> Does anyone have experience with big industrial dishwashers?

Yes, they're a mainstay for high traffic kitchens. And while the allure of having your dishes pressure washed in 1-3 min cycles sounds cool its actually a much bigger PITA than you can imagine as the maintenance costs on those things is pretty high. In my experience most kitchens don't actually own them, they rent them with a maintenance and supply cost attached to them, which get very costly.

We had to double the capacity of ours in my last kitchen, the problems was that this double sized machine had lots of downtime as the sensors were not reading the cycles correctly, it would randomly shutdown or just freeze, which would create pauses in the middle of service, and this was an old part of town (150 years old?) with tons of other restaurants so the plumbing was less than ideal which created an issue with backups and sudden floods of waste water coming from the machine into the kitchen.

So unless you're regularly hosting banquets in your home and have issues with limited pans, cutlery and flatware I can't see this making any sense and is incredible overkill. The company might love you for the low costs they'll incur, though.

I will say this: after having spent time working in kitchens I really hate doing dishes at home now by hand. But that could be easily solved with just having a domestic sized dishwasher machine and increase my flatware and utensils. Even a high pressure sprayer attachment to a deep sink would make a much bigger improvement and likely save on water as You could just compartmentalize the process.

This is completely unqualified, but on top of that I'm guessing they're very hard on most household dishes and such.

Hotels and restaurants do indeed have thicker and more robust plates and utensils. Rough handling by guests and staff as well as the aforementioned pressure cleaning with aggressive cleaning agents make it necessary. Catalogues (picked randomly from google results, no relation): https://hotel.seltmann.com/

>In my experience most kitchens don't actually own them, they rent them with a maintenance and supply cost attached to them, which get very costly.

Most kitchens can neither in-house maintenance nor wash dished by hand (because health code) if the machine goes down. If you can in-house the maintenance and can afford to wash dishes by hand for a week while a new widget ships from China then commercial machines are cheap enough to own (up front cost not withstanding).

There is a long, detailed rundown of someone who did just that:

https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/2l7z90/installed_a_co...

... some installers and people who maintain such machines for restaurants chimed in. Fairly interesting.

And clearly a message from the dude selling them not to do it:

>Peeked at reddit for a moment before I fall asleep and one of our items is on the front page! I'm a product expert at the WebstaurantStore. Folks, I know this looks wonderful and all, but, as a rule, we really don't recommend putting commercial appliances in home kitchens. There are many things on our website that are fantastic for home use, but bad and unexpected things can happen when installing professional equipment at home.

That just reeks of "people are idiots and I don't wanna get sued" type ass covering. There's nothing about these machines that's particularly magical. They just aren't stupid proofed against the typical homeowner half-assery. Solution is don't be stupid and don't half ass the install (i.e. read the docs the manufacturer publishes about the machine and do something to mitigate the corners you inevitably need to cut in your specific case).

Like what exactly? I am curious. Is this happening because if everybody was buying industrial dish washers an entire industry was going down or there are legitimate problems?

Quoting that same person's latter reply:

"One of the things about commercial equipment is the lack of insulation. So there could be issues with the booster heater affecting the counters around it. The moisture that comes with a high temp machine are also an issue. Maintenance can be a problem if he doesn't have a softener. EDIT: probably the worst thing though, which is mentioned by someone else below, is that if a commercial appliance causes a fire or other damage, you might be S.O.L. when it comes to your homeowners insurance."

I’ve been kicking around the idea of a proper commercial kitchen in the house I’m thinking of building in the next few years, and it seems like this is definitely the kind of stuff you need to plan the whole room around.

That said, who doesn’t want a big gas griddle, serious fume hood exhaust, and a giant three door stainless fridge in their kitchen?! I’m so tired of smoke detectors going off when I try to cook a steak indoors, or filling the whole house with burger grease smoke.

A real set of commercial kitchen gear, in a room designed for the purpose, to me is the ultimate luxury kitchen. Beats the hell out of those pot-filler arms and silly islands that pass for such these days in residences.

The ultimate luxury kitchen is the sort one sees in original condition pre-1900 middle class houses: it's very spartan, because the owners never went in there, it having been the domain of the cook.

