. To say that Europe doesn't have rats is just silly.
In EU we typically have separate waste bin for food leftovers that I expect would go to this garbage disposal in kitchen sink. So if you put the food leftovers to separate garbage bin, there's pretty much nothing that will end up in drain filter to be cleared. It's just different routine.
I think you also misread the response about the fatty foods. I don't feel it was related to fatty food in USA, it was more in a sense that if you shred fat leftovers, it will eventually clog some pipe down the line.
I don't think Miele has any special loophole that will allow them to bypass the new 2023 energy/water requirements for dishwashers sold in the US.
Perhaps I will ship a German SKU Miele from Germany, and figure out how to get 230V/50Hz to it. I wonder which 60Hz market has the highest power/water limit Miele SKUs.
No, but they are better designed in ways that allow them to clean well with lower power consumption. The tub is better insulated for example and they don’t waste energy on a heated dry cycle. That energy allowance can be better utilized in the main cleaning cycle.
Are there new 2023 requirements? In the past, the only thing that DOE requirements applied to was the "Normal" cycle. All others can use as much water as they want since DOE regs don't apply.
I have a Miele dishwasher in the US. It works great, but normal clean cycle is 2h37m :( it takes forever. Comes out clean though!
I run it on sanitize (baby bottles) with just pods (and rinse aid, it helps getting the water off/dry) and everything comes out squeaky clean. No matter the gunk on it.
Had a Bosch when I lived in Germany. 1h14min for a normal cycle, pods. Came out squeaky clean too. I miss that machine. The extra time the Miele in the US takes is really annoying
I bought an AEG dishwasher two years ago specifically because it has a 1h "quick" and a 1h30m "normal" cycle (both extend by 15m if you enable the GlassCare option).
Modern Bosch machines also have a "fast" mode that is done in just 1h:9m. Of course it uses more water and energy, but I'm fine with that. Dishes come out squeaky clean and mostly dry.
I’ve learned you don’t actually need to sanitize baby bottles in the dishwasher, you can just hand wash them normally, and you don’t get as many leaks. Also watch the rinse aid in a baby bottle - it can cause leaky gut: https://lastinghealth.com/news/rinse-aid-affects-immune-and-....
I have a Miele dishwasher and it does a great job of washing ceramic and glass dishes. But reusable plastic food containers (Gladware, etc.) always come out sopping wet and I have to hand-dry them.
The Miele is nice and quiet, but sometimes I miss my old loud energy-hogging dishwasher that had a real "dry" cycle with a fan.
> But reusable plastic food containers (Gladware, etc.) always come out sopping wet and I have to hand-dry them.
ime this is because plastics have lower thermal mass and hence cool out faster than the ceramic/glass/metal things. while the water evaporates from warm objects it then condenses at lower temperature surfaces.
We bought a Miele because I was sick and tired of replacing our machine every 3 years (or less in the case of the last one.)
The quality of the unit is substantially better than any other DW I've experienced. Jury is out on how long it's going to last, but by reputation, There's Miele, Bosch, and everybody else.
Many commercial dishwashers run only 15 minutes and the dishes come out sparkling clean. Same with cloths washers, commercial units have small, medium and large settings with hot, warm, cold and that's all you need. They actual use more than a gallon of water but your cloths come out clean in 25 minutes. It's insane what has happened to residential household appliances. The only alternative is to spend the extra and by a low end commercial unit.
Commercial dishwashers make different trade-offs. Eg they typically assume that you wash directly after eating. Domestic dishwashers deal with food that has been dried up and caked on for days.
Many domestic dishwashers spend a lot of time at the end drying your dishes. Commercial ones seldom bother with that.
Commercial dishwashers depend on all the food being scraped off before they get fed. I know because I was the "dishwasher" in my school, and that's how I paid for my lunch. My job was to scrape off all the food and get the dishes visually clean, at which point I would load them into the tray and put the trays into the commercial dishwasher.
The point of the commercial dishwasher is really to get the water super hot (steam, actually), and then sanitize the dishes after they've been cleaned.
It boggles my mind that the federal government of the United States pays bureaucrats to write non-safety-related standards for home appliances (or anything else).
Yea, it’s weird. There's a whole segment of our population who strongly believe that only the government can fix problems, and that they they know which problems to fix and what the best solutions are. I’ll let you guess which political party they belong to.
Appliances use a significant amount of resources. It’s a bit tricky to attribute gains to standards versus general technological progress and consumers being more aware of issues like climate change but the amount of energy saved by increased efficiency in appliances is significant.
Maybe eggs? I used to have a smell problem with our dishes off and on, and I think it might been correlated with raw eggs being on something in the load. My wife always claimed not to be able to smell the problem though.
I bought a modern premium dishwasher a few years ago. The drying did not work very well, so I called the service. To my suprise only a few hours later a serviceman came plugged his laptop into the machine and prolonged the drying time and everything was perfect. The easiest solution for the manufacturer to get the A++ energy label for this machine was obviously to deliver a machine that does not dry and if someone complains just adjust it rapidily. This is green washing.
Is it greenwashing? The vast majority of people won’t complain to the manufacturer, they’ll just recognize it doesn’t dry very well.
Although my understanding is drying cycles are longer than the actual run time. They heat up the ceramic and glass then turn off the heater and let the moisture evaporate. Opening the dish washer slightly and letting it sit for a while will usually completely dry the dishes.
It's not green washing if it actually reduces electricity consumption. Anyway, Miele dishwashers use unheated air blown over the dishes to dry them with minimal cost if you choose the long cycle (i.e. overnight). Bosch doesn't have that feature but also dries ok if you open it up 10 minutes before emptying it. What brand did you have?
One final tip though is that tupperware is a drying killer. The cheap plastic absorbs oils over time and creates a film that never really dries - making the whole dryer damp. Get rid of those and move to glass for a much better experience in every way.
NEVER allow dishes in the dishwasher that haven't been wiped off, in any way you choose, into the garbage. (un-wiped dishes allow the food particles into your kitchen drain line where it will congeal. Over time it will trap water and rot out copper drain lines found in older homes.)
Garbage disposals are nick named "plumbers gold" for the same reason above. Only use them to flush water down the sink drain before running the dishwasher, NOT for dicing up what comes off dirty plates.
The kitchen drain line most likely runs below your living room floor in the concrete slab. It is very costly to have the carpet/tile removed and the slab sawed up to replace the line, usually with PVC.
My understanding was that the regulations applied to a normal wash cycle, but that they don't prevent dishwashers from having additional modes that use more water/energy for a faster clean.
My Bosch dishwasher is only a few years old. On normal mode, it takes 2 hours and 20 minutes. However it has a "Vario Speed" option which uses more water/energy, but performs the same clean in about an hour.
We rarely use Vario Speed. The dishwasher gets stacked after dinner and set on a timer so that it runs overnight. But the option for a fast wash is much appreciated.
One thing I'll say about wash quality is that the detergent matters. In Australia you can check out Choice's list [1]. We did find the Aldi Logix Platinum ones to be pretty good.
This thread is super interesting for me as a Mexican. I've never understood dishwashers: expensive machines you buy to wash dishes you've already had to wash in the sink.
I pay a "human" dishwasher $20 dollars a day and she washes the dishes completely, dries them, puts them out, wahes and sorts clothing, mops and vacuums the floor, washes toilets and the backyard with the dogs' dirt.
So after 30 days, you've spent more money than someone with a lower cost dishwasher, and as the article mentions, your dishes haven't been sanitized and had allergens removed. You've also used a lot more water. Yes, you have to put away the dishes yourself, but that still seems like a pretty good trade to me.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 354 ms ] threadSame with washing machines. My wife gets annoyed, but as far as I'm concerned, I don't really care whether the default cycle takes 1h30 or 5h.
One doesn't usually separate dishes by color before washing them in a dishwasher, and even if for some reason one did, one still wouldn't usually wash towels in a dishwasher.
Modern laundry washing machines also have a "finish at" timer. I set mine to finish at 8am so after breakfast I empty it out. If we really need to do 2 loads a day (it happens sometimes with a family) then the second one is done around lunch time.
It doesn't work with every laundry layout (luckily does for me) but I have found leaving the door open so it can dry out is very helpful to prevent mould built up on the doors etc at least. Not sure how much it effects the bacteria/scud/etc - could even make scud worse to some degree since deposits dry out I guess.
Another tip that I only recently learnt is that you can dry washing with a dehumifier at a rate not that much slower than a clothes dryer (6-ish hours). Also at a rate cheaper or comparable to a heat pump dryer. That may be a good option for your staged washing if you're happy to hang the clothes out.
On my washer at least the hour cycle does a pretty good job of things though in theory you're supposed to only wash like 3-4KG instead of 8-11 like in the 2-3 hour cycles.
Two things I am reasonably sure matter but have not looked into the research and need to get around to doing is: - I have to wonder about the impact of long washing loads on clothes longevity and wearing out of the fabric, especially with fuller loads.. that's a lot of rubbing. - The washing powder I currently like the most definitely gets caught and leaves residue.. in particular it builds up -inside- the detergent drawer and becomes so glued on even a pressure washer and screwdriver takes a lot of effort to get it off (clearly needs CLR or some such). I am sure some detergents are much better at not building up SCUD compared to others but this seems to be a not well discussed/reviewed fact.
