this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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It's plausible that handwashing uses less electricity, specially if you let the machine heat-dry the dishes. But water? If you do the comparison against a fully-loaded machine, no way. Modern machines use half the water from machines of 15 years ago, and those were already competitive against handwashing. Best case scenario for handwashing (single water bath) still uses about twice as much water. Dishwasher detergent is stronger and the machine takes longer so it has more contact time, the chemistry heavily favours using less water for the same amount of gunk to dissolve.
In your case, as you already mentioned you only cook once a day and you don't want to degrade your high end stuff in the machine, it's reasonable that you won't generate dishes enough to fill the machine. If you would be using a half-loaded dishwasher then it is plausible that you would use less water handwashing, but it's still a close call - which is why I sometimes use the machine filled 1/3 without worry.
Give me a number. I use 6-8 L of water no matter how many dishes I have. From what I read, that’s about in line with the most efficient dishwashers.
You did say earlier that you cook once a day, meal for two. When I do that, all dishes for the day take a third of the maximum load on my machine, so I could wash once every three days, therefore averaging like 3 L per day tops? You handwashing every day are spending 6-8L daily which is more than double.
If it is true that you can spend <8L for an arbitrarily large amount of dishes, though, then I guess there must be an amount of dishes that you will outperform a dishwasher. They cannot handle an infinite amount of dirt, unfortunately. If you hand wash every 7 days you will be averaging less than 1L a day which really does sound unbeatable.
I really don’t understand why people get so aggressive when talking about their dishwashers.
One of many of life’s mysteries, such as why people get defensive about their water usage due to handwashing.
Only I wasn’t, and I didn’t insult you. But I have no more interest in discoursing with you.