My mother had a dishwasher in the late 70's that didn't work properly. I think it was very expensive at the time.

She used it's crumminess as justification both to wash all of the dishes manually, and to never buy another dishwasher again, since she would obviously have to wash all of the dishes by hand anyhow. The thought that technology might improve over time never seemed to occur to her.

I get the idea that she was not alone in that.

No one is "replying obliquely", I don't think. Generally when I post about this, there's a profusion of indignant outrage (usually about how I should use their magic ritual to propitiate the dishwasher), and one or two people also willing to spend the karma points to say that tracks with their experience.

I'm willing to believe commercial-grade dishwashers are actually effective, because only very occasionally do restaurants give me dirty dishes or cutlery. In personal homes, however, I've only encountered totems and superstition, but unlike internet commenters they don't usually get super outraged.

Not to mention if your dishwasher has a sanitize cycle, you are very likely making the dishes dirtier and spreading new bacteria onto them by post-washing them.

1) you don’t need to wash the dishes before loading the machine. There is a filter you can clear food out of but most people don’t know about it. Scrape off the solids beforehand leads to less gunk in the filter.

2) a cycle will typically be much hotter for much longer than whatever you do manually. So the dishwasher is what I trust to fully disinfect my dishes

3) a family of four cooking at home will need a full load every day so it’s a lot more efficient than manually washing and drying everything, especially when both parents work

My wife is convinced that you need to hand wash dishes before putting them in the dishwasher, so she doesn't use the dishwasher (it came with the house). I actually thought the two types of people in this article were going to be A) people who hand wash dishes before putting them in the dishwasher; and B) people who just put them in the dishwasher and trust it will do its job to clean them.

Funny how easy it is to s/dishwasher/llm in this subthread.

> > The entire concept is flawed and can't possibly work and wastes more time than it will ever save.

> List of tips for proper usage

I just wash my dishes.

It's when visiting other people's homes that I encounter dishwashers and weird superstitions relating to dishwashers.

I wasn't sold on dishwashers until I learned that they use less water than handwashing

I get rid of bigger chunks only and left sauce and grease. My dishwasher has no problem with that.

I lightly rinse the worst dishes while loading until the water gets really hot at the sink next to the dishwasher. Having that prewash be very hot does a lot to make sure it gets it good in my experience.

US dishwashers tend to assume the incoming water is from the hot water line and is pretty hot. It takes a bit for the tub to actually get the water very hot, so you'll end up spending most of the pre-wash step with only mildly warm water if you don't get the hot water there first.

Don't most dishwashers pre-rinse anyway?

Of course, there may be a tipping point where that "simplicity" is just shipping the complexity out to somewhere else. In this case, perhaps this would arise as extra water treatment plants due to the extra water used by hand washing. Obviously not just from you, but if a large amount of us did it this way.

These dishwasher discussions to me always are a bit frustrating because so much of it depends.

Even the article has this little caveat that's not so little: you don't need to prerinse unless it involves protein, which is actually a lot of dishes potentially.

It depends on how long it takes you to load the dishwasher, as you're pointing out, and all sorts of other things.

I've also noticed that consumer outlets frequently complain that people don't clean out their filter enough, which damages the dishwasher, but that filter is probably clogged by stuff that doesn't get rinsed off the dishes.

We have a dishwasher, we use it, but I have always kind of felt like dishwashers were the one appliance I could live without (and have for years at times, even when we owned one). If there's lots of dishes or lots of people, they're useful for us. But we don't have that many people over usually, I can't put certain things in ours because they don't get clean, there's always things I don't want to or can't put in the dishwasher, so I end up washing things with them, there's things that I will have to pull out anyway or run a very empty load, and so forth and so on.

I guess I feel like they're useful to have around but other appliances (range, fridge, washing machine) have been much much much much more important to me.

There Are Two Types of Dishwasher People, and Then There Are Animals

I think a lot of dishwasher opinions are based on how your mom told you to wash the dishes 35 years ago.

If you stuff something covered in egg yolk in there it's coming out with egg yolk on it. If you don't scrape whole chunks of potato off the plate, you're rolling the dice with whether you pull it out of a filter or out of the thin hose between the dishwasher and the drain. The dishwasher's not magic - if it takes a scrub to get it off, you need to scrub it.

I don't know about handwashing after it comes out though, that's crazy.

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Not the OP, but this is how my parents use the dishwasher - I think a lot of people don't realize that you don't need to pre-handwash for modern dishwashers.