How Useful Is Your Dishwasher?

If you hate washing dishes by hand, I have good news for you! It turns out that washing dishes by hand wastes water. We should all go forth and purchase dishwashers immediately!

Now, there are naturally a lot of caveats to that point, the biggest one being that dishwashers are freaking expensive. And of course the fancy, high efficiency ones — which, naturally, is what experts look at while comparing the effectiveness of washing by hand — are the expensive ones out there. But if you can afford a dishwasher, you should really consider getting on that, because it turns out it's way more efficient. And if you already have a high-efficiency dishwasher, you should stop washing your dishes before you run it, because you're just wasting water.

As Chris Mooney puts it for the New York Times:

[A] diverse group of experts — including from Consumer Reports, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star Program, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy — suggests that in most cases we should just "let the dishwasher do its job," as Consumer Reports puts it.

And actually, it turns out dishwashers are really freaking good at their jobs. “While it may be possible to use less water/energy by washing dishes by hand, it is extremely unlikely,” Jonah Schein, technical coordinator for homes and buildings in the EPA’s WaterSense program, said in a statement. "In order to wash the same amount of dishes that can fit in a single load of a full size dishwasher and use less water [than an Energy-Star Certified dishwasher], you would need to be able to wash eight full place settings and still limit the total amount of time that the faucet was running to less than two minutes.”

Basically, your dishwasher is amazing and superior to you in all dish-cleaning activities. While experts say you should definitely scrape off as much of the excess food as possible from your plates before loading them into the dishwasher, if you have an Energy-Star Certified dishwasher, you don't need to worry about pre-washing them. And you definitely don't need to wash them yourself.

And as someone who hates doing the dishes with a fiery passion, I would like to just say that this is fantastic news. Goodbye, scrubbing, rinsing, and drying. Hello, pressing a button! A girl could get used to this.

Images: Alexander Borisenko/Fotolia; Giphy