From an Appliance repair/reseller "Bens Appliances and Junk" "Clean a Washing Machine Inside: How to Remove Mold, Soap Scum and More with a CHEAP Organic Cleaner" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOXM81Zk_As
"How The Insides Of Washing Machines Are Deep Cleaned | Deep Cleaned | Insider" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I45FqVN-PjE
I didn’t really mean “immediately” so much as “you can’t leave it overnight then possibly forget about it the next morning,” but yeah, it seems to depend on the weather and other things (more on that below). Hasn’t happened in a while. The washing machine is clean, I scrub out the mold in the detergent tray regularly and have always left the door open. I used to run the cleaning cycle from time to time but don’t think it is necessary since I do whites with plenty bleach at scalding hot temps often enough. It happened with our old top loader, too. More than anything though, you can smell a moldy washer and ours doesn’t smell and a freshly washed load normally doesn’t either.
It seems to be the Lake Michigan water we are hooked up to responsible for the stinky occasions. I read up about this a few years ago and they actually monitor for the levels of the molecule (I don’t think it was bacteria?) that gives wet clothes their stink since it is rampant in the Great Lakes and they are constantly adjusting because it’s expensive to counteract more than they feel they need to. My guess is that they got their act together in recent years. Another point in this direction is that it happens some summers to towels used after a shower while they’re hanging to dry. I’m pretty sure it’s just the water.
Oh, and in answer to your question, we definitely noticed the euro-style front-loader was harder on the clothes than the old American top-loader – though it also did get more stains out. But yes, we too fill it up properly to capacity to avoid the waste of running it empty or mostly so - and I guess the increased friction would contribute.
[0]: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1994-11-20-941120... archived at https://archive.ph/qV723#
[1]: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1999-06-25-990625... just archived at https://archive.ph/wip/ybQ9N
—-
There’s also this 53-page survey of contributors to taste and smell in water supplies from the Illinois State Water Survey out of UIUC that I would love to get around to reading (or at least skimming through): https://www.isws.illinois.edu/pubdoc/C/ISWSC-127.pdf
For the record, those cleaners are usually pure sodium percarbonate (commercially sold as Oxiclean/Napisan). When combined with a hot cyle (60 degrees Celsius or higher) it does a good job sterilising your washing machine.
Drip-dry (usually whilst completing other loads) on a drying rack. This often removes most moisture.
If still damp, put the laundry in the dryer for a quick cycle.
This maximises the efficiencies of each mode: drip-drying tends to quickly shed the initial bulk water through, er, dripping. A warm-air dryer is relatively ineffective when laundry is dripping wet, but is quite good at removing final traces of moisture.
If you have time, a fan blowing over a drying rack will also speed drying.
Outdoor lines can be quite effective especially in hot, dry climates. Less so in rain or fog.
I thought that’s what the centrifugal action was for (even with no heat involved); basically emulating gravity to get the clothes to “drip” outward into the perforations. I imagine it achieves greater than 1g making it actually more effective than traditional drip drying?
<https://www.hunker.com/12003102/how-fast-does-a-washing-mach...>
The tumbling motion of a hot-air dryer is more to circulate the laundry and expose it to airflow than to generate centrifugal drying.
Note that airflow alone will dry clothes (though more slowly), and that leaving your dryer on a low-heat setting is not that much slower, whilst it tends to be far less harsh on fabrics. Much of laundry wear occurs in the dryer rather than the washing machine.
Then the water in the water heater is nice and fresh for my shower too.
Mine (an LG model) has a "Delay End" function, where you say "I want the cycle to end in 9 hours", and it calculates when to start based on that.
The only appliance I have with a “delay end” or “schedule end” feature is my Zojirushi rice cooker (and ironically I never use the timer feature there).
Luckily I have a top loader
So essentialy, when the machine is idle, you end up with both the tray and the door open.
Does that really matters? Do you take your guest first to sight-see your washing machine?
This is why you should get a combined washer/dryer. I never worry about this.
If you're not going to be in, or need to process multiple loads (more likely for laundry than dishes) then long cycles turn the process into an all-day, or multi-day, function.
I still prefer hand-washing dishes in most cases as it occurs in parallel with meal prep and eating (fill sink, soak cooking and prep pots and utensils whilst eating, finish and wash table dishes afterward, pop onto a drying rack. Ten minutes. Can be a conversation / bonding time with a partner, or a good time to listen to audiobooks, podcasts, music, etc., if solo.
With a dishwasher, I'm constantly fishing out, and hand-washing, pots, utensils, or dishes that I need either before or during the wash cycle (which takes > 1 hour). Hand-washing that item alone? 1 minute tops.
If you have a large family, there's potential time savings. Solo or couple? Not so much.
As for efficiency: for dishwashers vs. fill sink / soak / scrub, there's little effective difference in water or energy, and the cycle time is far shorter.
You could also just buy more dishes.
And costs more.
</s>
Dishwasher checks by consumer groups do not test egg protein, or avocado. They need to test with real world, tight locking protein and fats.
And with lentils: the amount of fine gritty fibre which can remain in suspension is just fantastic. And then in the rinse cycle, it sits in the feet of plates and cups.
I also believe that electro-coupling between different metals in cutlery means they age faster if you don't space them properly. If they touch, they can make a circuit.
I've not had the privilege of having a new dishwasher till my most recent place, all the dishwashers prior have been 10+ years old. This new one though which is a Miele dishwasher has maybe 1-2 dishes that need to be manually washed per week at the very most. Whereas my older dishwashers it was anything from an extra 1-2 dishwasher loads per week worth of failed cleans.
We don't rinse our plates, just scrape them. If I have to hand wash 1-2 bowls and plates over the week it's a non-event. We're still saving a lot of water compared to hand rinsing all of our dishes before putting them in the Miele.
The best I can come up with is that maybe it's advocates have a lot left on the plate, and where I would scrape into compost if that happened are using a sink garbage disposal grinder thing?
If it's just some kind of saucy residue like goes into my dishwasher (without any need for any kind of 'prewashing') then any machine that can't cope with it needs returning.
I'm not suggesting anyone run out and feed their dog a bunch of garlic on purpose - that would be dumb - but if you look at the toxicity data, a 30 lb dog would need to eat something like 200 grams of garlic to have a serious problem.
As with many things, the risk is highly overstated -- so please stop spreading FUD.
----
"Onion poisoning is consistently noted in pets who consume more than 0.5% of their body weight in onions."
https://www.petmd.com/dog/nutrition/can-dogs-eat-onions
----
"Consuming as little as 2 grams per pound of your dog’s weight can cause observable changes in a pet's stomach, and larger amounts can damage the blood. For reference, each garlic clove weighs an average of 5 grams. For a medium-sized dog weighing around 25 pounds, treatment will be needed if they ingest 50 grams of garlic—approximately 10 cloves, or half of a garlic bulb."
https://www.petmd.com/dog/nutrition/can-dogs-eat-garlic
----
Unless you're literally feeding your dog a dish with onions and garlic, it isn't an issue.
Wife and I came to the same conclusion. We just wash things in the sink, and use the dishwasher as an overpriced drying rack.
I've put stuff absolutely covered in peanut butter, egg, bottom of air fryer, hot pot pan, etc in the dishwasher without prewash. Always comes out clean.
Even when I was in a rental with a crappy American unit from the 80s, it would still get everything though I often had to use the extended “pots and pans” cycles for that to happen.
But yes, utensils can and do corrode in the dishwasher over time if you have different metals thrown together in the high-temp, high-conductivity alkaline bath.
Sure. The point is, normalising "you have to wash dishes for 2 hours" and saying "shifts stubborn stains" is really overdoing it. If you can get some of these foods off the plates before they dry, and can do a shorter wash, its win--win
To be honest, since having kids and their being at a certain age, we now run the dishwasher filled to the brim every other day at most, so it’s a moot point. But in all cases, it runs while we’re sleeping and it makes no difference to me if it takes an hour or six.
The only time I’ve ever wished it finished faster is on the occasion of hosting guests and having more than the regular expected daily churn in dining ware. And that doesn’t happen enough to matter.
If that's the case: (A) yes, your analogy is sound. And (B), you should probably switch crockery, because most people don't have this problem.
I did see examples when shopping that were in advertisement only. i.e. the 'express cycle' skipped something, the drying stage, or rinse stage(s), etc.
It's well available at retailers in Canada. I could go purchase one this afternoon.
> but it doesn't seem to have info. on when it was introduced. Can you link a model that is confirmed to predate November 2020?
The product manual mentions a revision to the power cord made in September 2020, so that product predates nov 2020.
How is that relevant to the fact that the manufacturer has discontinued it?
Retailers can sell products they have in stock even if they are no longer manufactured.
Looking at the instruction manual it's clear that both the 'Express' and 'Speed60' modes are skipping some steps of the cleaning process as it says:
Normal
Recommended for daily, regular or typical use to completely wash a full load of normally soiled dishes.
