I don’t have a dishwasher.
It’s a dishwasher, not a garbage disposal. Food goes in the compost bin and the plates are rinsed before going into the dishwasher.
I run mine about every 5 days. It takes that long for two of us to fill it up. I almost never use the dishwasher for pots or pans. It’s for dishes, glassware, and flatware only. I almost always pre-heat plates and bowls before serving, so things like eggs or sauces tend to cook onto the plates more than most folks probably see at their house.
Loose chunks and thick accumulations of gunk get mostly scraped off into the trash. Then on early days the dishes get a quick rinse; on the last day they go straight in. I’m not real sure the rinse accomplishes anything. It’s not like the stuff stays wet until the dishwasher runs 3 days later. I’ll have to experiment.
No, I don’t, because I don’t properly wash them by hand. The half-assed way I do it, I’m not at all sure there isn’t still grease or soap scum or germs all over them.
I worked on Mama Plant’s dishwasher.
At what age do Mamas still treat you as a child, yet expect you to be able to repair household appliances?
But I digress.
There are tiny hoses, the size of aquarium tubing, and a tiny pump to drain the dishwasher. I cleaned “dishwasher stew” from the above mentioned hoses and pumps, and the dishwasher worked again.
So I wipe down and rinse dishes in hot water before I put them into the dishwasher.
It used to be this exactly.
Now that it’s just my husband and myself however the dishwasher might not run more than once a week so I’ve found some things just can’t sit that long and still come clean so I actually rinse the occasional dish now. Still rare though.
Scrape, no rinse, so I’m not sure which option to select.
I don’t really have a good dishwasher, it’s a compact 18" model instead of a standard 24". So, if you don’t rinse the chunks of things off, they tend to stick around. I don’t like scraping bits of rice or eggs off of supposedly clean dishes, so I rinse well, but don’t clean with soap.
Yep, me too. Although the doggie always gets to lick the ice cream bowl!
That’s pretty much me; I have a pretty good handle on what our dishwasher can remove, which is most everything. So I rarely clean things off much- if there’s a really egregious deposit or something burnt-on, I"ll scrape it off beforehand or soak it, but most everything else goes in as-is.
I’ve never had a plate come out dirty, only pots and pans, and usually in those cases, there was more stuck crud, or it was burned on in some fashion.
I do admit to using the Cascade Complete or Platinum detergent pods; if I used the cheaper stuff, I’d have to do a lot more prewashing.
Never really understood any pre-washing beyond the very minimum; if you’re going to go to that much trouble, you’re already 2/3 of the way to hand-washing the dishes anyway, so why bother with the dishwasher at all?
Difficult stuff like eggs and cheese get a quick scrub, and lumps get rinsed off. Just because the dishwasher may have a tiny rudimentary disposer inside doesn’t give you license to torture it with chunks of meat or celery.
I’ve found if dishes are “pre-cleaned” too well, it confuses the auto-wash cycle. Apparently, if it doesn’t sense that things are getting cleaner, it just keeps running and running for longer than a “normal” cycle.
We rinse our dishes thoroughly before putting them in the dishwasher.
Why? Well, we might not run it for a couple days until there’s a full load. We don’t want the dishes stinking or attracting bugs.
I run the washers almost every day, ten minutes a day is better than all day.
Besides, if Lauren Bacall drops by, I don’t want her to see a sink full of dirty dishes and a pile of dirty clothes.
:dubious:
How does it sense that?
Yes, I am an Instrumentation Engineer and I wonder how things work. Kiss my grits. 
Too much gunk plugs things up, so we scrape, then wash.
[QUOTE=carnivorousplant]
How does it sense that?
Yes, I am an Instrumentation Engineer and I wonder how things work. Kiss my grits.
[/QUOTE]
The short answer is “With a turbidity sensor” but from there, I don’t know if the sensor and the dishwasher’s controller are looking for the turbidity (cloudiness) of the water to approach some pre-defined value of “clear” or for it to improve by some amount.
How much do I clean? Too damn much. Because that’s what the girlfriend wants. I would prefer to just let the dishwasher do it’s job.
Scrape and into the dishwasher it goes.
Except for the dishes used to give the overlords their wet cat food. Those get rinsed so the tuna fish flakes don’t stick around. That’s mostly because they smell, though.
Thanks!
“Soil Sensor: Some dishwashers use a soil sensor, actually called a turbidity sensor to monitor the amount of soil the wash water. The turbidity sensor shines light through a small sampling of dishwater measuring sediment content and adjusts the dishwasher’s cycle time and functions accordingly. Technologies like this are another benefit to solid-state timers.”
It shines a light into the water and sees how dirty it is.
I remove napkins and large bones from my plates before they go in the dishwasher, but that’s about it. They always come out clean, so why should I do the dishwasher’s job for it?