I just detest doing dishes. I only got a dishwasher six years ago. How I’ve managed to get to forty and change before having one is beyond me. Damn thing is a miracle worker. I also have two kids and I cannot believe how many dishes, plates, bowls, and cups we go through in a day. It looks like a family of ten lives here.
Having grown up in houses with dishwashers, I was used to having them around. But then I briefly (1-2 years) rented a small, old house near Green Lake in Seattle, about 25 years ago. There was no dishwasher, which was fine since I was living alone. But something was “wrong.”
When the GF moved in, we got a floor-mounted dishwasher that required a multi-hose attachment to get water from the kitchen faucet and drain wastewater into the sink. Despite this mild inconvenience, the dishwasher was a huge improvement to our daily routine.
A discovery: Just having a dishwasher gives you a place to store dirty dishes, freeing up limited counter space for working in the kitchen. This turned out to be about half the benefit of owning a dishwasher.
Heh, when my gf cooks it seems sometimes like she purposefully uses as many dishes as possible. She will be mixing things in a bowl and decide she needs more room, so she grabs another bowl and pours everything in there. Then she decides she needs an even bigger bowl. She uses a knife to chop onions. Instead of rinsing that knife and then chopping celery, she grabs another knife.
After we eat, if she cooked then it is my job to clean up the kitchen. If I cooked, the kitchen is already clean. I’m not complaining, just observing. 
What manufacturer is that machine? I’ve been in the Hotel/ Restaurant industry for the past 20 years and I have never seen one that doesn’t need a detergent of some kind… most Hot Water machines don’t need a sanitizing solution since the water is 180 degrees F or higher… not calling “bull shit” on the no detergent… but if that’s true, I would like to get one for our bars and banquet service kitchens… last month I had to approve the purchase of $2356.00 worth of just EcoLab power xl detergent for the Bar, Restaurant, Housekeeping and Banquets… and September wasn’t all that slow but really crazy busy. So anything that I can do to shave $25-30 grand off my budget for the year is worth it…
I used to be really good about cleaning as I went, but as my cooking improved, I realized the cleaning was going by the wayside. This is because although I think I’m good at multi-tasking, I’m actually not, so I was neglecting the food on the stove in favor of cleaning. There’s also always something I’ve forgotten to prep, so the frantic chopping, peeling, and/or grating creates more mess than it should.
It occurs to me that if we had just two people in the household, the balance might tip away from the dishwasher, but with three, we run it almost every day, especially when I chuck pans in there. Being a lazy slob by nature, I only wash the things that aren’t dishwasher-safe every other day or so. I like the idea of @kayaker 's method better, but I’ve never managed to actually put it into practice. Because Mr. Legend has a lot of trouble standing for any amount of time, I’ve taken over all the kitchen duties, so at least I’m not inflicting my mess on anyone else!
You know, I have the same question. Early in my career I had a number of restaurant jobs, mostly back of house stuff doing prep, but I was also a dishwasher for a time. All of the machines I used or saw required some sort of detergent-y stuff. The industrial kitchen I worked in that had a conveyor system and a dishwasher tunnel used especially caustic stuff. And yeah, they all got hotter than hell.
The Auto-Chlor commercial dishwasher site specifically calls out detergent as being needed for both their high and low temperature machines, with the low temp machines also requiring sanitizing solutions.
We have a Champion Circular conveyor type that is about 20 years old… and is holding up well… 2 under counter type 1 in the bar and 1 in house keeping for the in room glasses* and a rack conveyor type in the roof top restaurant…
- our in room glasses get washed between guests… not everyone does that… it’s not mandated by most health departments in the US… I worked at one hotel that had the housekeepers “wash” the guest room glasses in the bathroom sink and sprayed them with sanitizer, because it would cost too much in labor to clean the glasses in the kitchen dishwasher…. I don’t drink out of the glasses in hotel rooms anymore
. That’s prime example why we need regulations and laws…not some right wing libertarian free market capitalism cluster fuck of no regulations on business.
I’ve tested our vintage 1980-something dishwasher: If anything visible is on the dish or cup, it will still be there after the wash & dry cycle.
Thus, our “dishwasher” is essentially a steam sanitizer.
It’s the opposite with Mrs. Solost and me. She always tells me I don’t load it correctly and I try, lord how I try, to do it just exactly the way she’s repeatedly shown me how to do it, but according to her I never do it right. She’s even accused me of intentionally doing it wrong so I get out of doing it, which is absolutely untrue.
Once when she told me I stacked it wrong yet again, I said “wait now; I distinctly remember you saying plates went (x) way and bowls went (y), and I followed it to the letter”.
She said “that’s the old way. I haven’t stacked that way for over a month”. 
LOL. You really have to start reading those monthly Stacking Memos.
I will check next time I’m at the firehouse.
Makes me turgid.
OK, Buck.
When my friend remodeled his kitchen, he put in 2 dishwashers. I asked him why, as he lived alone and didn’t often entertain crowds. He said it was so he’d never have to empty the dishwasher. He just used clean dishes out of one dishwasher and loaded them into the other.
I’m kind of in awe of this level of…well, you can’t even really call it laziness, can you? I’ve seen some pretty ingenious details in custom kitchen designs, but this takes the cake!
When I was in command of my kitchen my rule of thumb was
- If I have lots of whatevers (spoons, plates, etc.) put the dirties in the dishwasher. If I have one of them (microplane, a particular strainer, etc) wash it by hand during or immediately after the meal then set it out to dry.
When the two of us were eating most meals most days at home the dishwasher normally was run about every 3-5 days, usually because somebody had used the last teaspoon or salad fork. Stuff never got old or stinky in there, there was always a decent supply of clean stuff, and the DW handled about 80% of the piecework leaving me the last 20%.
Talking about modern electronic dishwashers and detergent…
Is it possible for a dishwasher to “taste” the dishwater in order to sense the “terge-ness” of said water as a function of cleanliness?
Something different than optical/turbidity?
I’m neither a chemist nor a chemical engineer, but I have seen both pH meters and oxygen concentration meters designed for continuous measuring in fluids. I don’t know what you’d have to measure to decide that the rinse water was clean enough, but I suspect that optical transparency was chosen because it is probably the simplest solution and doesn’t require exposing the sensors to the water where they could get corroded or gummed up.
How does a dishwasher sense whether food is still encrusted on a dish, if it’s sensing the wastewater?
IMO it doesn’t. But what it can sense, over time, is:
No gunk in the wastewater means I’m not going to get these dishes any cleaner by continuing to spray them with soapy water. They’re as clean as I can get them. Time to switch to rinse & dry.