Speed60®
Cleans freshly soiled dishes with easy to remove soils. This cycle reduces cycle time while still including drying.
Express
Cleans lightly soiled dishes and reduces overall wash time. Use this cycle to clean glasses and dessert dishware that may need to be reused at the same event.
You've moved the goalposts so far they're onto an entirely different field here.
So your going to pretend the first part of my comment doesn't exist?
It seems a bit self-defeating to be honest since I can't see how anyone will pay more attention to your views after.
Since it appears your confused as to what the article is about, let me spell it out step by step:
It's clearly not moving the goalposts because the whole point behind this change was that it was spurred on by recent dishwashers, circa 2020, that don't clean as well, so giving an example of a dishwasher that doesn't clean as well in a faster mode, is pointless. Since that is already understood as a possibility by everyone who read it.
It's not some hidden secret that all dishwashers can be sped up by lowering the bar in the cleaning cycle. What's interesting is if it's able to maintain the same level of performance in less time, typically at the cost of increased energy and water usage, hence the nominal basis for this rule change by the DOE in 2020.
First half of which comment?
> Since it appears your confused as to what the article is about, let me spell it out step by step:
I was replying to your comments, not the article. Your comments specifically asked about machines that had quicker modes. Your comments didn't have any of the details you're now providing. I haven't read the article and don't have any interest in doing so.
- The dishwasher runs balls-out for 40 minutes so it's noisier. (Bosch sells a lot of units on its reputation of being ultra quiet)
- Manual mode doesn't check the soil sensor while washing.
- There is no drying cycle, which is the bulk of a two hour wash.
So if you're okay with that, Manual works just fine for most everyday loads and is pretty much the equivalent of the old school DWs and how they worked.
For example: "And yes, it is crazy, if not also bad environmental public policy that the federal government regulates the robot in my kitchen that cleans and dries the dishes; and keeps changing the rules to the point that the machine first invented in 1886 no longer accomplishes its purpose."
When I moved to a city I found a lot of people wash with running water or change at the first hint of it getting dirty.
However now I live in a city and have things to do, a dishwasher is great because no matter how long it takes I’m not doing the dishes.
You can order water from a commercial water suppliers of course, but why pay extra if you can avoid it?
In my house, the dishwasher is orders of magnitudes more efficient than hand-washing.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rBO8neWw04
The one hour cycle actually does a prewash.
Rinsing is done with cold water. Options are to fill a second tub (or refill the washing tub after the suds-based wash), passing items under the tap, or using a sprayer hose (the most effective and efficient option in my experience). Total water use is typically less than that used for washing itself.
With dishwashers, it's rare that I don't have to further rinse or clean items, so the nominal usage is understating actual usage.
Even when they do, I just leave them for the next cycle. Unless the next cycle was already going to be at capacity, the added water/energy use for re-washing is minimal.
Knowing what cleaning treatments work and when they're appropriate is another bit of practical knowledge often lost. There's also knowledge of what chemicals not to use together
It's also possible to pre-soak specific items, either in the sink or by filling them (e.g., pots and pans) and letting them sit on the sink. Many people self-sabotage cleaning by failing to give the cleaning solution time to work, which can be a few seconds for light soiling to hours for chemical stains or baked-on stains.
The automatic dishwasher is also hard on the actual dishes and utensils, in my experience, and tends to pit or damage ceramics, glassware, and stainless-steel or aluminium utensils and pots.
And when washing a large number of items, ironically, filled basins to soap and rinse may use less water than multiple dishwasher loads. Though again, when the difference is measured in single-digit gallons (or up to around 20--40 litres), the overall efficiency savings largely pale against other household water usage (bathing, handwashing, laundry, other food prep, etc.).
Again, I see no reasonable basis for shaming those who prefer hand-washing. Cycle time and efficacy can be markedly better, total water and energy efficiency are comparable. Machine-washing is more consistent over larger populations (given equivalent equipment), though might degrade with age of the machine. It's mostly a ... wash.
There are other sources of inefficiencies in using a dishwasher as I've noted above.
My point isn't to browbeat people into hand-washing dishes. Rather, it's to point out that there are real advantages to doing so, and if that's what you prefer you shouldn't beat yourself up over it on account of efficiency arguments.
A few years back I'd looked up the actual research on hand-washing vs. machine washing. The most-quoted study (where any study is quoted at all, rather than vague hand-waving) is from the University of Bonn, Germany:
"A European Comparison of Cleaning Dishes by Hand", Rainer STAMMINGER, Ricarda BADURA, Gereon BROIL, Susanne DÖRR, Anja ELSCHENBROICH. University of Bonn, Germany.
<https://web.archive.org/web/20150701173343/www.landtechnik-a...>
The upshot:
- Practices for hand-washing vary widely. Some are exceedingly efficient. Some are stupendously wasteful.
- There's a considerable variation by country, or by region of the US.
- The best hand-washing methods beat dishwashers. Many of the rest come close.
Among the most efficient hand-washers are Germans, Californians, and Australians. The latter two live in areas where water is chronically limited. The least efficient: Russians.
If you fill a sink basin or small dish bucket, you've got about 2 gallons of water accounted for (the most efficient dishwashers use at least 4, many use 6 or somewhat more). Rinsing may in another basin, or under the tap in the sink.
If you live in a multi-person household and can fill a dishwasher every day or so, and hate doing dishes, the dishwasher makes sense.
If you live alone or can't fill the dishwasher, or would be washing dishes anyway, hand-washing may be more effective.
Either way, so long as you're not performing the Russian method: hot water tap full on during the full period you're washing dishes, hand-wasing can be the most efficient water- and energy-wise.
And if you hate hand-washing, and have a dishwasher, then use it.
Neither side in this discussion should be browbeating the other
> Additionally it was shown that new dishwashers are able to reach at least the same performance with significant less amount of water needed as any test person
Also, the chart shows the average water use for a lot of these countries is somewhere close to 100L of water. Even for the lows of Germany/GB the average is around 50L. 3.5gal is only ~13L of water. So by this document my dishwasher is 3.8x as efficient as the average German doing dishes and almost 8x more efficient as many other countries, but I do agree this study doesn't exactly have massive sample sizes and there's a massive range of variability.
I do generally agree though we're (usually) talking about somewhat insignificant amounts of water "wasted" either way. I use far more water for bathing, drinking/eating, and flushing throughout my day, and we're talking about a few hundred kWh of energy used over a year when my monthly usage is >1000kWh. In the end I agree, people should generally do what's comfortable for them, save for just letting the hot water run while doing a lot of dishes. But this idea that the average person handwashing dishes is radically more efficient just isn't reality, and most people would have to seriously try to be more water/energy efficient than most dishwashers on the market today.
The average person's techniques for washing dishes by hand just isn't as efficient as any modern dishwasher. That's probably fine, but also lets not ignore reality.
Thank you for your n=1 study/survey.
I've seen more than one household run the kitchen faucet at 100% (1-2.2gpm/4-8Lpm) when washing dishes. EnergyStar mandates <20L for a normal cycle.
I suspect it is more efficient at creating germ-free clean dishes, given the temperatures and steam that the wares are exposed to.
I suspect it is quicker than human time than hand washing
It might be slower than human time from stopwatch dirty dish to clean dish.
It might use more water than a hand washer who is very careful with water.
It almost certainly costs more to use a dishwasher. Capital, costs, electricity, repairs, tabs.
> I suspect it is more efficient at creating germ-free clean dishes, given the temperatures and steam that the wares are exposed to.
Though you shouldn't worry too much about germs. The next time you are your food touches the dishes, they are all germed up again anyway.
The amount of germ removal you get from hand-washing dishes is sufficient.
(A dishwasher is still a good idea for saving on human labour.)
> Moreover, the current standard requires standard residential dishwashers to not exceed 307 kWh/year and 5.0 gallons per cycle for the “Normal” cycle. 10 CFR 430.32(f)(1)(i). Consistent with the results of the Department's evaluation of dishwashers offering a 60 to 90 minute “Quick” cycle, DOE's has identified an innovative opportunity for the further development of a dishwasher model offering a “Normal” cycle of one hour or less.
I think the issue is that manufacturers struggle to get good cleaning performance subject to the 307 kWh/year, 5 gallon per cycle rule unless the cycle is very slow, and the DOE has indicated that it will allow more water and/or more energy usage for faster dishwashers.
(Speaking of water usage, I find it odd that dishwashers don't seem to do a final spray with fresh (non-recirculated) water. I would gladly use an extra 1/4 - 1/2 gallon per load to get a freshwater rinse at the end.
P.S. What's up with kWh/year anyway? Surely it should be kWh per cycle with an added restriction on additional power used when not running.
e.g. A fancier model with several 'Eco' cycles and only one higher power mode will appear better than simpler models with fewer modes, even though the simpler model might actually use less energy.
In fact it would be very counter-intuitive and highly misleading.
If you compare the energy efficiency of my old one with a new ones where you have to pre-wash your dishes with warm water the old Bosch wins both in energy and water use.
Not exactly friendly for your electric bill though.
