I am not alone about dishwashers

While there appears to be hundreds of references in a Google search about dishwashers being more efficient than hand washing, all those sites seem to be merely cloned version of the same comments (usually with plenty of embedded links to buy or install dishwashers). Just like the repetitious claim that the average dishwasher uses 15 gallons of water. But I finally ran across an article in the UK Guardian which also questions the practical comparison of bad hand washers to super efficient machines.

You can read that article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1605710,00.html

And then there is a nice little story and study done by Ask Pablo. He has all the numbers and details including the name and model of the dishwasher he used in a more realistic setting. You can find his story here:

http://www.triplepundit.com/pages/askpablo-the-dishwasher-002386.php

I'm not out to kill the dish washing machine. I really just want people to be more efficient about their choices and how they use them. We won't always have the time to be more efficient. Nobody is going to try and tell us that driving a car is more efficient than riding a bike. We know it uses a lot of energy which translates into more pollution etc. But there are times when we can make a better choice and we need to exercise that option.

I find that dishwasher report from Germany

Seems I hit the mark with my last paragraph of my last post. We don't use a dishwasher because it is more efficient, we use it because it is a convenience. In this case, the testers did use those twelve people from my party or as they put it, twelve place settings comprising 140 pieces. So if you have a family of four and you eat at home for all three meals and you always have a complete formal meal with a dinner plate, salad plate, soup bowl, dinner fork, salad fork, teaspoon, soup spoon, knife, water glass, coffee cup/wine glass and various cooking utensils, then I think you should use a dishwasher just so you can spend more time with your family. Then again this kind of formal eating at every meal would probably mean you have a butler and maid preparing and serving your meals for you and you don't care whether they wash the dishes or a machine does.

Go look at your own cupboard. I would have empty mine out and I still could not come up with 12 place settings. I would run out of dishes first and.... a OH... I'd have to wash dishes after lunch just to have some for dinner. But that's the Achilles Heel of the dishwasher, it must be full to claim it is more efficient because it uses the same amount of water each time. A hand washer only uses as much water as is needed to clean the dishes on hand.

This report used an unnamed model of dishwasher to square off with randomly picked people from different countries in Europe. The biggest problem may simply be, as this study showed, that hand washers are notorious for letting the hot water run the entire time they are doing the dishes. How else to explain the average use of 27 gallons to wash these dishes? But then how many people leave this many dishes to wash till the end of the day. Which is another flaw in the study. Unless you actually have a party, you'd have to let the dishes sit around all day until after dinner by which time anything on the breakfast and lunch plates will have dried to a nice diamond hard consistency. Unless you rinsed them off....opps... wait! No rinsing, remember? And as I mentioned in the previous post, anyone whose used a dishwasher knows about the inspection process afterward to make sure the dishes are really clean. Even more interesting though, go look at your own cupboard.

While the report doesn't mention the name brand of the machines used, it does claim they did a load with only 4 gallons of water. That is pretty impressive except I can't find any model that makes that claim. It seems that in the United States the newest most efficient models are still going to use about 8 gallons of water on the most efficient settings.

As you'll recall from the previous post, I got off on this post because of the comment from CNN about dishwashers being more efficient. But nobody at CNN read the report. They did like the rest and just read a sound bite from some other source without finding the origin of the study. But now this statement can be found all over the Internet with some at least crediting the University of Bonn for the study. But they still didn't read it or they'd wonder about what kind of person uses almost 30 gallons of water to wash a load of dishes or who could let 140 pieces pile up before washing them (try and picture that).

Here is the link to the University of Bonn study: HERE