It’s time to buy that dishwasher

Probably less than 1 per cent households in urban India use dishwashers. Other than the fact that most of us have domestic helps to do chores, we love to point out that Indian cuisine, with its oils and masalas, are no match for the Western concept of dishwashers and that our hands do a far better job.

We are wrong. Modern dishwashers are now officially faster, more hygienic and way better for the environment that we’ll ever be. So maybe it’s finally time to give in and let the machines take over, reports sciencealert.com. There’s still the prevailing myth that washing by hand is cleaner and better for the environment — particularly if you manage to use just one sinkfull of water for a whole family’s worth of dishes. But research shows that this isn’t the case anymore, with dishwashers becoming not only far cheaper to run, but also much more water- and energy-efficient.

“While it may be possible to use less water/energy by washing dishes by hand, it is extremely unlikely,” says Jonah Schein, the technical co-ordinator for homes and buildings from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Water Sense program, referring to Energy Star-certified dishwashers, said in a statement.

“In order to wash the same amount of dishes that can fit in a single load of a full size dishwasher and use less water, you would need to be able to wash eight full place settings and still limit the total amount of time that the faucet was running to less than two minutes,” he adds.

OK we get it — it’s hard to use less water than a machine. But surely we still need to give dishwashers a helping hand by giving dishes a quick rinse before loading them in?

Unfortunately not, according to Steven Nadel, the executive director of the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy. In fact, if you’ve got a modern dishwasher, it’s totally unnecessary to do anything but scrape the food scraps off plates.

“Old dishwashers, to generalise, didn’t get dishes very clean unless you pre-washed,” Nadel told The Washington Post. “With the new dishwashers, that is not an issue. Almost all of them have what’s called soil sensors. Depending on how dirty the dishes are, they will wash more or less. They will get the dishes clean."

Dishwashers can also spray highly controlled jets of water upwards of 60ºC at the dishes, something our human hands can't handle — although experts recommend you only need to set it as high as around 48ºC. In fact, by pre-washing our dishes, Consumer Reports suggests that households could be wasting more than 22,000 litres of water per year. Still not convinced that a machine can do household chores better than you? Well, we hate to tell you this, but you’re literally wasting your life. The Energy Star programme has worked out that handing over all dishwashing responsibilities to a machine saves you 230 hours, or nearly 10 days, each year. Which makes for a pretty compelling argument.