If you think residential dishwashers are bad at getting plates clean of dried-on gunk, commercial dishwashers are 100x worse, as that's not their job. The pre-washing everyone gripes about shitty residential dishwashers now requiring is an expected and designed-for staple in a commercial dishwashing process.
That said the high pressure sprayer before the dishwasher is enough to get almost everything off dishes except hardened melted cheese. If it didn’t spray everywhere I’d want one for my house.
I “learned” this in college, too. And then I did a bit more research and discovered that the dishwasher was very much capable of cleaning, but only if it had appropriate detergent or cleaning solution. But commercial dishwasher cleaning solution is nasty and highly basic, so apparently whoever was in charged decided students shouldn’t have access to cleaning solution. So we only had sanitizer, and the dishwasher only sanitized.
After a discussion with the facilities department, I got cleaning solution and its feed line, and the dishwasher magically started washing dishes!
One should still spray the food off first, but commercial dishwashers wash just fine.
You still need to thoroughly clean the dishes before they go in, otherwise in 1-2 loads the filters are completely clogged. They are absolutely not designed for dishes to go in that have any residual food on them.
In a residential setting if you're going to clean the dishes to that extent, you should just finish washing them, as it's basically the same amount of time for a household's amount of dishes. The only time a commercial dishwasher makes sense is if you need to do dozens of plates and cups and kilograms of silverware.
Commercial dishwashers are a bad choice for residential use.
Are you sure they actually use harsh chemicals? I thought it's mostly about the extra heatL
If I ran a restaurant, I would go with high temp to avoid residual chlorine taste. And I would skip the rinse aid, thank you very much.
Or if you want a decent job, install a reverse-osmosis water filtration system in the central water piping that takes out all the nasty mineral salts responsible for the hardness and limescale. Also makes cleaning way easier.
Famously the Romans liked to found cities where the water was hard. But the preference persists for some people today. (And the reverse osmosis thing is a big investment, and might not be feasible when renting.)
Or bonus points for a dishwasher that uses RO concentrate/brine for washing.
I now tend to avoid anything labelled as "eco" as it invariably means "worse".
The cycle is very long, though. Mostly I don't mind, as I tend to run it overnight.
You probably measure your temperature in something like Kelvin (or Celsius or Fahrenheit), too? Instead of taking the ideal gas law pV = nkT serious and measuring temperature in units that are implied by T = p V / n * k, ie energy per degree of freedom.
I think that now DOE appliance standards, for all appliances, are now in annual consumption terms. They used to use different terms for different appliances that could convert to annual consumption (e.g., for dishwashers, it was "Energy Factor", which was cycles per kWh.)
> Surely it should be kWh per cycle with an added restriction on additional power used when not running.
That would be strictly more complicated, though I don't think passive draw is a big things for dishwashers.
Even the cheapest models should be able to meet the DOE limits and clean the dishes completely.
The quick 65C cycle takes an hour but uses 1.1kWh and 10 US gallons.
The one that pains me is ovens. They are hugely power hungry and here many models have a very tiny amount of insulation (unless you get a "pyrolitic" model that heats up to 500C to burn the oil off, they have better insulation by requirement of that).
We have no energy rating for ovens, so no real incentive to improve. The vast majority are also installed by builders when the house is built, so consumers never even make a choice in the first place. You can also imagine that also pushes most builders to the bottom end of the market. I'm also still always surprised how expensive ovens can be for how simple they are.
Most of them now also have a fan to run air around the the outside of the unit so it doesn't overheat the cupboard around it (but not all) which is perhaps also a hint at the poor insulation. The cheap builder model I most recently pulled apart had such poor insulation and gaps all around it.
Choice's most recent review has running cost per year ranging from $310 to $651 (this is unfortunately behind a paywall): https://www.choice.com.au/home-and-living/kitchen/ovens/revi...
"The running costs are calculated based on running the oven at 170°C for one hour, three times per week for 10 years at 30c per kWh. Where available, the fan-forced function is used, otherwise, the fan-assist is used. For models without either function, the top and bottom elements (convection or traditional bake) are used."
That's also probably generous since you often run a higher temp and I suspect 200-220C might make a big difference in that cost.
It's a good reason to make use of appliances like air fryers (which despite the name are mostly just ovens), they heat a much smaller space and use a lot less power as a result.
Unfortunately the ever shrinking house makes storing and using such things increasingly difficult. Microwaves are also only 50% effeceient (a surprise I recently learnt).
I know why we don't have it, and energy ratings are partly a proxy for it, but I always wished the average consumer had easy ways to be more informed about trade-offs exactly like this article talks about. You can trade energy effeciency for a slower cycle - that's partly why most washers these days have many different cycle options - you're trading one thing for another - but most of the time they just tell you the name of the situation they are supposedly for without even a hint at maybe how much more or less energy or water or delicacy you are trading off. The same reason product reviews are never clear cut because everyone has different priorities :)
If energy prices reflect externalities, you wouldn't need any special regulations or official ratings to give people incentives to get improved appliances.
Energy costs are already giving people incentives to do so, but perhaps they aren't high enough?
There is no way to know how much the oven is using. Even noce purchased, most people have no idea how much energy in their home is used by what (they just get a single bill and for an entire 2 months period).
Lastly as noted, at least here, the majority are installed by builders and included in a package price - the consumer doesn't choose and most builders don't offer an option. Many more would also be chosen by landlords for those who rent, rather than home owners. Or may have been chosen by the home owner that built the house you then purchased.
Thus I would say the number of consumers that directly choose and purchase the oven they use would be a low percentage, and the cost to replace it is high enough to make that unlikely and not have a great payback period.
Eg in Germany people routinely check out how good the insulation on eg the windows is when they choose a place to buy or rent. That's because energy is expensive in Germany, and it gets cold enough in winter that you need to heat.
If energy is cheap enough, people can be rationally (!) ignorant about these issues.
[0] At least here, a 208V element is not available. It works at 208V but not as well.
If the same ovens are available in the UK, then maybe look for the model number on a UK website.
You can always add clothes. If it’s too hot, there’s only so much you can remove. Particularly in a corporate setting
This is a huge argument in favor of WFH: fewer/no arguments over office temps, a debate about as old as time itself, and particularly a place where it's going to be extremely difficult to get varied groups of folks to all be comfortable and agree (imagine someone super petite vs someone with a good bit of body mass, or someone who grew up in Norway vs someone from Singapore, or even just guys and gals who statistically tend to have different circulation, fat levels, etc. leading to different preferences in ambient temperature).
One exec guy would turn the AC on high because there was little circulation over there. He liked it 'cool'. I was on the other side of the open area, in a small office. I'd come in in July, and the thermometer on my digital desk clock said 63f. I could not move my fingers to type efficiently because it was so cold. My fingers ached. I brought in a space heater and was chastised that I was "making a big deal out of nothing". 100+ people were consistently uncomfortable to make sure one person was comfortable. The energy waste had to have been enormous.
The days this guy was in it reminded me of working in foodservice, having to stock the walk-in cooler on delivery days. Yes, by afternoon, it was bearable, but 63f was just too cold to work effectively. Dozens of us were impacted, but the one top exec needed his comfort the 3 days a week he was in.
...
> The days this guy was in it reminded me of working in foodservice, having to stock the walk-in cooler on delivery days.
63F is not a walk-in cooler; 40F is a walk-in cooler.
Hyperbole like this is just rubbish.
Outdoors we at least have airflow to wick heat away. Indoors, it's just stale, warm air (there's other trains of thought that discuss the impact of CO2 in rooms on deep thought; I don't have any such studies handy to link at the moment but it does come to mind tangentially).
They should get used to it. Cooling large spaces is a huge waste of electricity, and it's not like 74 degrees is anywhere near hot or miserable.
Our bodies generate a pocket of heat that we end up sitting in without airflow. Years ago I bough an air circulator (a fan designed to push a lot of air slowly across a room, instead of blowing on a person) specifically to deal with this, and it brought my room-temperature-upper-tolerance from ~76 to ~80 without any need for AC.
People who point to electronic energy usage need to leave my clock cycles alone, and either direct their anger towards the world's elite, with their private planes and yachts, or just shut up completely.
And Microsoft can suck my nuts with their default settings for power savings. Why would I buy a sports car and let someone keep a software governor on the engine?
I'd be curious how the study was conducted, and if they have video of the study participants washing their dishes.
The majority of the energy used in dishwasher is from heating up the water. If you wash with cold water, you are using less energy than the dish washer.
You'd better rinse with hot water to get the soap away.
Edit: I just measured my kitchen sink and pot for this, 17x19 and 4 inches high = 5.6 gallons. If I go all the way to the sink's overflow at 6.5 inches high, that's 9 gallons.
Because I can only use water cool enough to put my hands in, the dishes are not as clean as what a dishwasher can do, but, again, no way does a single wash consume 5+ gallons.
Rinsing dishes requires fresh water from the tap, which runs somewhere from 1-2 gallons per minute. After filling a sink (or bucket) with water and rinsing everything, it's easy to use 5+ gal to wash dishes.