Yep you can do it. One problem is that they are noisy. You will want to hide the extractor fans in the ceiling if you vent up out the roof. Bear in mind that a newer house will be tightly sealed too so your stove/ vent will need it's own air intake as well. I mean you can open a window but I think code will require it to prevent backdraft. Basically the air intake opens when you turn the fan on. Most of your other gas equipment (gas water heater and a gas clothes dryer) will be direct vent though in new builds.

Does commercial kitchen equipment try via how it's designed to prevent smells from wafting around? I think if you want to prevent that you need doors on your kitchen and to not combine it with the dining space. Which is hard to find because most parties and social life revolves around the kitchen, so most people don't like that setup thus builders never build it. There is also the general trend to make houses into large open spaces for living, dining and kitchen, which makes it even worse. Like the open office trend!

Typically the cooking surfaces in a commercial kitchen are installed under an absolutely enormousness hood that sucks a lot of air. That is sufficient to greatly contain smoke. Not sure what smells have to do with anything.

Further up the thread here I mention a friend with a Hobart professional under sink dishwasher unit in his home

Follow the clearances, supply the 240V 50 amp power, install a catch pan under it, soften the water if needed, etc. None of it rocket science if you are mechanically-minded, but requires to educate yourself and pay attention.

My friend is from a large family, and they had a proper commercial kitchen in their house growing up, so no big deal for him.

With contact grills, only the professional ones achieve temperatures that are good for searing a steak.

I washed dishes, by hand and with the industrial machines, for a couple of different sorority houses in college long ago. The machines worked well, but required supervisory maintenance like would be expected for most industrial equipment. They also take a while to heat the water chamber to washing temperature.

A good friend of mine has an under counter version of the Hobart (https://www.hobartcorp.com/products/commercial-dishwashers/u...) machine in his kitchen, as well as a conventional consumer dishwasher. The commercial machines are electricity hogs, unless you use them constantly. He only uses the Hobart for dinner parties or entertaining. It is a nice setup.

Speed Queen will sell you a nice domestic version of their laundromat front-load washing machines for about a 20% premium over a high end unit at Home Depot or Lowe's. Our family is considering one. (https://speedqueen.com/products/home-products/front-load-was...)

Edited to provide product links for clarity

In addition to the downsides noted by other responses like electricity and maintenance costs, it's worth noting these industrial machines don't clean food residue nearly as well as domestic machines.

There simply isn't enough time in contact with the chemicals to break down things like starch and protein. You're meant to preclean dishes that go into these things quite well, then they degrease and sanitize them.

There's a blog post somewhere in the web of someone that installed a commercial dishwasher in his kitchen. It requires 220 V and uses an enormous amount of power, but it cleans a load in 90 seconds.

However, does it use more or less power than a regular dishwasher in aggregate? My understanding is that a regular dishwasher takes a while to run. I've never owned one, so I don't really know.

A typical 'eco' cycle might take about 90 minutes. The dishwasher might have a rated peak load of 10A/1200W, but you can't just multiply that by 1.5 hours.

The peak power is for the resistive heater, which runs for several minutes at the start and intermittently throughout the cycle, as heat is lost through the insulated enclosure and out with the periodically drained water. But most of the duration is spent pulsing the small 1.3A/160W/0.2 HP circulation pump. It works out to a little less than 1 kWh for the full cycle.

Like my high-efficiency front-loading clothes washer, it ostensibly reduces energy and water use by running a small, efficient motor for a long time instead of a high-power motor with lots of water for a short time.

A commercial dishwasher might have a 30 amp, 220V heater, and a 3 horsepower 220V motor. The heater draws 6.6 kW for 4 minutes to warm up the machine before you can run the first load, or 0.4 kWh, and the motor runs for 90 seconds at 2.3 kW, so the total power requirement is actually less than the 'Energy Star' consumer unit at 0.5 kW/cycle!

When I used to take part time jobs, I've noticed that the dishwashers in the restaurants are quite different from those used domestically.

Especially for glasses, the job would be done in about 30 seconds, it will come out quite warm and will be ready for re-use as soon as you wipe them (roughly, like for a second or two) with a cloth. Spotless every time.

The plates and everything first go through a larger machine that looks like a carwash for mechanical cleaning, then go to the dishwasher. Comes out hot and ready for use just as quick as with the glasses.

I asked if they use any chemicals and the manager said yes but it was not immediately obvious where they put it and I did not notice any smell, just how water.

