I think that with transparently ludicrous claims like this, the article should come with an offer to come do my dishes for me when I put them in the dishwasher without rinsing and they come out just as dirty as when they went in.
As they do.
95% of the time. With every dishwasher I’ve ever had.
This claim helps make sense of the oft-stated claim that dishwashers use less water than hand washing dishes – a claim that my husband (who does the dishes in our house) vehemently denies.
Only if you do dishes without a plug, keeping the water running through the process, could you use so much water. Hence, if you wash dishes as my husband does (with a tub of soapy water and a tub of rinse water) it obviously doesn’t.
So where does this 27 gallon stat come from?
That just can’t be right. Once the detergent cleans off the same amount of food that you’ve rinsed it should stop working. Either something’s wrong with their logic, or something’s wrong with mine.
I’ll quickly rinse (with no soap) dishes just to keep big food particles from clogging up the filter (or from stinking if dirty dishes are going to sit for a few days if the dishwasher was just emptied), or scrub really sticky/stuck debris but that’s about it.
My mom still has the habit of hand washing dishes and more likely using the washer as a drying rack than anything, because if I were to do it, I’d just load them in as is and she’d complain even a few dishes get some dried on food left from the drying process. I figured it’s still easier to clean these up after the fact than doing it all at once before. But it also means I should just help with the chores more.
If the detergent needs dirt to stick to, and there is no dirt, then the dishes are clean, so what was the problem again?
“wasting water” is a phrase that always causes some cognitive dissonance for me.
At my house, water comes from a hole in the ground. After I’m done using the water, I put it back into a (different) hole in the ground. I guess there’s something about groundwater and aquifers that makes a difference here?
I suspect that if I understood the problem space better, then this would make more sense to me. It’s just really hard to visualize subterranean water flow.
Does’t apply to city folk, of course.
I had (and to some extent still have) a Hmmmm moment.
From the original source in the WSJ (paywalled but thank the taxpayer for libraries)
Cascade, made by Procter & Gamble Co., warns against pre-washing, except for removing large pieces of food. Enzymes in Cascade detergent are designed to attach themselves to food particles. Without food, the enzymes have nothing to latch on to, P&G says.
Large pieces still gotta go. The enzymes cling because they bind to the food, and I suppose that this allows them to slowly drip down the plate and break down small particles that might be adhering, which might not come off with the rinse spray if the enzymes don’t get their chance.
So upshot: Yeah rinse that dried piece of spaghetti off, you slob.
It is not unreasonable to expect that small food particles could provide a frictional force to drive grease off of the dishes when powered through nozzles. If anyone has cleaned a water pipe they likely know that adding salt grains to their solvent is practically a requirement.
And it is just as clear to me that large food particles would only clog up the nozzles and filters.
A lot of people put a piece of masking tape over the camera in their dishwasher these days
You can lay them over the bed neatly. So long as they don’t cover the pillows and nothing is tucked in. But separating the layers in some way is better. Leaving them all wadded up in one place isn’t ideal either.
Apparently you want to do both to minimize the problem.
If you want your dishes to be really clean, put a scoop of mashed potatoes and a squirt of ketchup in the dishwasher before running.
This is the only logical conclusion.
Seriously, though. You… you gotta get the food off the dishes. Don’t tell me I don’t. I’ve got kids and I know exactly what unrinsed dishes look like on the other side of a dishwasher cycle. I’m sure they are amazing for the latest in soaps, but they HAVE FOOD ON THEM AND NEED TO BE WASHED AGAIN.
Not only that, but the post dish-washer food isn’t just a crumb of bread, it’s been enzymatically transformed into a fork/starch alloy that is bound like Bose-Einstein condensate.
Two facts:
If I place dishes in the dishwasher without removing every visible or tactile bit of dirt, they come back out with some amount of that dirt vulcanized to the dish.
Any time I’ve mentioned this in a group, I was informed that everybody else in the group just throws crap-encrusted dishes into their machine, and it cleans them back to their brand-new status.
Seems pretty clear that I’ve been singled out by God. I guess I should feel special.
Isn’t this really just the same bullshit we have entered into with washing machines? Top loaders used to have a water level dial, now it’s done by weight, hopes, and government meddling. I’m not trying to be some government “bad” kind of person, but auto sensing everything never seems to be as good as what I select and run. I prewash my dishes to a degree and have a good idea what settings will do what. Of course my washer is 15 years old, heaven help me if I’m forced into buying one that has 12 cycles that are all really just varying levels of sensing and water minimizing.
Besides detergents really only work chemically or biologically. If you really wanted a washer to do a great job you would have cycles like, soak, where it just sprays the dishes every few mins. Then you could get into the actual pressure washing after the detergent had time to do its job.
Anyone ever hsd issues with egg making their dishes smell bad? I wonder if it because the inside of my washer is plastic not stainless.
Yeah, no.
Ever clean out the trap from a dishwasher? Old, wet food is nasty. If you don’t have a machine with an integrated food grinder in the drain mechanism, you’re setting yourself for an unpleasant cleaning job, or calling someone to do that job at some point. One such repair person kindly and patiently explained to us that “it’s basically a dish sanitizer” after we’d handed over a lot of cash for him to clear said trap.
Now we save money and scrape food bits into the covered compost pail next to the sink, and toss the contents in our weekly yard waste pickup. Hot water and soap will not remove caked-on oatmeal, cannot chisel off dried peanut butter, does not touch pasta or rice bits stuck to the bottom of the pot. Soak and scrape!
(Speeling errers edit)
Due to various circumstances, I occasionally get dishes that have a bunch of dried on crusted food on them. Those get soaked in the sink, occasionally with hot water and a shot of hand-washing dish soap if it’s really bad. Otherwise, I use a scraper or a dedicated spatula to get the bulk of the loose stuff off into the trash, and then load it into the dishwasher. (my unit was bought new in 2012 when I got the house.)
My dishwasher does a ‘good enough’ job, but some things it just won’t handle, like the stoneware liner of the slow cooker that had food backed on it, allowed to dry, and then placed in the dishwasher without any sort of pre-soaking or scraping. I usually end up taking a nylon scrubbie to it when that happens, and hand-washing it. (the few times I’ve had backing pans or cookies sheets that bad, I go old skool on it and break out the scotch-brite pad on it. 
They should use something that won’t wash off, like egg, guacamole or pizza dough.
if you do the dishwasher’s job for it, it will never learn how to do it properly itself