More efficient appliances mean less water going through the sewer, and less wastewater that needs to be treated. Which means lower capital expenditures, which eventually come directly out of your pocket.
And if even a fraction of people feel the need to pre-rinse or post-rinse, those gains can disappear.
Also, we've apparently transitioned from waste water being something that had to be dealt with to an actual asset. It can be cleaned to partial usage (and used for agriculture) or directed to help refill specific aquifers.
IOW, wastewater infrastructure is necessary above a certain density.
The irony is that wastewater infrastructure is one of the areas where cities often defer maintenance, leading to sewage backups when it rains.
That's always a good concern to have. That's why regulations that restrict consumption for individual appliances or activities are pretty silly.
An overall carbon price (and appropriate water price) would be much more rational than individually banning drinking straws and thirsty dishwashers.
But that's politics for you.
First, replace your pods with a box of powder detergent, then add some detergent to the prewash cup on your dishwasher in addition to the normal dispenser. If your dishwasher doesn't have one you can just put some on the door before you close the washer. This gives your dishwasher detergent to work with on two of its cycles rather than just one and in my experience it makes all the difference on really difficult dishes.
The pods are effectively identical to the powder detergent but at a huge cost premium and don't give you the ability to adjust your amount of detergent to match the water hardness in your area which can result in a film on your clean dishes.
for more info there is a great Technology Connections video covering it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rBO8neWw04
Alternatively you can test this by just throwing an extra pod in the bottom of the dishwasher to start with. If it works well then you can consider switching to powder to save costs.
European dishwashers use 240V (like everything else in the house) and so they can heat water much more quickly.
This electrical difference is also reflected in the fact that electric kettles (for boiling water) aren’t nearly as popular in North America as they are in Europe. Technology Connections also did a video on this topic [1].
[1] https://youtu.be/_yMMTVVJI4c
Of course equal efficiency isn't necessarily a given. The insulation and the design of the heating element can have a notable impact on heating time. And for small amounts it likely doesn't matter that much. But assuming equal construction it is still a very notable difference.
Dishwasher maybe less so, but they're usually pretty sturdy too.
No matter what, North American dishwashers will only be able to draw 1500w, and probably less because they're not always on a dedicated circuit, and have other power needs than just heat. So it's probably not a "cheap diswasher" vs expensive one issue.
The Miele user manual for their USA models recommends connecting to the cold water inlet unless the hot water is known to be heated by a very efficient source [2].
[1] https://producthelp.maytag.com/Dishwashers/Product_Info/Dish...
[2] https://media.miele.com/downloads/05/c4/00_96106053F20B1EDDB...
Huh? How does it matter to the dishwasher?
At 1200W and a 2.5 gallon wash cycle, I'd expect heating from 70 to 130F would take about 20 minutes. Unless the pre-rinse cycle was extended, I would expect this would mean the soap was released at the start of the wash cycle before the water was to temperature.
(Though they might have different dishwashers in Europe with better heating?)
However, even if you had hot water available, it would actually be to hot. The hot water entering can be much hotter than the required 30C for the lowest setting, so the dishwasher would need to cool the water.
As for heat setting, what’s the reason to be concerned with tap water being too hot? I don’t think plumbing code would allow water to be available at the tap that was hot enough to actually damage any type of utensil/drinkware/etc? I presume the only reason there might be a lower heat setting is simply for energy savings, which is kind of moot if you’re instead pulling hot water from the efficiently heated water supply.
1. He points out that a powder Detergent by itself is less effective than a combination of powder and gel. Something that the pods provide built in.
2. His own experiment with the prewash were completely underwhelming, showing nearly identical results in addition to not proving any different in the final result.
this seems like bad advice. Setting aside the question of whether the colors actually do anything, once this "advice" is known it's only a matter of time before inferior brands add a mix of food coloring to their detergent pods to look more premium.
1. I don't see any/much difference in pre- and post-Christopher Kimball ATK. The rest of the senior staff is basically the same, so I'm not sure what would have changed.
2. What exactly is so special about the colored liquids? What is the chemical make-up of them and their purpose? And are the liquids the same between difference brands? Is the red of one the same as the red as another? Or is the red of one have an equivalent to another (brandA->red = brandB->blue)?
Because unless you know what the liquids are/do, you're just cargo culting. By some account the liquids to nothing practical:
> Chemistry expert and former detergent chemist here, chiming in. Modulo some small semantic differences, you're 100% spot on. Functionally, there is zero difference in the formulations. Every powder dish detergent on the market comprises the same functional components, though the exact chemicals selected may vary. It's always some combination of detergent, anti-deposition agent, water conditioners, strong base, oxidizers, enzymes, buffers, "processing aids", and what I call "foo foo juice" - colors and fragrances.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll6-eGDpimU&lc=Ugxn7pFkryB_j...
The direction completely changed. Now it's all about fancier foods and restaurant stuff. Compare an episode from 2010 to now. Complete difference.
> Because unless you know what the liquids are/do, you're just cargo culting. By some account the liquids to nothing practical:
Uh, yeah, by definition I'm appealing to authority. Namely the authority of the people who did the comparison testing in America's Test Kitchen. That's literally why I watch it: because they know better than me and they put in the work.
Is the fanciness of ATK any different that CK's Milk Street? Season six of the latter had Jordanian, Brazillian (pizza), Turkish, falafel, Mexican, Greek cuisine; season five had Ethopian, Japan, Ukraine, Crete, etc:
* https://www.youtube.com/@ChristopherKimballsMilkStreet/video...
If anything it's Kimball that seems to have gone in the high falutin' direction. Regardless: if fancy is where the viewers/audience numbers are now, then that's the direction that either/both shows have to go to. What was done in 2010, or whenever, is irrelevant if the landsacape has changed.
> That's literally why I watch it: because they know better than me and they put in the work.
That's fine, but the authority should at least explain why so the more curious viewer could dig into things more. The YT link to the Technology Connections videos is to a comment by a chemists that breaks things down:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll6-eGDpimU&lc=Ugxn7pFkryB_j...
For example:
> Some pods, such as our top pick and runner-up pick, contain additional liquid cleaning agents in separate chambers that release when the PVA film dissolves. This design keeps liquid and powder separate until they are dispensed, allowing detergent boosters that best operate in liquid form to combine with powder detergent during a dishwasher’s cycle, enhancing their effectiveness.
* https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-dishwasher-d...
Right. Specifically, its the kind of advice that even if it works on the market at the time it is written, if it gets popular, it is very trivially subject to gaming in the way that gives truth to Goodhart's Law. "More colors of liquid in the pod = sells better" is an obvious target for trivial optimization with no change in substantive composition.
On the other hand, if they care enough to manufacture the pods with multiple liquid compartments, why not put the good stuff in them? I don't think the chemical composition will meaningfully change the cost.
Because the good stuff may cost more than the 'placebo', and given each pod can cost 10-30¢ each, small amounts matter in terms of margin.
Yup this is what it is. My understanding is they have different enzymes that clean better but need to be mixed at the time of washing.
One other thing made a difference between good and bad cleaning in a load - plates near the dispenser.
The detergent dispenser is in the door and putting plates on the bottom rack sort of between the bottom rotating arm and the dispenser seemed to interfere with the pod. It would prevent or delay dissolving the pod and mixing with the water. leaving some free space in the bottom rack in that location was key.
Dirt sensors might mean that deliberately leaving crud on the dishes (rather than rinsing first in the sink) leads to longer and better washes
Run your kitchen sink hot water a little before starting to get warmer water into the dishwasher
The first cycle is just water, before the detergent tray pops open, so put detergent into the pre-wash tray or just straight into the tub to make it do more cleaning in that cycle
But don't put two pods in, i.e. one in the detergent tray, and another detergent pod into the tub because these pods are very concentrated and harsh and will damage plates. Only add a little extra powder
I'd much rather watch a 30 minute video that's entertaining and teaches me something than skim read a document for a few minutes.
He also tends to go into all sorts of interesting tangents that I probably wouldn't have even found out about if I was researching this stuff myself.
Learning how's and why's also gives you tools to think about future things you encounter as well. You get a greater understanding of the world.
Note: this only makes sense in the US (or wherever else it's common for your dishwasher not to heat its own water).
> But don't put two pods in, i.e. one in the detergent tray, and another detergent pod into the tub because these pods are very concentrated and harsh and will damage plates. Only add a little extra powder
I'm not sure damaging your plates is the reason to avoid the extra pod. Plates are often made of some glass-like or ceramic-like material and not that easily damaged by chemicals.
I'm not sure about scratches. I can imagine you would get scratches if your detergent (especially crystals) doesn't completely dissolve? I mean, people even sometimes use sugar as a scrubbing agent. Dissolved sugar can't scratch anything, but sugar crystals can.
https://www.maytag.com/blog/kitchen/how-to-prevent-etching-g...
American dishwashers heat their own water too - I think this is for cases when the dishwasher has a time limit on how long it will spend heating up the water (perhaps to meet expectations on cycle length).
The pre-wash/pre-rinse cycle may only give enough time to raise the temperature 10-15 °F before the regular wash cycle starts. I do not believe they will delay the start of the wash cycle due to the water not yet being to target.
