The one chore I despise more than anything is washing dishes. I would rather lick the floor clean than have to manually wash a sink full of dishes. I don’t know why I have this hatred, but there it is. It could be the old roommate who would clean his rooms 1x/month and bring down crusted, scummy, moldy dishes and just leave them in a pile on the counter for me to wash, or the fact that I was the only person in a household of three adult that knew how to wield a bottle of Dawn, or that when I was young the dishes were my chore and that my mom was a perfectionist. More than one night a week she would hover over me telling me how we were going to die since my scrubbing abilities were sub par. Who knows.
That said, I (of course) love my dishwasher. LilMiss is in charge of loading and unloading it, but I will do it once a week if the sink is piling up. Logic says when they’re clean put them away so you can put the dirty dishes in as you go along, but logic and my family are concepts that do not belong in the same sentence.
It’s taken a few times to find out what detergent works best in my washer - Cascade powder works the best for it. We rarely have more than one glass or one fork with gunk still on it.
That’s not to say that I never have to roll up my sleeves and wash a pan by hand. If I’m in major baking mode I was the bowls by hand as it’s faster than running the washer. That was while the last batch of whatever is baking I can be starting on the next batch.
For Christmas, my wife and I asked my parents for a new dishwasher. Ours is horribly loud, inefficient, and doesn’t clean well. Whadaya expect from the bottom of the line. Also, we’re really lusting after that delay-start option.
The new one (we’ve already picked one out) should rock muchly, but I must say that I question the need for one in our house, the reason being that my wife already hand-scrubs the dishes, then puts the already-clean dishes into the dishwasher to “sanitize” them or something. That seems like overkill to me; I tell her that the detergent will start etching the glasses and overfoam if there’s not at least some soil left on the dishes to be cleaned off, but that had little effect.
That is an understatement of epic proportions. The dishwasher is one of the few things that keeps me from murdering my sloppy, lazy in-laws (the whole prison deal being another thing).
As a single woman who is in the process of purchasing a condo, I can tell you that I wouldn’t even look at one that didn’t have a dishwasher. I grew up always having a dishwasher, and when I was 19 and had to learn how to wash dishes, a hatred stronger than anything I’ve ever felt before began to grow. I don’t cook because I don’t want to wash the dishes. I have thrown things out rather than wash them.
My new place has a dishwasher. And laundry inside the house.
The dish drawers look neat and all, but from what I hear from my wife’s dad, they’re not so hot. They got some about two years ago (Jenn-Air, I think) with front panels that match the rest of their cabinets, so they totally blend in with the kitchen decor, which is nice. Problem is, there aren’t many options for them; you basically get “start” and “stop”, no heavy cycles or china cycles. And, the dishes have to be pretty darn clean when you put them in, because the jets don’t have the power of the big boys. But, if you gotta have a $1200 plate warmer, I guess they’re the way to go. Personally, I’d go for one of the high-end standard models that lets you run a “top rack only” cycle, if you want to do small loads.
Someone told me about a similar situation involving two dishwashers on another remodeling show; in this case it was a couple of guys. They didn’t need kitchen cabinets, they just went back and forth between dishwashers. Every guy I tell about this thinks it is the best idea they have ever heard.
I used to be a dish pan/rinse sink/drying rack guy before I remodeled the kitchen. I really didn’t mind the dishwashing work, but it kept the counter cluttered. The dishwasher saves space, which is important in a smaller kitchen. I think the secret is to have enough dishes/glasses/silverware so that you can keep going until you fill the dishwasher. I only use the dishwasher a couple of times a week. I tend to run warm water over the dirty dishes and let them sit in the sink a few hours before moving them to the dishwasher. I do like that it gets hot enough to kill off bacteria, which you can’t do in a sink. The only problems I find are with flour, or occasionally rice; if you don’t get that off the dishes first, it just gets spread around the dishes and bakes on. I find a dishwasher gets glasses cleaner than I can do by hand.
And I do agree with that previous thread; nothing delicate or expensive should be put into the dishwasher unless you are willing to lose it.
You also can’t load as much as the big boys.
For that kind of money I would suggest a Miele I have one, and this thing flat rocks. If you have a small load, you can do a top rack only load for only 3.2 gallons of water. It is so quiet that standing next to it you cannot hear it run. Really! 46db. Built in water softener, and it uses less detergent than any other dw I have ever seen. It will also will out clean any other method of washing dishes I have ever seen. I don’t pre wash anything. Put it in, pull it out clean. What’s not to like?
