I live alone and have a “half width” dishwasher. It’s amazing at saving me time but also clutter. No dirty dishes on the bench top. The thing is on every night. Research has also shown it uses far less water and energy than hand washing.

By far the best investment I ever made for house cleaning though is a cordless Dyson vacuum. It’s mounted on the wall and I end up vacuuming (5 mins max) every day so it hardly feels like a chore.

Less water and energy, but using a brutal kind of soap that is surely more harmful to the environment than hand wash soap.

Old-fashioned dishwasher detergents caused significant phosphate pollution, but since the regulations were changed, they're considerably less nasty.

Three small squirts of handwashing liquid, fill it 2/3rds the way with baking soda, then fill the rest with cooking salt: works wonders in a dishwasher, is cheap as hell, and pretty good environment-wise.

Or you could use Ecover dishwasher products, which are a bit better.

I live alone, and you'll pry my dishwasher from my cold dead hands. If I didn't have one, I'd probably cook a lot less; it really simplifies cleaning up.

I also have a washer-dryer, though mostly for space reasons.

That's interesting. I feel dishwasher is one of the easiest life improvement purchases. Will depend quite a bit on how much you cook I suppose.

I would've gotten a robot vacuum ages ago too but my place has quite high doorsills, I don't think there's a device that could climb those.

You can hire people to do that for you, you know - very flexible, can do all the things, do them while you're out of the house.

For me there, the issue is trust (and that's not intended as a slight against the people who do that kind of work -- I have family members who used to do precisely that). I just would not feel comfortable having people doing work in my home whilst I wasn't there.

Also the price point is not quite the same as appliance.