Starting with cold water reduces the effectiveness of the initial rinse, and may reduce effectiveness or prolong the wash cycle.
The edges/sides of my Corelle plates (a layered tempered glass) are rough due to the dishwasher. Also, those with prints have faded significantly.
> Note: this only makes sense in the US (or wherever else it's common for your dishwasher not to heat its own water).
I don't think this is a US-vs-world issue. Other countries' dishwashers are also connected to the hot water supply.
Rather, Technology Connections is suggesting a hack.
Your dishwasher, wherever in the world you may be, will start up by using whatever water it can get for an initial rinse of the dishes, and it will measure how dirty the water is after this initial rinse.
Normally this water will be tepid. But if you make it hot by running your hot tap first, the hot water will rinse more dirt off the dishes than tepid water, the dishwasher will detect more dirt, and so it will assume the dishes need more aggressive cleaning, and adjust its program accordingly.
> Normally this water will be tepid. But if you make it hot by running your hot tap first, the hot water will rinse more dirt off the dishes than tepid water ...
I might be misunderstanding you, but this definitely doesn't apply everywhere.
I don't know how this works in the rest of the world, but in the Netherlands at least my dishwasher is only hooked up to the cold water, running my tap will have no effect on the temperature of the water my dishwasher receives.
It makes sense to hook it up to a hot water line, given things like solar collectors and heat exchangers heating / pre-heating water.
Unless someone can point me to the existence of regulations saying something like "it's illegal to connect a dishwasher to a hot water line, it's gotta be cold water that the dishwasher heats up itself", then my expectation is that most dishwashers can be connected to either hot or cold, and will heat the water to the correct temperature.
Looking at EU regulations, as far as I can see, they don't regulate the intake temperatures that dishwashers have to accept. What they do regulate is energy usage labelling, and mandating there must be an "eco" mode, what the eco mode must do, and if you get to select multiple modes then "eco" mode must be the default. https://commission.europa.eu/energy-climate-change-environme...
This is not my experience. Nowadays appliances such as washing machines and dishwashers, in Europe at least, only have a cold water inlet.
Apparently modern appliances use so little water overall that it's no longer efficient to connect them to a hot water supply, since they will stop drawing water before the hot water runs through the pipes, and therefore it just wastes the hot water.
No? I'm in Germany, all dishwashers I've ever had were connected to cold water and heat their own water.
My dishwasher is connected to a hot water tap and also heats its own water to exactly the correct temperature... it just doesn't need to heat it as much because it's connected to a hot water line.
Here's the install guide of a random dishwasher selling in Germany right now: https://media3.bosch-home.com/Documents/9000521334_L.pdf
It says to connect to a water source with these characteristics:
* Pressure: 0,05 - 1 MPa (0,5 - 10 bar) * Temperature: max 60°C
It doesn't specify a minimum temperature although I assume it'd have to be >=1°C. But it is clear you can connect to either a hot or a cold water line.
And what for? Whether the instant water heater or the dishwasher heats the water, it's still going to be the same amount of electricity, the same cost.
981 of 1027 models from a number of well-known brands have an optional hot water intake: https://geizhals.de/?cat=hgeschirr60&xf=1069_AEG+Electrolux%...
I think in the US people might heat water with natural gas, which is cheaper, but that's not really the case in most rental apartments in Germany.
I think it is more a 110V vs. 230V household power issue. For 110V countries like the US the amps needed to heat up the water would be pretty high or the heat up would take very long. In Europe however I have yet to come across a dish-washer that is connected to the hot water supply.
Which country are you in?
I'm in the UK and we only connect dishwashers to the cold supply. Other comments in this thread from NL and DE are the same.
The manual makes clear this is quite OK.
They work with either hot or cold water. They will heat the water to the temperature they need. They don't work with _too hot_ water, hotter than they would heat it themselves (e.g. >60°C), but that's also outside the range of most domestic hot water supplies (which per BS 8558 should have a draw-off temperature of 50°C at sinks).
As a quick sample, here's the Argos dishwashers page: https://www.argos.co.uk/browse/appliances/dishwashers/c:2961...
Pick any dishwasher at random, go to Specifications -> General -> Water fill. Every single one I picked, all from different manufacturers, said "cold or hot"
Looking at one random choice's data sheet: https://documents.4rgos.it/v1/static/3425118_R_D010
> Maximum temperature for water intake (°C) 60
> Connect the machine to cold water if possible. Then the dishwasher itself heats up the water during the washing phase and the final rinse, which means that you save about 20 percent of energy. Today's dishwasher detergent works best and tablets dissolve better when the program starts with cold water.
> Dishwashers connected to cold water use around 30 percent less energy than dishwashers connected to hot water. A dishwasher connected to cold water only uses hot water when it is really needed.
https://www.cylinda.se/produktguide/kok/diskmaskiner
https://www.electroluxhome.se/vitvaror/diskmaskin/inspiratio...
- Does the dish washer support it? Not all do in the EU.
- Did the plumber install a warm outlet when they set up the connection for the dish washer?
- Does it even make sense from a holistic perspective?
The latter depends on the specific circumstances. For instance, I live in a country with district heating, and here it makes sense, because then I can use cheap heat. My dish washer supports it. But there's no warm outlet installed by the plumber, and currently the heat is mostly from coal, whereas the electricity is mostly renewable, so for the time being I just let it be.
A ceramic is a glass (or the other way around), just of a different material composition. And yes, a dishwasher can easily damage both glassware and ceramic dishes depending on how the glass (or glaze, in the case of a ceramic dish) was formulated.
A common durability test for ceramic engineers is indeed — placing it in the dishwasher.
The first water cycle does not get heated, but all subsequent ones do. I’m tempted at switching it to the cold water line.
However, those details are exactly why I follow his channel! I'm a million times more confident repairing my own appliances than I was before I found his videos, and it's not because he has videos on how to repair my specific appliances, it's because his deep dives into a wide variety of appliances have given me a good intuition for how these kinds of machines work.
This is a strange optimization choice. I'd much rather replace plates slightly more often vs. spend time each night handwashing or rinsing dishes. My philosophy is to put everything in the dishwasher regardless of 'diswasher safe'. If it breaks, I replace it with some other dish/cup brand. In a short time you are left with durable cook and glassware that the dishwasher can clean by itself.
As it is often the case in the EU these regulations are aimed at consumer level products. Industrial level products are regulated differently, if at all. I don't know details.
Wait, does that mean that dishwashing pods are not Vegan?
While I quite like this Darwinistic approach, I've not actually had this problem other than with printed or gilded patterns. Although I need a better solution for my grandmother's EPNS spoons.
What made it stop washing? I had switched to powdered detergent because I couldn't find pods due to COVID shortages. When I found pods again, I bought them. I've never had problems since.
Is there a case that they’re something else?
Of course, there are other ways to formulate things, but they all have tradeoffs.
I had switched earlier this year after seeing the Technology Connections video, and I'm ready to switch back. The pods are just better.
Or invest in a water softener. They’re a one-time expense and almost no maintenance (aside from a small expense/maintenance for salt), and are beneficial for a number of things:
- improved appliance longevity
- eliminating scale buildup on toilets and faucets
- improving the health of your skin and hair
- everything cleans more easily
So for me, I'd say something that takes me about 30 minutes to do (including the trip to get the salt) twice a year is fairly low maintenance.
Also, when I lived in the Midwest I could barely tell the water softener was there. I would descale my kettle and the first pot already had a thick layer on it. I now use a countertop RO system.
I guess it depends on how hard the water is, I suppose, but could also be the type of softener. I'm not sure, I haven't done a lot of research on it, as it seems to just work.
But in my experience, I can tell a huge difference (vs. the house we moved from that didn't have a softener). I never see any scale on our appliances, faucets, shower doors, etc.
When showering, I can tell when I've forgotten to refill the salt just from the feel of the water.
TSP == Trisodium phosphate. Available at many stores.
The same for washing machine detergent. Why anyone would pay $$$ to have water come with their detergent is beyond me.
In the same vein, antifreeze now comes "premixed" with water. Gaaaaah. I just keep looking till I find the lonely 100% antifreeze jug.
I pay so that I don't have to add yet another thing to my increasingly limited free time. The older I get the happier I am to pay extra so I have to do less.
Because powder detergent (no matter if for laundry or dishes) has a nasty tendency to pull in moisture from the air, leading to it clumping up and getting ineffective. If you have a family with small children that produce a lot of dishes and laundry, you may get away with it but if you're single / DINK no way.
> In the same vein, antifreeze now comes "premixed" with water. Gaaaaah. I just keep looking till I find the lonely 100% antifreeze jug.
That one is because most people don't use distilled water to dilute, but tap water instead... which can carry serious issues, either because it dissolves the piping (see e.g. Flint water crisis) or because limescale builds up in the engine where it's hot and eventually clogs up, leading to engine failure.
Also, the nozzles on the spray arms can become clogged. The easiest method to clean everything is to add one of those "cleaning" tablets to a normal wash. These are just Sodium Hydroxide, which chemically converts accumulates fats and greases into soap.
