A nationwide study rated washing dishes as the most hated chore in America — even more than cleaning the toilet — because without a dishwasher, it's one of those annoying things you have to do literally every day, multiple times a day.
Plus, even if you do have a dishwasher, you may not be using it right: Some reports suggest as much as 20% of people with a dishwasher say they don't even use it (old habits die hard?), and a lot who do tend to use it less often than they could, by pre-washing or rinsing too often or hand-washing certain items that are actually fine to be in there.
I recently spent the day with a dishwasher scientist inside a secret dishwasher lab at the headquarters for the largest detergent manufacturer in America, Procter & Gamble, and I learned all about how to cut down on this dreaded chore — not to mention seeing firsthand how much money the dishwasher can actually save you per year on utility bills and eventually pay for itself if used often and correctly.
So I'm reporting back from the lab with the tips and tricks — and mythbusting — that have saved me money, time, and water.
Myth No. 1: Dishwashers are a wasteful convenience
Wrong! While your dishwasher only uses about four gallons of water per cycle, hand-washing a typical load of dishes can use as much as two dozen gallons of water. Plus, dishwashers use about two times less energy to heat the water in the first place.
This leads to real cost savings on your utility bills — over $130 per year.
As you might imagine, P&G is happy when people use their dishwashers because it means they're buying dishwasher detergent, but the company makes hand-washing dish liquid too, so the people there said that most importantly, they want consumers to use less water as a way to make more sustainable choices. That's also because 70% of the company's products use water, and in an increasingly water-scarce world where one-third of people live in water-stressed regions, that could threaten the future of P&G's business.
"If there's no water, there's not going to be a lot of P&G business," Frantz Beznik, P&G's head of sustainability innovation, told The Cool Down. That's why the company has dedicated its innovation team to developing products that will use less water, as well as helping to educate consumers on things like Myth No. 2…
Myth No. 2: You have to pre-rinse before loading
On my tour of the dish lab, P&G dishwasher scientist Morgan Eberhard told me that pre-rinsing your dishes is one of the worst dishwasher habits.
"If you do a quick rinse under the faucet, that's actually the worst habit you can do," Eberhard explained, because then the machine's sensors won't properly recognize your dishes as dirty.
A look inside P&G's custom-made plexiglass-front dishwasher helped me to understand why pre-rinsing is a bad idea.
First, the pre-wash cycle happens: Water enters at room temperature and circulates through the spray arms, knocking anything loose off of your dishes. With most models, a sensor at the bottom of the machine measures how cloudy the pre-wash water is, and if it's very cloudy, it knows the dishes are dirty, signaling that it needs to run a more effective cycle.
If the dishwasher's sensors detect that your dishes are already clean (because they've recently been pre-rinsed, leading to less immediate cloudiness), then it won't clean those dishes as thoroughly. Plus, dishwasher detergents are formulated with ingredients that latch on to food that is left on dishes and break it down into particles that can flow down the drain.
Without any particles, the detergents that are designed to clean food will just "swirl around" in the water, "and they could actually deposit the film on your dishes, which could mean your dishes don't look clean," Eberhard explained.
So when you go to load the dishwasher, simply scrape any extra food into your compost before you put the dishes in, but don't use water to rinse the dishes. The dishwasher is built to handle plenty of stuck-on food, and virtually all models even have a filter for any bigger issues (and you should make sure to clean the filter when it looks gross).
I was a chronic pre-rinser, so this was a hard habit for me to break, but it's been a game-changer in terms of time and water savings.
"It's your own time. You don't need to be spending the time and the water and the energy to do it," Eberhard said.
Myth No. 3: It's okay to throw your pod anywhere in the machine
With the increasing popularity of dishwasher pods instead of dish liquid or powder, social media has popularized just chucking the pod into the dishwasher, wherever it may end up. But that's a big no-no, according to Eberhard.
If you don't put the pod into the dispenser, it will actually dissolve during the 10-to-15-minute pre-wash cycle, and your machine will just end up cleaning your dishes with water, not detergent. The dishwasher is designed to deposit those pods at the exact right time in the cycle.
And here's another related pro tip from the wider experience on scene there: Make sure your hand and the pod cup are fully dry when you add the pod. Otherwise, it could stick to the pod compartment and fail to release, or at least to release at the right time. The same goes for keeping your pod container dry and closed so it doesn't get wet or humid, both of which could affect the performance of your dishwasher.
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