It would be wasteful for me to have a dishwasher.
One plate or bowl, fork or spoon a meal. I would have to have a large collection to wait days before putting them in.
All my plates and bowls are plastic and a dollar or less, no breakage.
2 metal spoons and one metal fork.
A Lot less water is used.
It really sounds as if your sister has an anxiety disorder, which is maybe why she can’t just accept a “no” and let it go. Anyway, my sympathies about that and about your mom.
In the future, be aware that repair people warn never to use the self-cleaning cycle. You run the risk of frying the circuitry. Google it if you have any doubts.
Never mind, already addressed.
This is about what I have to wash every day, plus the occasional pot or pan when I cook, which is why I don’t bother with a dishwasher. I grew up washing dishes by hand so I’m used to it. The only reason I have one is that it came with the house.
I christened the cooktop today. I like that there is an indicator to let me know that the burner area is hot even after I turn it off.
Q: Is it once again garbage collection day tomorrow?
A: Yes, indeed.
Q: So this time, in preparation, the pup will roll the bins over to the end of the driveway tonight, correct?
A: No.
Q: Why not?
A: Because the current temperature outside is the sort that’s been characterized by weather reporters as “colder than a witch’s tit”. Furthermore, a warming trend late tonight is forecast to bring snow flurries tonight through to tomorrow, and the bins would be in the way of Snowplow Guy.
Q: So Snowplow Guy will finally actually have to do some real work?
A: I doubt it. I’m imagining the whole eastern section of North America getting snowed in, and I get a light dusting as usual, as a sort of teaser. Of course if I didn’t contract Snowplow Guy, some extraordinary polar vortex would dump so much snow directly on top of my house that I wouldn’t even be able to open the front door. So I continue to contribute to keeping the man employed. I think of him as a sort of insurance agent with mystical powers.
It was recycle day today so I grabbed the full full-sized (32 gal?) plastic blue can to take it to the curb. I went down, the can went down, a lot of stuff came out, one bottle broke & it was hard to find the glass in the driveway as opposed to the ice. I hurt my wrist but it was fatal to the can; it was so cold that it created a circular crack all the way down to about 2" from the bottom. I told her to put a note on it, “Please take me”. When I heard the trash twuck come I went out. The first guy was going to take it when I talked to him. Then the driver came around, he said that he shouldn’t take it today but on Fri, with the regular trash. By this time the first guy had already thrown it in the back so the driver decided that he could take it today. It’s plastic, it’s recyclable (for whatever value of recycling they do vs. just throwing stuff in the dump), it’s broken. Why wouldn’t you want to take it with the recyclables instead of making me wait two days to try the same exercise over again?
Our oven has that too which is nice.
When I was a bachelor, I always hand-washed everything, because like others here I never generated many dirty dishes. It was easy and fast to wash the few I dirtied every day, and if I did it every day (particularly if I rinsed things before they dried and/or cooled) then I never had a big job to do. It made dishes a trivial thing.
Another thing that might have helped spur that instinct was when I lived in a low income apartment building full of cockroaches. I was careful to keep all food and dishes sealed up in something (like a sealed plastic container or the fridge). That way I kept cockroaches away from my apartment, and when one or two did come to visit they wouldn’t crawl over things I put in my mouth. I probably, almost certainly had the cleanest apartment in that building (and if you saw that building and my neighbors you’d realize that was a very low bar). And it wasn’t because I was a neat freak, it was because I was trying to make the best of a really bad situation and by making my aparment an island of cleanliness, it was an oasis of sanity in a really fucked up place to live.
Naturally, that situation demanded dishes be cleaned, dried, and put away immediately after use, which became an easy long-term habit. (It was also good when one day during a rainstorm, a mysterious black oily liquid started dripping from the ceiling all over my kitchen, to this day I have no idea what it was, but no food or dishes were ruined thanks to being sealed away.)