EG, I use the 'weed wacker' to cut up stuff, or I am racking leaves, I get pants with plant debris on them. I tend to shake them off first.
Presumably plates had the leftovers scraped off into the compost bin before putting into dishwasher anyways.
This strikes me as an abuse of the word “need”, in my opinion.
Look, yes, you ought to replace the filter every six months to a year, but will your car stop dead the very next day if you don't? No!
It also won't stop the day after, or the day after that. Ergo, by induction, we come to the conclusion that the 2012 R2 server on RTM patch level is not professional negligence.
It's just simple logic.
I don't like cleaning the dishwasher during normal cycles. I don't like eating more chemicals than I have to.
I clean the (German made) dishwasher when it tells me to using products designed for this.
https://shop.rema1000.dk/varer/145820
and
https://www.fjordbutikken.dk/sterling-citronsyre-til-afkalkn...
The first on removes dirt .. mostly fat I think.
The second removes lime using citric acid crystals. You could use vinegar instead I think.
The water hardness has something to do with the amount of salt the dishwasher uses so it needs to be set correctly.
I don't have any issues with the dishwasher.. I had it for 5 years.
https://clrbrands.com/Products/CLR-Household/CLR-Calcium-Lim...
This is probably a 'different problem', in that I have hard water, and calcium buildup is a thing here. It also builds on the plates and everything. So.. I do a full load, all dishes, with CLR. Yes, I do a second wash after.
To give an idea, if I put a pot full of water on the stove, and boil it to empty, I'll end up with a solid disc of calcium and other elemets at the bottom, about 1mm thick!
Do you use filters for drinking water or just bottled water?
I have a cooler with delivered water. I probably could drink the well water, how much calcium and such does milk have? But I'd have to test it more often.
The cleaning program is probably executed every two months or so. I'm assuming that the dishwasher can sense if the pumps it contains use more energy to pump water (I know pumps that can give the user this info but I think this is an estimate based on some magic numbers from the designers of the motor control software).
It might be also a simple timer. :)
( Myself I prefer Whole Foods 365 brand pods because they have all the detergent + enzymes but none of the ethoxylated alcohols or the worst chemicals)
I smash between a quarter and half the pod for prewash and the rest in the compartment following that technology connection video where he talks about the problem.
I find little life of quality change.
And no, I'm not talking about crappy, dirty, worn-out dishwashers. I'm talking about state-of-the art modern dishwashers. I thought it was normal for everybody that you had to wash all your dishes by hand before putting them in the dishwasher. I thought TC was basically making a big joke, but after TFA I'm thinking maybe dishwashers do exist (or did exist?) that actually ... wash dishes?? And don't take 4 hours to do it??
I’m able to put dirty dishes in mine and have them come out clean.
Only now I'm beginning to think I've been out of the loop.
In the new flat, equipped with some mid-range Siemens, I don't have this problem anymore. I use the exact same pods, same butter, and same knives. Hell, even the "quick 1h 45º" program gets rid of pretty much everything, even using the cheapest pods.
The three biggest changes I've experienced:
1. Water usage has gone WAY down, especially for energy star washers. You may see 2.5 gallon pre-rinse/wash, 1 gallon rinse cycle usage now. Heavily soiled dishes are relying on the filtration system to remove the particles rather than spraying gunk back on the dishes.
2. Post-rinse drying cycles use hot water and evaporation/condensation (via stainless steel tubs) rather than hot air. For ceramic/glass this is perfect, but plasticware will not get properly dried.
3. Pre-wash detergent cycles have started to go away. I suspect this is because the additional agents in pods have made the pre-wash cycle less effective. However, this means there may be even less time before the main wash cycle for water to heat - it is hard to tell if there is a rule whether to delay washing until it has water to temperature if the source water was cold.
Dishwashers (and clothes washing machines) used to use phosphates, but those detergents have been banned for residential use at least in the US.
Every surface you want washed needs line-of-sight to a sprayer, so it's quite possible to load a dishwasher in a way that doesn't work properly.
Certain things are particularly sticky. People used to make glue out of fish for a reason; the one thing I will pre-wash off plates is fish skin.
When I did clean them before washing them, so to speak, the short wash cycle would be enough. (Now I use the sensor cycle.)
No amount of "aww shucks" and tier 1 support level of suggestion changes or downplays my observations.
I can understand the convenience factor of pre formed pods, but if I have to spend 15 minutes a week making my own pods from powdered detergent, it seems like I’d be better off just using the powder as intended.
Using just detergent without rinse agent has always had poor results, and it's frustrating running out of rinse agent. Pods don't really cost that much more unless you're buying the ultra family size from Costco.
I would recommend that you look at them closely and get the one that fits your use case the best.
CR can also help here, because they will test them independently of the dishwasher.
Maybe because our how water systems are more various, so you can't just assume that's always hot on demand when you want it? If you need a heating element in the dishwasher anyway it's not much of a feature.
But I still don't get it: as dishwashers are usually in the kitchen, isn't a hot water line just as far away as a cold water line?
Or is the concern that there are more "on-demand" hot water heaters and a simultaneous shower might max them out?
People might also have a hot water tank, but only turn on that heater when people want to take a hot shower.
We turn our hot water tank on a few minutes before we want warm water for the shower. Most of the time we don't bother and shower cold, though.
Frankly I think even with some assumptions about your market to ignore 1 & 2, 3 alone makes it more complex than just taking a cold fill and heating to temp within the dishwasher. I believe the very few models that do have a hot fill do it on an eco basis (you already have hot water use it here too) but the validity of that is disputed, and really the only obvious benefit is to the EPC sticker (characterising energy performance) which will appear best in class (the class of all dishwashers) just by not having a multiple kW heater, not accounting for that having been offloaded to the boiler.
It's a GE which has a food grinder in it. Very quiet.
https://www.consumerreports.org/appliances/dishwashers/best-...
Whereas I place a top premium on the dishwasher actually getting the dishes clean, and then getting them dry afterwards. Bosch does fine on the first part, but without a heated drying cycle, they're rubbish on the second part.
I will never again buy another dishwasher without a heated drying cycle.
So, yes -- use those tests and listings, but make sure you fully understand the data behind them and assign your own priorities to those attributes that you value. Because what CR values may not be the same thing that you value.
https://whirlpoolcorp.com/brands-we-love/
I guess it's because europeans typically take their appliances when they move instead of leaving them in place (as they typically do in North America).
Costco had the best pricing on Bosch in my opinion. Cheap delivery and removal of the old unit. Was really surprised how lightweight a washing machine is, but I guess it's just a shell with a pump thin metal+plastic drawers at the end of the day.
For apartments, where tenants are more likely to abuse the appliances, a plug-in might make some sense, as it would make installing a new dishwasher slightly easier, and avoid needing to cut the power on that circuit to wire up a hard connection.
That being said, next look at the brand. I have a Bosch and its great, super silent. If you hear a noise, you loaded your dishes too tightly and they're banging against each other.
In addition to adding regulations to our refrigerators, washing machines, stoves, etc. etc.
I had not heard of the IER, and so looked them up:
> The Institute for Energy Research (IER) is a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit organization that, according to itself, conducts research and analysis on the functions, operations, and government regulation of global energy markets.[1] IER maintains that the free market provides the most "efficient and effective solutions" to "global energy and environmental challenges".[1]
> IER is often described as a front group for the fossil fuel industry.[2][3][4] It was initially formed by Charles Koch, receives donations from many large companies like Exxon, and publishes a stream of reports and position papers opposing any efforts to control greenhouse gasses. Thomas Pyle, president of the IER and its offshoot American Energy Alliance (AEA), was appointed to the US Department of Energy's transition team after the 2016 United States elections.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Energy_Research
You ever think a research group owned by Koch and Exxon are ever going to find that one should burn less fossil fuels? You think Coca Cola is ever going to tell you to stop drinking Coke? Given the fact they're massively biased on the subjects, shouldn't you then probably take their "studies" with at least 5 tons of salt?
I mean, c'mon now, they say stupid stuff like this:
> Since paper plates and plastic utensils are not eligible for government food assistance programs, the proposed standard will hit the poor especially hard.
Yeah, that's right, lets just slip in the idea of putting in some kind of government assistance to go buy disposable plastic right in this article. Who would stand to gain? Huh, Koch, the Koch family, Exxon, you know, their list of sponsors, etc. Its crazy to me how openly brazen and hostile they are with this logic.
Then they say stuff like:
> Manufacturers have warned reducing water and power in dishwashers has become increasingly difficult without impacting performance
But at the same time mention:
> While most dishwashers on the market meet the Energy Star Standard of 3.5 gallons per cycle
So we're already meeting half the standard and yet they act like its impossible to be at the point we're already at.
I don't personally care too much about these rules, but this article is a bunch of nonsense.
Even from their economic side of hurting consumers, they openly state it'll save >$600M in costs while only costing $125M to implement. So they're arguing against saving almost $500M in energy and water costs for consumers, not arguing that things will ultimately cost more. This article written by the energy industry is literally trying to convince us we should spend $500M in extra energy costs, and you're eating it right up.
