Heat pump dryers, and the US lack of kettles? That’s at least another two Alec videos in one comment (bonus points for one of them inevitably talking about the refrigeration cycle)
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One more mention and I think he appears in the mirror behind you.
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I watched this video awhile back and followed all the tips, and my dishwasher still doesn’t get my dishes clean unless I wash them first. There is such a thing as just a shitty dishwasher.
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And I don’t understand why Europe wouldn’t use hot water to fill it. You already have a perfectly good source of hot water that is designed specifically to heat your water as efficiently as possible (solar water heaters and heat pump water heaters are both much more efficient than resistive electric). Instead, they start with cold water and shove thousands of watts of power into it until it reaches operating temperature.
Slow and expensive does not make a lot of sense to me.
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A dishwasher uses ~1-2 gallons of water. To heat that gallon of water from 60 to 140 is ~.2-.4ish kWh. That’s about 2-4 cents at .11/kWh.
Your pipes contain quite a bit of cold water. If you pull from the hot pipe, you can pull sometimes up to 3 gallons of water before it gets hot, depending on how far from the water heater is to your dishwasher. Which is less than the dishwasher needs, so not only are you wasting 1-2 gallons from the hot water tank, you are still going to need to heat up the 1-2 gallons of water in your dishwasher. Even if your hot water heater is close-ish to the dishwasher, it will still need the heating coil & the control mechanism to bring it up to temp, since it only needs a little bit to pre-wash, then it sits for awhile, then does the wash cycle, then another rinse, leaving the hot water cooling in your pipes in between. So in the end, you are now heating 2-4 gallons of hot water, when you only need 1-2g, and most likely you are doing 100% of the heating in the dishwasher first.
That’s why running the cold water out of the pipes first helps. Another good hint for extra clean dishes: Add a squirt of detergent outside the detergent cup for use in the pre-wash. Most manuals tell you to do so. Unfortunately with the pods, there isn’t a way of doing that without also buying powder/liquid detergent. Alex has another video explaining this.
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A surprising number of houses (at least in the UK) didn’t have on-demand water heating until relatively recently. Instead they had the big immersion tank which used cheap overnight power to heat a lot of water. When that was used up, you had no hot water. The British household water system is even more weird than our ring mains.
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If you don’t, they’ll eventually tell you when they stop draining properly and/or spill water all over the floor.
@Kilkrazy Many American appliances like to beep loudly and repeatedly to tell you when they’re done, sometimes even when you ask them not to. I like to run appliances overnight too, but sometimes (especially in an AirBnB where I don’t know the controls super well) it’s annoying.
@danimagoo Yes there is such a thing as a shitty dishwasher, but for those who don’t have that problem, it’s worth mentioning that if your dishes are not dirty enough, they’re likely to be damaged over time because the detergent will attack the dishes instead of food particles.
I think for both dishes and laundry there’s a lot of good advice our grandparents and great grandparents knew that we’ve forgotten.
For handwashing dishes, I strongly recommend getting a natural sea sponge, if you can get a species that’s well suited to it. I got one in January, they are super easy to keep clean, they can last for years, and they require way less elbow grease than any other sponge. I still keep some scouring pads around for extreme cases, though.
For laundry, I highly recommend the book “Laundry Love.” Seriously: Washing soda, laundry soap flakes, vinegar, alcohol, and a horse hair brush have totally changed my approach to laundry and to stain removal. It’s still important to try and catch stains before they set (especially before they go through the dryer!), but otherwise, there’s almost nothing that can’t be fixed.
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Sorry but that is nothing compared to the TikTok of hamsters running in a wheel to Motorhead
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Yeah. We went through months of it with the manufacturer but actually got them to fix/replace the diahwasher rather than just blame us for not using it right which is essentially what they did three times.
Works a treat now.
@AnthonyC i never thought of sponges for dishwashing. They are great for skin though, along with olive oil soap. If I ever get to Greece again I will fill my bags!
Or if I can persuade my family to go on a ruins holiday in Turkey….
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I hear a lot of ruins are close to a beach, coast, shore, waterfront, bank, lakeshore, lakeside, littoral, margin, oceanfront, seaboard, seafront, seashore, seaside, shingle or strand; others may be found near an estuary, inlet, waterway, arm, creek, firth, fjord or tidewater.
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I got mine from a little Greek community in Tarpon Springs, FL. The link was to the place I bought mine from.
I wondered about the sponges acting like petri dishes (by comparison, a washcloth starts to give an odor after a couple of days), and the link says:
They don’t grow bacteria so you can wash your dishes with confidence.
Cool, but how’s come they don’t? 
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Greece is a bit closer for me than Florida!
I’m sure they have fine sponge in Florida but it really is a point of pride in Greece.
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I would imagine they do, and the sellers overstate the case at least to some degree. But from my own use it seems like they come clean much better under warm water, and release whatever food particles or oils they pick up, more readily than other types of sponges. Once every month or two I soak them in vinegar and baking soda, too.
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I’m sure they do to some extent, but the explanation I have always heard is that unlike an artificial sponge, which is basically just a foam, with lots of closed interlinked bubbles, a real sponge used to be an animal. Thus the internal passages are actually interconnected and all lead to the surface. So when you squeeze it, you squeeze out a lot more water, and it is basically dry right away. That way there’s less stagnant water for bacteria growth.
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Sounds great. I hope they’re not endangered.
Oh, wait. . . 
According to the Australian Marine Conservation Society, sea sponges are under threat not only from over-harvesting but also from sewage discharge and stormwater run-off, as well as from scallop dredging activity. Global warming, which has been increasing water temperatures and altering the ocean food chain and seafloor environment accordingly, is also now a factor. The organization reports that very few sponge gardens are protected, and is advocating for the creation of marine protected areas and more sensitive fishing methods in regions where sea sponges remain abundant.
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