These days I have a wife and daughter (and extended family and friends that visit and get entertained), so dishes pile up quickly. I run the dishwasher once or twice a week, only when it’s truly full.
I always rinse everything immediately after use so nothing dries on it. Once I’m through cooking/eating I load up the dishpan and run water into the other sink until it’s really hot, then fill the dishpan with hot soapy water and let things soak until the water cools enough that I can put my hands in it. Everything wipes clean easily, then sits in the draining tray to dry overnight.
Now see, this is the sort of thing I mean. It sounds like work. Having retired from a working life I feel that I’m entitled to avoid any further work. My approach to dishes seems to me much simpler. Once I’m done with whatever item used for cooking or eating I simply put it in the dishwasher. That’s it.
Obviously excessive crud of whatever kind is disposed of separately, but in general that’s what I do. When I switched from powdered dishwasher detergent to my preferred pods (Finish™ Quantum Ultimate pods, since you ask) the packaging promised that pre-rinsing would no longer be necessary, due to the pods containing three different kinds of allegedly miraculous detergents. I set out to prove the advertising wrong, but so far everything I’ve put in there has emerged spotless.
ETA: Not to exaggerate a point, when a pot or casserole dish or something has burned-on crud, I do soak and/or scrub it. I don’t expect detergent and moderate pressure of hot water to work miracles, regardless of advertising claims! But the pods really do clean well. 
It’s work in the way that wiping your butt after going poop is work.
(I realize that metaphor might be lost on a dog.)
Does this imply that if a witch gives birth and breastfeeds her baby, the milk comes out as soft serve ice cream? That sounds like the most awesome infancy possible!
No, it isn’t. Try to look at it this way. Few would argue that in this modern age it would be unreasonable for a family of six to own a dishwasher, and for a nightly dishwasher run to be more or less routine. I simply maintain that a family of one over six days or so is equivalent to a family of six over one day. Or am I going to be hearing that you also wash your shorts by hand at the end of every day, so who needs a washing machine?
Besides, I like the sparkling-clean results and the sanitation from the long run in very hot water. My love for dishwashers goes back a long way. You wouldn’t think that a bunch of college kids sharing a townhouse would have any use for a dishwasher, but one of the gang (not me) was a sort of self-appointed organizer of the household and insisted we all chip in for the cost of a rented portable dishwasher (in those days built-in ones weren’t very common). We all eventually appreciated its benefits.
Not likely to happen. Some of her other body parts are even colder! 
How much water does handwashing save? It only takes me 5 minutes.
Handwashing dishes takes FIVE times as much water as washing the same amount of dishes in a dishwasher.
It’s even worse if you compare daily washing by hand with running a dishwasher say around once a week.
The thing I particularly like about the pods I now use is that even if the dishes in the washer are visibly dirty (i.e- have not been pre-rinsed) the strong detergent in combination with hot water cleans them right up.
This is working for you, so you probably won’t want or need to change. However, it appears that in general using powder (or even dispensed liquid) detergent cleans better. The reason is that your dishwasher probably has 2 detergent dispensers, big and small.
The big one (where you put your pod), releases during the second (main wash) fill. The small one (there are various designs) releases the smaller amount of detergent during the prewash rinse cycle, which helps that cycle remove some crud and apparently much of the oil/grease.
Long, snarky video by the Technology Connections guy here. He may not be your cup of tea, and he is a bit of a fanatic on the subject (here is a follow-up video where he expands/corrects on a few things).
One of his hot (well, warm) buttons is the cost difference between pods and powder. It doesn’t amount to much, but possibly the cost of a Caesar or two over the course of a year.
After watching those videos, I buy powdered store-brand detergent and it works great. Saves money because I use less than when I used pods.
But this may fall into the category of work under @wolfpup’s definition.
That can’t be so. I am going to put a container in the sink and measure.
For your use case (single place setting, and that is all you have (so you wouldn’t be washing multiples in the machine after a day or three)), you may be right. But your dishwasher probably uses a lot less water than you are imagining.