If that whole $125M was done in just the first year of dishwashers sold in only the US market it increases the price of a several hundred dollar appliance by $15. Just the water saving costs alone is estimated at $30/unit, then an additional $7+/year in energy savings. If the thing only lives 5 years (dismal outlook, but lets use it) its saving consumers $65, 65 - 15 = a positive number, aka it will save consumers money, even if they're poor.
I've already manually removed all of the flow reducer bottlenecks in my showerheads.
If you want me to use less water or power, tax it more, don't render my appliances nonfunctional. Alternately, heavily tax the inefficient machines so they aren't cost effective for normal consumers/builders.
I really hate how poorly modern appliances work.
they also release steam in quantities that will have negative effects in a kitchen that wasn't built to withstand that. commercial appliances are meant to be used in commercial kitchens with commercial ventilation.
Domestic dishwashers are designed to deal with plates sitting around for the few days it might take a small household to fill them up before running.
You just need to be willing to spend the money on the better brand equipment.
The modern tests for toilets are much tougher than the old tests, and the best modern toilets will pass with flying colors on those tougher modern tests. Older toilets, and lesser quality toilets, can't hold a candle to the kind of performance you are able to get with the better and more modern toilets.
Toto is just one example. They're not the only one with top performing toilets. You can look on Consumer Reports to see the tests they run, and which toilets do well on those tests.
The US has had (roughly) four kinds of toilet:
1. The old 5 gallon per flush kind. Didn’t clog all that often. Flushed very very slowly. Contributed to downstream clogs because the outflow was insufficient to get the solids flowing well through the pipes.
2. The early lower-water-consuming kind. These were awful. Replace them if you have one!
3. Modern toilets. They use 1.28-0.8 gallons per flush, they rarely clog, and they don’t tend to clog the pipes downstream. They are generally quite good.
4. Flushometer toilets. They are often messy - they flush loudly and spray water around. Eww.
Why go backwards?
Modern toilets are tested for their ability to flush well:
https://map-testing.com/
I was hesitant to buy new toilets because I figured they’re all low-flush, so what difference would it make? I found a top-reviewed model on Home Depot and it made a huge difference. Went from everyday clogs to a clog maybe once every few months. I replaced all my toilets and it’s the best home upgrade I ever did.
Have an acquaintance, whom I'll call "Big Shit", whose feces were so voluminous that they required custom (i.e., high-volume, larger diameter) toilets and enlarging the sewer line in the house.
Big Shit's oriental wife has broadcast his productivity to all of his friends, much to our amusement and disgust. Certain asians, unlike Americans, are not at all shy about discussing their (and their spouses') bathroom experiences in excruciating detail.
With a single control, it's more commonly hold for short flush, release for long flush, which is just madness.
Source: owned too many dishwashers over the last decade. Paid money to make problem go away and to my surprise it actually did.
It works really well, but it's not magic.
Eg it still benefits from adding a bit of powder in the special compartment that opens immediately (or alternatively, directly in the body of the dishwasher).
You also have to clean the Miele's dirt trap every once in a while. I'm informed American dishwashers have different arrangements that don't need cleaning?
https://photos.smugmug.com/Appliantology/Kitchenaid-Dishwash...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_disposal_unit
Looks like those units are really uncommon in Europe.
So, yeah. I guess those things are a quirk of the US only.
I don't get why the USA don't ban these, but then complain about rat infestations at the same time. JFC.
I split my time between Germany and the US and the lack of a garbage disposal in the kitchen sink is a constant annoyance. (It's nothing to do with fatty foods; the reasoning provided seems like a red herring.)
New York's rat problem is world-(in)famous, as is San Francisco's.
> and having to clean out the sink drain filter multiple times per day is a disgusting waste of time.
Yeah, if you're peeling onions and potatoes over the sink instead of a bio-waste container. Do it like Germans do (in fact, if you look up your community's Abfallsatzung you may be required to) and you won't need to clean that thing more often than once every few months.
I don't ever peel anything over the sink, it's just the small particles of stuff from washing that fills up the filter. This isn't a "you're holding it wrong".
I get the impression it's a similar objection to air conditioning: it's regarded as foreign, atypical, and unnecessary luxury, so plausible justifications about why it's bad are trotted out.
One of my favorite parts of visiting asia is discovering what fun new things have been electrified and automated. It seems europeans tend to have the opposite culture, and regard using electricity as vaguely sinful.
(I'm considering whether it would make sense for us to install one.)
But in no country that I visited without those macerators do people clean their sinks multiple times a day. Are you sure you aren't 'holding it wrong'?
That's still weird. Standard German kitchen sinks have a very coarse filter [1], it's almost impossible to clog these up with anything but potato and onion peel segments.
[1] https://www.obi.de/edelstahlspuelen/pyramis-einbauspuele-ca-...
What are you doing to your sink?
I used to live there and the rodent problem is real. There was a great book about it a few years back where they wrote up a little piece on each cat at each location. And yes, I had a cat in my house because without a cat you get mice.
Paris is also notorious for its rat problem. To say that Europe doesn't have rats is just silly.
Perhaps I will ship a German SKU Miele from Germany, and figure out how to get 230V/50Hz to it. I wonder which 60Hz market has the highest power/water limit Miele SKUs.
I imagine there are some Japanese ones from the 60Hz half of Japan (you read that right, yes) that might fit the bill, too.
Also make sure you check the traps and clean the rotating heads - that was an issue with our older Bosch after a while.
I run it on sanitize (baby bottles) with just pods (and rinse aid, it helps getting the water off/dry) and everything comes out squeaky clean. No matter the gunk on it.
Had a Bosch when I lived in Germany. 1h14min for a normal cycle, pods. Came out squeaky clean too. I miss that machine. The extra time the Miele in the US takes is really annoying
The Miele is nice and quiet, but sometimes I miss my old loud energy-hogging dishwasher that had a real "dry" cycle with a fan.
ime this is because plastics have lower thermal mass and hence cool out faster than the ceramic/glass/metal things. while the water evaporates from warm objects it then condenses at lower temperature surfaces.
The quality of the unit is substantially better than any other DW I've experienced. Jury is out on how long it's going to last, but by reputation, There's Miele, Bosch, and everybody else.
https://youtu.be/r_9AkGSj3FQ?si=jj0iB-pTYC5GZmSZ
Here's a squeaky dishwasher door inside the most expensive ($250 million) and highest penthouse in the world (video at 8:40):
https://youtu.be/aN9DH_GxqEo?feature=shared&t=521
Now that's comedy!
Many domestic dishwashers spend a lot of time at the end drying your dishes. Commercial ones seldom bother with that.
The point of the commercial dishwasher is really to get the water super hot (steam, actually), and then sanitize the dishes after they've been cleaned.
https://www.aceee.org/blog/2016/01/amazing-drop-home-applian... https://www.vox.com/climate/2023/3/29/23588463/carter-effici...
We are combating this by only using vinegar in the rinse aid reservoir and dumping 2 cups in the bottom after unloading.
At $1.50/gallon for vinegar its not a cost issue just a "why does it have to be like this" issue.
We clean our filter monthly, too.
This is the interesting part of your story.
Communicate Directly with Appliances for Real-Time Diagnostics - SmartHQ GE Appliance Service Tool https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fu02_mvDQEI
APK, probably... https://apkpure.com/smarthq-service-formerly-newf/com.geappl...
Interesting idea re-flashing the firmware on your dishwasher or changing internal settings.
Although my understanding is drying cycles are longer than the actual run time. They heat up the ceramic and glass then turn off the heater and let the moisture evaporate. Opening the dish washer slightly and letting it sit for a while will usually completely dry the dishes.
One final tip though is that tupperware is a drying killer. The cheap plastic absorbs oils over time and creates a film that never really dries - making the whole dryer damp. Get rid of those and move to glass for a much better experience in every way.
Of course, it was bigger than a VW Beetle. Not exactly something for home use.
Garbage disposals are nick named "plumbers gold" for the same reason above. Only use them to flush water down the sink drain before running the dishwasher, NOT for dicing up what comes off dirty plates.
The kitchen drain line most likely runs below your living room floor in the concrete slab. It is very costly to have the carpet/tile removed and the slab sawed up to replace the line, usually with PVC.
My Bosch dishwasher is only a few years old. On normal mode, it takes 2 hours and 20 minutes. However it has a "Vario Speed" option which uses more water/energy, but performs the same clean in about an hour.
We rarely use Vario Speed. The dishwasher gets stacked after dinner and set on a timer so that it runs overnight. But the option for a fast wash is much appreciated.
One thing I'll say about wash quality is that the detergent matters. In Australia you can check out Choice's list [1]. We did find the Aldi Logix Platinum ones to be pretty good.
https://www.choice.com.au/home-and-living/kitchen/dishwasher...
I pay a "human" dishwasher $20 dollars a day and she washes the dishes completely, dries them, puts them out, wahes and sorts clothing, mops and vacuums the floor, washes toilets and the backyard with the dogs' dirt.
The wonders of cheap labour I guess