A dishwasher rocks. In our house it’s my parents, my brother and me, and no one’s at home for most of the day. We have breakfast at home but that’s about it. Sometimes dinner. Always too busy or too tired to wash dishes most days, so we end up doing them once every two or three days - and there’s where the dishwasher comes in handy.
It might also help that our dishwasher is small. 8 bowls, 8 plates, 5 cups and a handful of silverware fills it up. Such a cute helpful little thing.
I live alone, and I’ve done it both ways. Dishwasher wins, even though I only run it maybe once or twice a week.
We’ve got one, but it’s rarely used.
I can wash the dishes and get them put away faster myself.
I absolutely love mine. When the mice ate my dishwasher last year, I thought I had be transported back to the stone ages.
Also, I have long nails. Dishwashing is very hard on them. Yeah, I can wear gloves, and I do wear them when I have to scrub something that’s really funky, but I’ve washed enough dishes in my life to know that the machine is way better. And mine happens to get nearly everything very clean. Pots and pans, depending on the dish, are first done by hand and then tossed in for the bleach treatment.
How big are your mice?! :eek:
Do you have to borrow a tiger from the zoo to exterminate them?
I wish I had a dishwasher. When we first moved into this house (which has no dishwasher and no place to put one), my in-laws bought us a little “portable” one, you know, the ones that hook up to the kitchen sink. But a couple of years ago, it died. We haven’t been able to find another one at a price we could afford to pay. We’re a family of four (really, three during the week while hubby works out of town). Weekdays, I spend a total of maybe 30 minutes washing dishes. But weekends, when I’d like more free time with my husband, I also cook more ambitious meals (he eats take-out food all week long, and misses my cooking). On weekends, I spend maybe an hour a day washing dishes and putting them away. If we had a dishwasher, I’d teach my fourteen-year-old daughter to load it, and my five-year-old daughter to empty it. Then I’d only have to hand-wash a few delicate items.
The only person I know that has a dishwasher is my brother. He lives on a farm and only has access to the water in his water tank. During periods without rain he has to buy truckloads of water. He has a dishwasher for efficiency. They have enough crockery and cutlery for 4 families and they use it all until the dishwasher is full. Then they do a load and put it all away to start again. Apparently it saves them hundreds of gallons of water every year.
I think the statement that humans use more water than machines is only true if we don’t wash the dishes properly.
I have a double sink and all the dishes from dinner go into one side filled with hot soapy water. There they soak for 10 or 15 minutes or until all messiness has dissolved away. Move the dishes one at a time over to the other side of the sink, while checking for any klingons. No water needs to be running while you do this. Then use a low flow of cold water to rinse each dish as it goes into the drying rack. I can’t believe this process would use more than 5 gallons of hot water and maybe another two or three of cold water in the rinse cycle.
Of course my drying rack is the dishwasher, so maybe I shouldn’t get rid of it after all. 
For those who say that dishwashers don’t save you any work because you have to wash everything before you put it in the dishwasher, go get yourself a GOOD dishwasher. I know of those washers you speak of; the ones where unless you put a practically clean dish in them, they don’t get it clean. Trust me, there’s better models.
The only stuff I rinse before putting it in the dishwasher are really crusty pans - the ones that if you wash 'em by hand you’ll be scrubbing for 30 minutes. Nothing gets those things clean easily. But your average pot, plate, utensil? No rinsing. They get stuck in there as is. And they come out shiny clean.
I’d never want to live without a dishwasher, and I’m in a household of two adults (and the dogs, but they don’t use many dishes.) In fact, I joke around that I want two or three dishwashers. But I cook, and my kitchen gets used. The dishwasher is full a minimum of once a day, and if it’s a cooking day it’s not uncommon to run it 3 or even 4 times.
As far as water… <shrug> I don’t care, I have a well & septic tank. It just all gets recycled. 
We have one and we use it, but I don’t really care too much about it. I don’t think it’s that much extra work to do dishes by hand.
Still, enough people seem to think they’re as invaluable as a fridge, so I’d put one in if I was remodelling.
I love mine passionately. I hate hate hate dishes cluttering up the counter, and if I have just a glass of milk or just use a knife or something, I love being able to just throw it in the dishwasher rather than leave it on the sink or counter, or wash, dry and put it away each time.
Actually, I saw a remodel of a kitchen once, on TV, where they installed two dishwashers, one on either side of the sink. The couple having the remodel done really liked to entertain, and really did think they’d get their money’s worth out of two dishwashers. For me, it would be overkill, but hey, your kitchen, your money, your choice.
Easy to accomplish if you have a double sink, or even a sink large enough to accomodate a plastic basin. I don’t have either, so unfortunately the only way to wash dishes is either to wash and rinse the same dish in one pass, or to wash them, stack them up on the limited counterspace that I have and then backtrack, rinsing them all.
Resale value is always a crap-shoot. Obviously there are people who do not care if they have a dishwasher, and people who wouldn’t live without it (I would never buy an already renovated kitchen that didn’t have one.)
So if the only thing you are concerned about resale, then the obvious answer is that you need to put one in to avoid turning off 2/3 (?) of the buyers.
Amen to that. A real time saver. I wouldn’t be without one.
Well, they didn’t eat the whole thing. Just the plastic nozzle thingy on the top (under the counter). Bummer of it is that you don’t realize this has happened until you turn on the machine and water floods the floor.
So I had it fixed.
Two days later the little fuckers did it again.
So I had someone fill the area behind the counter with steel wool. No more meeces eating my dishwasher (so far).
You and me, both!
A fourteen-year-old should have six years dishwashing experience by now. I’d go along with you still doing your own delicate items. :eek:
Well, my fourteen-year-old does know how to wash dishes, and gets drafted into it (by her father) when I’m sick. But seeing as how she hates washing dishes, and I don’t really mind all that much, and she has plenty of other things she helps out with, I don’t press the situation.
I’ll ignore the smart-ass comments about my “delicate items”. 
We have two kids, and we run our dishwasher every day, sometimes twice a day on weekends. I’d rather give up my oven. I hate hand-washing dishes, and the “dishwasher-safe” label is a priority on any pot/pan/utensil I buy.