I'm not a fan of dishwashers. You have to handwash the dish, then put it through the dishwasher, then handwash it when it comes out. It seems a lot easier to just handwash it once at full effort.
Now, this article suggests that the first handwashing can be skipped with contemporary detergents, which is useful information if true, though I think it wouldn't help in the social situations the article talks about since it makes it look as though you're cutting corners.
Because everybody is replying obliquely to this: You should not have to do either of those things. If your dishwasher is working properly, you should be able to put fully-dirty dishes in it and remove fully-clean, dry dishes from it. This is how my dishwasher works and how all dishwashers I have ever owned work.
If your dishwasher does not generally work in this way, it is not working correctly.
My mother had a dishwasher in the late 70's that didn't work properly. I think it was very expensive at the time.
She used it's crumminess as justification both to wash all of the dishes manually, and to never buy another dishwasher again, since she would obviously have to wash all of the dishes by hand anyhow. The thought that technology might improve over time never seemed to occur to her.
I get the idea that she was not alone in that.
No one is "replying obliquely", I don't think. Generally when I post about this, there's a profusion of indignant outrage (usually about how I should use their magic ritual to propitiate the dishwasher), and one or two people also willing to spend the karma points to say that tracks with their experience.
I'm willing to believe commercial-grade dishwashers are actually effective, because only very occasionally do restaurants give me dirty dishes or cutlery. In personal homes, however, I've only encountered totems and superstition, but unlike internet commenters they don't usually get super outraged.
> how I should use their magic ritual to propitiate the dishwasher
Maybe you are just wrong and basing your opinion on old, obsolete data? Granted I haven’t had to do any ritual of any kind using dishwashers for the last 20 years… but yeah. It’s not like I’m the one pointlessly wasting time hand washing dishes.
The pre-washing is silly, but the post-washing is totally mental. Why on earth would you post-wash a dish? Your dishwasher must be very dirty. Clean the filter, and also, run a few cycles with a couple of bowls facing up in the bottom, then discard the giant globs of dirt that will collect in them when the cycles are done. This is how to rehabilitate an old dishwasher, assuming it is mechanically working ok.
Not to mention if your dishwasher has a sanitize cycle, you are very likely making the dishes dirtier and spreading new bacteria onto them by post-washing them.
Why bother with the dishwasher if you're already washing the dishes? I don't do any of those manual steps and my dishes come out clean. Modern dishwashers and soap are very good at the entire process.
1) you don’t need to wash the dishes before loading the machine. There is a filter you can clear food out of but most people don’t know about it. Scrape off the solids beforehand leads to less gunk in the filter.
2) a cycle will typically be much hotter for much longer than whatever you do manually. So the dishwasher is what I trust to fully disinfect my dishes
3) a family of four cooking at home will need a full load every day so it’s a lot more efficient than manually washing and drying everything, especially when both parents work
> So the dishwasher is what I trust to fully disinfect my dishes
The water probably doesn't get hot enough, unless the dishwasher has a sanitize cycle.
My wife is convinced that you need to hand wash dishes before putting them in the dishwasher, so she doesn't use the dishwasher (it came with the house). I actually thought the two types of people in this article were going to be A) people who hand wash dishes before putting them in the dishwasher; and B) people who just put them in the dishwasher and trust it will do its job to clean them.
It's worth mentioning that pre-washing the dishes too clean is actually worse, because the enzymes in dishwasher soap are activated with the organic matter in the food debris.
Wow, I've never seen the two-handwashings version of this complaint! Also, that remark about how people perceive you is worrying. Who are you hanging out with?
Seriously though, your opinion is common (maybe not majority, just weirdly not as rare as you would think).
I sometimes wonder about it, and I generally land on these explanations, in decreasing order of how common I think they are ("you" below refers to the representative of all people, not you personally):
1. You experienced a partial failure a number of times in specific cases (e.g. a fluke of loading/shapes where a spot just doesn't get clean, or maybe you were expecting it to accomplish the impossible task of cleaning a left-out bowl of mini-wheats). This soured you and caused you to over-compensate forever after.
2. You have very high standards for "clean" (e.g. faint streaks on glass is unacceptable).
3. You over-load it or never clean the filter.
4. Washers and/or detergent were indeed crappy, and are now better (maybe true, but I'm not sure I buy this as a significant reason).
5. You use detergent packs or you don't call for hot water before turning it on (even I'm guilty of these, and don't have issues).
Funny how easy it is to s/dishwasher/llm in this subthread.
> > The entire concept is flawed and can't possibly work and wastes more time than it will ever save.
> List of tips for proper usage
I just wash my dishes.
It's when visiting other people's homes that I encounter dishwashers and weird superstitions relating to dishwashers.
Superstition is mostly just holding beliefs that you refuse to test. You can find plenty of that among dishwasher users, but I think you've also demonstrated a fair amount here.
The level of vitriol, and arbitrariness of the various rituals different people are absolutely convinced I must immediately use to see the light (I don't even own a dishwasher, lol), don't really inspire much confidence.
well, you do seem to hold a belief, that people with dishwashers must pre and postwash dishes by hand.
You could consider placing this belief in the open for people with dishwashers to contradict a sort of test, but you don't appear to consider it that way. Do you still think that everyone in this thread with a dishwasher washes their dishes by hand before and after they put them in the dishwasher?
You're accusing people who use dishwashers of a profoundly inefficient process. I think that you don't recognize this as insulting, but I also think that you derive a sense of superiority from this accusation, and if you are holding onto this belief in spite of people's insistent contradiction, then I think that this amounts to superstition and vitriol on your part.
