It’s only me and my partner and we run it every single day. To be fair we both work from home so we generate more dishes than two people that go to work I suppose but I just hate doing them by hand

You don’t have to make excuses, modern dishwashers are really water and power efficient.

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I’m in the US with a Bosch dishwasher installed in 2024. It’s 1-1.5kw depending on the cycle.

Also, since when are electric water heaters common in the USA? Every home I’ve ever lived in here has used gas for heating water.

> It’s 1-1.5kw depending on the cycle.

But if it's hooked up to hot water, add in the 4 gallons of water it used and the 1.5 kWh to heat that.

Is the suggestion that this is not efficient though? What’s the point of comparison?

2.5kWh seems like a lot to wash some dishes when some European models (which use cold fill) can go as low as 0.6 kWh.

The difference is mostly to use as little water as possible - just enough to wet the surface of the dishes not to soak them, and heat only the wash water not the 2 sets of rinse water or the prewash water.

There are some neat tricks to do this - for example there is no water level sensor - you aren't aiming to fill the bottom of the machine - instead you run the pump at full speed and keep adding water slowly till the pump electrically feels like it doesn't have many air bubbles in it.

It depends on where you live. Where I’m at they’re extremely common because electricity is cheap and very green.

I think a really in-depth look at how people use dishwashers would be pretty interesting. There are a lot of surprisingly strong opinions about right ways to do it. Of course knowing the right way is also interesting, but how people came to be so convinced that their way was the right way would be even more interesting to me-- I suspect there are a lot of hidden generational and socioeconomic attitudes hidden in there.

>suspect there are a lot of hidden generational and socioeconomic attitudes hidden in there

You're probably right about that. A lot of people grew up without dishwashers and don't have a way to economically install one outside of a major kitchen remodel even if they have the space which many in cities don't have. They're also not the, for lack of a better term, necessities that washers, stoves, and ovens are. And, of course, dishwashers don't eliminate the need for any handwashing and if you aren't cooking or doing a lot of entertaining a lot, they may not be all that useful. I do cook but still probably only run my dishwasher 2 or 3 times per week.

They completely eliminate the need for handwashing for me, unless cooking something very out of the ordinary like a huge vat of soup to freeze in the largest stock pot I own.

I have a rule that every single item in the kitchen goes into the dishwasher. If it doesn’t survive oh well - survival of the fittest.

The only thing exception outside of size that I can think of are the fancy knives. But we have an everyday set I don’t mind dulling and just sharpening once a month with a basic sharpener.

Everything used immediately goes into the dishwasher during the day, then before bed it gets ran full or not. Dishes put away with morning coffee and the cycle repeats. No dirty dishes cluttering up the kitchen, and no wasteful (water and time) hand washing required.

FWIW the nicer dishwashers now have removable and adjustable racks so it’s actually practical to dishwash a stock pot if you wanted to.

Yeah, though I tend to find that filling up a dishwasher with mostly a few things is often less efficient than just washing the bulky/awkward things by hand.

I was going to make a joke about ludicrous speed, but then remembered that automatic dishwashers for restaurants typically clean dishes in under two minutes.

Those are actually sanitizers, not dishwashers. The washing part is done by humans, before the washed dishes get fed to the sanitizer.

Source: I did that dishwashing job in school, to pay for my lunches.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good dishwasher. But we need to recognize the difference in the jobs here.

And bad dishwashers? Well, let me just say that we will never, ever have another Bosch dishwasher in our house.