Episode 1: What We Learned, Machine Washing Dishes

While we were trying to find out whether hand washing dishes used less energy than machine washing them, we did research, talked to experts, and did our testing. As we did, we learned a few things - some of which you probably already know, and some you might not.

Here’s what we learned about machine washing dishes:

• For many dishwashers, you don’t have to fill the detergent cup all the way up each time. There are typically lines in the cup that show you how much soap to put in depending on how dirty your dishes are.
• Even though we used the “Normal” setting in our tests, most dishwashers have a “light wash”, “short wash”, or “econo wash” setting. You can experiment with those modes to figure out when they might be useful to you so that you can save even more energy.
• Scrape your dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. DON’T pre-rinse them. Modern dishwashers are built to clean dishes that haven’t already been pre-rinsed. You may have been trained by an old machine to basically clean your dishes before you put them in the dishwasher. If so, try running a few loads without pre-rinsing; you may be surprised. Even if you find you still have to pre-rinse, you may be able to narrow down the kinds of dish stains that you have to rinse so that you don’t have to do as much work.
• If you have to pre-rinse some things before putting them in the dishwasher, do it in cold water. When you’re pre-rinsing, most of what you are doing is knocking off particularly stubborn bits of food, so go ahead and use cold water, only switch to hot if it doesn’t work on cold (and let us know what kinds of things cold water doesn’t work for). The dishwasher will do the work of getting the dishes clean.
• Waiting until you have full loads helps reduce the number of loads you do each year (this goes for both hand and machine washing). Each load avoided is more energy saved.
• The heat dry mode's function is to get dishes dryer faster. It can also be quite the energy hog. So try not using it for a while (especially if you let your washer run over night) to see if you even need to use it at all.

Ok, those are some of our findings.. Have questions or more tips? Leave us a comment and let us know!