> Especially for glasses, the job would be done in about 30 seconds, it will come out quite warm and will be ready for re-use as soon as you wipe them (roughly, like for a second or two) with a cloth. Spotless every time.

I was once visiting an old country estate/hall, in the process of planning an event. We had the tour and were left in the dining room alone, while our hosts went to get us coffee. In the meantime, there was tray of glasses on the side and we went to help ourselves to some water. Without warning one of the glasses exploded.

When the coffee arrived we hastily explained what had happened, thinking that we sounded like idiots: "it broke itself, honest!"

Apparently their dishwasher ran a bit too hot and if it was a cool day occasionally the thermal shock would destroy some of the more well-used glassware, terrifying unsuspecting guests.

Yep, I've seen it happen. You can have a tray of hot newly washed glasses shatter if you put them in a cooled area.

Unless you can uninstall someone else's broken one, fix it and install it in your home without F-ing it up you likely have no business owning industrial appliances. These things aren't made to plug and play anywhere any everywhere like consumer appliances are and you're gonna have to consider a bunch of little details in order to make them deliver good service. If you don't already know what that entails you're probably out of your league and the ownership experience will likely be less satisfying than several $500 disposable consumer models of the same time period.

Also if you're not gonna do all your own maintenance just forget about it and buy cheap disposable appliances. Skilled labor is just too expensive these days to do anything else. Also, many commercial operations that are small enough to not be able to do maintenance in house (hotel laundry is a good example) buy a fleet of consumer appliances with the extended warranty and buy more than they need to that when one or two are down at any one time it's a non-issue because doing that is actually cheaper than maintaining commercial equipment.

> if you're not gonna do all your own maintenance just forget about it and buy cheap disposable appliances

Besides the physical waste that I can already see accumulating behind this advice that I find quite poor, it also makes no economical sense. I own high quality home appliances and they don't break down, or need replacement. My washing machine is 30 years old and runs once or twice a day.

Don't buy cheap shit would be my advice. If you can't afford a good quality appliance, wait for a couple extra months.

In Norway we have ASKO Professional. They are built for commercial use. In Norway they can be bought at the big consumer electronics shops. I plan to buy their cheapest commercial dishwasher DWCBI231.W during Black Friday in November. They also have the industrial DWCFS5936.S

https://static18.asko.com/files/default/Nordic/Professional/...

I am very pleased with their washing machine WMC743PS. It has shock absorbers. The drain pump makes the most noise. This machine is not afraid of unstable loads such a single wool sweater. It is fascinating to look at the door getting tossed around while the the rest of the machine is stable. In most consumer machines this heavy wool sweater would come out soaking wet as the safety features of the control board would stop the machine. Check out the door seal on ASKO compared to normal washing machines. It is very hygienic unlike the common deep rubber seal that will get moldy over time. I managed to get it for ~1700 USD.

The ASKO Professional vented tumble dryer does not reverse the spin direction, so I got the Miele T 8302 vented tumble dryer instead. I toss the exhaust hose out a window, temporarily. It had to be vented, non-negotiable :)

Miele Professional was too expensive.

Autoclaves! They're used in industrial kitchens and life science labs.

Are you sure? I've used autoclaves in labs and I'd imagine it'd take longer than that to just pressurize, much less be done and out, in 15 seconds.

Ah yup my mistake -- it's this kind of thing: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/INEO-Restaurant-Hood-...

Autoclaves are used in the food industry too, but you're right those are very different: https://www.steriflow.com/en/Autoclaves-sterilization-alimen...

I could tell I'd been out of back of the house food service long enough when I no longer put my home sink all the way over, because it was too hot.

(Our dishwasher and washing machines run when we're not at home, so they could run for twice as long and be twice as loud and I wouldn't care.)

I'm always running them when I'm home. I was taught that getting a broken machine and water damage while you're away can mean negligence and insurance won't cover. Not sure how true that is as I've never really read the fine print in my insurance though.

Here the principle of insurance is to make life better by avoiding worry over low-probability events. (I just called mine and double checked, and they said run the machines anytime I like.)

I now wonder if attaching a second pump+heater set to a normal dishwasher would work :D.

I mean, you'd have to modify it so it's taller (because the extra parts won't fit), but it would increase the pressure and decrease the heating time.

I used to work in a restaurant where we had one! So good