Buy a new dishwasher. I had an insidious dishwasher that went through its entire cycle, but sometimes refused to make things clean. After weeks of trial and error and a few new parts, I finally determined the control board was popping all the detergent into the tub after just a few minutes in the first cycle and then draining and restarting the main cycle with just water. Everything mechanical was working perfectly, but it was literally being stupid at its job. I just couldn't trust it to not do that again, and decided to scrap it and upgrade on a Black Friday sale.
Modern dishwashers are great. I was firmly of your opinion for years, stubbornly a hand washer. Now I rinse dishes until there are no chunks left, sauce, grease, etc is all OK. Put them into the washer, and most evenings decide it's full enough and click start. The next day clean dry dishes are loaded directly into the cabinets.
You absolutely don't need to handwash the dish first when using a modern dishwasher. You just need to scrape off large scraps into the trash.
I lightly rinse the worst dishes while loading until the water gets really hot at the sink next to the dishwasher. Having that prewash be very hot does a lot to make sure it gets it good in my experience.
US dishwashers tend to assume the incoming water is from the hot water line and is pretty hot. It takes a bit for the tub to actually get the water very hot, so you'll end up spending most of the pre-wash step with only mildly warm water if you don't get the hot water there first.
Run the hot water at the sink until it's hot then the dishwasher should have hot water from the start.
That's what I do, but while I'm running the water I might as well rinse a few of the dishes and put that water to work.
Once the water gets to temp I just toss the rest into the dishwasher.
Modern dishwasher soap contains enzymes that are activated by proteins. Pre-rinsing prevents those enzymes from activating. The dishwasher might do a better job if you don't pre-rinse.
Don't most dishwashers pre-rinse anyway?
Not at all my experience. I rinse the dishes before they go in as they will likely sit for days and days before I fill up the dishwasher.
Likely that’s because if there’s just a couple dishes I just hand wash them. But when we have company the dishwasher is a massive time saver. That said, I bet the average American has way more electronic “stuff” and possessions than I do (with the exception of instruments and music gear) as I try to live pretty simply.
Of course, there may be a tipping point where that "simplicity" is just shipping the complexity out to somewhere else. In this case, perhaps this would arise as extra water treatment plants due to the extra water used by hand washing. Obviously not just from you, but if a large amount of us did it this way.
Depends on the dishwasher.
A quick rinse only decreases chances of issues.
Also, waiting 3 years to load the dishwasher until full to run it will make food hard on it.
Have to choose the poison.
These dishwasher discussions to me always are a bit frustrating because so much of it depends.
Even the article has this little caveat that's not so little: you don't need to prerinse unless it involves protein, which is actually a lot of dishes potentially.
It depends on how long it takes you to load the dishwasher, as you're pointing out, and all sorts of other things.
I've also noticed that consumer outlets frequently complain that people don't clean out their filter enough, which damages the dishwasher, but that filter is probably clogged by stuff that doesn't get rinsed off the dishes.
We have a dishwasher, we use it, but I have always kind of felt like dishwashers were the one appliance I could live without (and have for years at times, even when we owned one). If there's lots of dishes or lots of people, they're useful for us. But we don't have that many people over usually, I can't put certain things in ours because they don't get clean, there's always things I don't want to or can't put in the dishwasher, so I end up washing things with them, there's things that I will have to pull out anyway or run a very empty load, and so forth and so on.
I guess I feel like they're useful to have around but other appliances (range, fridge, washing machine) have been much much much much more important to me.
There Are Three Types of Dishwasher People.
You have to clean the filter more frequently, is the trade off. Not a bad one IMO.
> You have to handwash the dish, then put it through the dishwasher, then handwash it when it comes out.
What?
I think a lot of dishwasher opinions are based on how your mom told you to wash the dishes 35 years ago.
To be fair some people rent places with really old dishwashers.
That's my case. My old place had a brand new one and it did everything perfectly. My new place has one that's pretty old and not only does it need a pre-rinse, it doesn't even dry things (and unlike my old one, it needs a rinse aid)! And if it breaks, I'm sure the landlord will replace it with an empty area under the counter.
I think older dishwashers are more likely to have built in garbage disposals which is actually a huge win. On newer dishwashers one of the biggest problems is that people don't clean the filter regularly
If you stuff something covered in egg yolk in there it's coming out with egg yolk on it. If you don't scrape whole chunks of potato off the plate, you're rolling the dice with whether you pull it out of a filter or out of the thin hose between the dishwasher and the drain. The dishwasher's not magic - if it takes a scrub to get it off, you need to scrub it.
I don't know about handwashing after it comes out though, that's crazy.
Egg yolk is no problem whatsoever for a modern dishwasher and detergent. And obviously you don't put whole potato chunks in the machine. Don't be stupid.
GE machines come with a garbage disposal built-in. Be as stupid as you want, things are still coming out clean.
https://www.geappliances.com/appliances/dishwashers-with-pir...
> You have to handwash the dish, then put it through the dishwasher, then handwash it when it comes out.
You have never actually used a dishwasher have you.
Not the OP, but this is how my parents use the dishwasher - I think a lot of people don't realize that you don't need to pre-handwash for modern dishwashers.
Especially if you use a small amount of detergent in the pre-wash compartment. Most people (at least in Europe) just use a single tablet in the main wash section. I've seen a massive improvement by putting a teaspoon amount of detergent in with the pre-wash. The ever-wonderful Technology Connections sent me down this path.[1]
Without detergent in the pre-wash compartment, only water is used to pre-soak the dishes.
It works even better if you add trisodium phosphate to the compartment.
I'm using the Miele dishwasher powder myself, mainly because it's the only one I could find at a reasonable price that wasn't tablets:
https://shop.miele.com.au/en/cleaning-and-accessories/miele-...
Then there's the way my mother-in-law uses the dishwasher: turn on the faucet as high as it goes, then rinse each dish so much it could just go straight in the rack, then load the dishwasher, then FINALLY turn the water back off.