That would mean either you wash every time you put in a dirty dish (which would be wasteful) - or you accept that you always have some dirty dishes mixed between your clean ones, including the food remains, fluids, smell, etc that come with them. Sounds really unpleasant.
More practical problems:
- Dishes can be stored a lot more space-efficiently in a normal cupboard than in a dish washer. You'd need a lot more space if all your cupboards are dishwashers. Putting in dishes correctly is also more complex for a dishwasher than for a cupboard - so instead of saving the effort to empty the dishwasher, you've multiplied that effort to all of your cupboards.
- A cleaning run takes time. If cleaning runs start automatically, you'll have random parts of your kitchen inaccessible at random points of time.
- If you used a normal dishwasher you find out very quickly that drying is not perfect - if you leave clean dishes for too long in the airtight compartment, you might as well rinse them again. If the cupboard are meant to store the dishes permanently, that problem will get bigger.
Rethink how we store things. Rather then all plates in one place, all bowls in another ect. you mix everything up so each cabinet has the same variety of objects in it.
I know this only deals with one of your extremely valid points. I know some of the sorting/organizing people on here (the ones who label their label guns) would freak.
> Rethink how we store things
My apologies, but no. I'd like to not design my whole kitchen (and kitchen usage patterns) around my dishwasher.
> Rather then all plates in one place, all bowls in another ect. you mix everything up so each cabinet has the same variety of objects in it.
How would I quickly find the dishes I'm looking for? (No, installing RFID sensors or watertight cameras in each cupboard, "indexing" the dishes and providing a smartphone app with search is not an option.)
[1] https://i.pinimg.com/736x/a8/d0/d5/a8d0d5ce749c4ad9e8dc37a1c...
You'd place your dirty plates into the left, turn it on when full, place the next plates into the right, then the clean plates would be on the left while you'd fill the right one with the dirty ones, and keep alternating. This way you don't have to put anything away, you'd take the plates as needed from the dishwasher.
The nice thing about this is that it'd work with current dishwasher sizes, and no messy weird electrified cupboards. It could be manufactured today because it doesn't require special engineering, it doesn't require weird kitchens, and it's not a solution looking for a problem like some gadgets in the article.
I had a thought about this some time ago. What if every cupboard was a dishwasher? You just put dirty dishes away in the "cupboard", and then they get washed once the machine detects that there are too many dirty ones, and it can blow air through the cupboard to dry them off once it's done, and then you just open a cupboard and take out some clean dishes, whenever you want some.
It would even be fine if you had to manually tell the cupboard when to wash its contents.
You'd probably have to have about twice as many glasses, plates, bowls, etc. as you really need, so that you don't end up having all of the plates stuck inside one cupboard while wet. You always want to have everything you need available, clean, and dry. I don't think needing extra dishes would be a dominating cost, though.
You'd just have to run plumbing and electricity to all of your cupboard locations, buy enough tiny dishwashers, and then mount them on the wall. Probably could be done for only a few thousand pounds.