The thing I like about dishwashers in general is that they’re cheap. I think our first once cost $250 and this last one was just a little over $300. It frees up a lot of time in a week. If you look at it that way, it pays for itself in a relatively short period of time.
Yes there is a big difference between models, and the good ones are really good.
If you live by yourself and have a hectic life w/o much free time (or have people who don’t find the time to clean the dishes after every meal) they are very useful as it only takes a few seconds to put the dirty dishes into the dishwasher, and your sink is not used to store dirty dishes till you get around to cleaning them. I’d take sink space over cabinet space any day.
To me it would be a minus if there was no DW and I would have to factor into the price of getting one, if there was no space for it - it would be a big factor, a very big one and almost exclude it as I don’t want a portable one and I would have to remodel to install one.
I’m 28 years old, and until recently I had never experienced having a dishwasher. My parents never saw the point, because that’s what kids are for. I LOATHE doing dishes, and it was always a huge fight with my sisters over who had to do the dishes.
None of the apartments I lived in back in Minnesota had one, but when I moved out here, I was a little excited to find that the townhouse I’m renting had one. Weeee!
So I move in, and that week I loaded up the dishwasher to do my first load. And it didn’t work. Well drat. Then I proceeded to put off letting my landlord know about it for approximately five months. It wasn’t really a big deal to me, since I was used to handwashing everything. Of course, I hate doing dishes, so my sink area was frequently cluttered with dishes I hadn’t gotten around to washing yet.
Then, when he came over to check out the damage from the toilet flooding I had last month, I mentioned the problem with the dishwasher, since he was there and all. He fixed it, and I’ve been using it since. It’s bliss…my dishes don’t gather in the sink for days anymore, we cook more since I don’t mind dirtying dishes, even when I’m tired, and I’ve vowed that I will never go without a dishwasher again.
I run it a couple times a week or more, depending on what I cook.
That’s why I hate handwashing dishes: it takes forever. Like most people, I start with the cleanest stuff (usually glassware) and work towards the most heavily encrusted (saucepans). I soak each group for a while, go away and do something else, then come back and move on to the next group. Depending on the size of the wash, it can take an hour or more with the rinse, soak, wash, rinse palaver.
I resent having to wash anything by hand but at least the dishwasher reduces the time I spend in front of the sink.
20 US gallons to do the washing up by hand! What are these people doing? Filling the bath tub and washing up in that? I measured the water last night when I was doing the washing up. I used roughly 2 litres for some pre-rinsing and then another 6 litres in filling the sink to a depth of about 8cm. I washed and dried everything. I then used about another 2 litres in rinsing out the sink, washing down the benchtops etc. That’s 10 litres max, or a bit over 2.5 US gallons.
This is one of the best things about having a dishwasher, bar none. Oh sure, it only takes a minute or two to wash a few dishes, but how many people actually do this evey time they dirty a dish? With a dishwasher, you never have dirty dishes sitting out on the counter. You dirty a dish, you put it in the dishwasher and there it sits until the dishwasher is full and you can run it. It keeps your kitchen clean and uncluttered without any real work on your part.
Less than the fridge, the laundry machines and the stove, but more than the air conditioner, the heater, the phone and all the entertainment appliances.
None of you “it only takes a few minutes people” have mentioned how many people live in your household or how often you actually eat there. I serve breakfast and dinner to four and lunch to two. Usually the dishwasher fills up in a day.
I didn’t count (too lazy, duh! I won’t even wash dishes), but it looks to me like the majority vote is pro dishwasher.
It is well know that a dishwasher does save water, but cost power.
Remember that you usually do more dishes at once with a dishwasher then by hand. You have to compair the amount of water per dish. I would wag that 3-4 hand cleanning sessions = 1 dishwasher session.
Have similar feelings, the dishes MUST be clean, and I love my dishwasher! This is because I scrub them clean by hand and THEN run them in the dishwasher. I guess this is because we did not have one growing up and a lot of times the dish washing was rather casual. Anyway it is kind of a pet peeve of mine so that is the way I do them.
I think this thread jinx’d my dishwasher. When I ran it today a container flipped over and landed right where the (detergent) tablet pops out, so most of it just stayed in a deep container of full water. So I had to run it a second time and waste all that water.
Our hard water killed our dishwasher about 3 years ago and my wife insisted that we not get another one until we got a water softener. Now that we have a softener and a dishwasher, the results are amazing. No prerising is required. We got a budget one from Sears for under $300 and it works great. Now I wish I had gotten one sooner.
