As an adult, I've never owned one, and since becoming responsible enough to clean my dishes frequently, I've never seen the point in owning a dishwasher. I don't think I'm getting sick or anything from my hand washed dishes.
Is there real value in a dishwasher that I'm not understanding?
One person doing one person's worth of dishes is pretty manageable. Once you get more people involved, or if you're getting a lot of utensils dirty while making something fancy, it can be a whole different story. Also, I think they use less water than washing by hand, but again this depends on how many dishes you put in there at a time.
First time I traveled to the US (I was 13) I thought there was something odd about the dishes... they felt strange. I told my host, I said "there seems to be a film of something that feels strange". He thought about it and said, "what you feel is the absence of something... the thin film of oil that you can't get off when you wash the dishes by hand, but the machine can." He was right.
It's not the only "game in town".
I once washed a load of dishes in a laundry tub filled with a pretty strong concentration of Mr. Clean floor cleaner in hot water.
They came out squeaky, sparkling clean, like out of a dishwasher, without any scrubbing.
(Why I did that is that the dishes fell victim top a drain backup: vertical stack clogged somewhere below my floor, causing other people's black, stinking drain water to start coming up in the kitchen sink, and it soiled a bunch of dishes that were in the sink. I had to resort to something strong and anti-bacterial to feel good about those dishes. I still put them through the dishwasher, too.)
This is because the intermolecular bonds between certain food molecules (esp lipids like fats and oils) and the dish surfaces themselves can be remarkably strong. Additionally, it is quite possible for you to instantaneously remove molecules that are sticking due to intermolecular adhesive forces only for them to stick back on as you move said abrasive out of the way slightly.
The only real way you can actually remove such substances without mechanically damaging the dishes is to break down and/or dissolve them into the water so they don't restick to the surface.
However, for a single-person household it might not be worth it. For a household of more than two it’s definitely worth it.
If I can't take the dish off the dinner table and stick it into the machine, it means I'm pre-washing in some sense.
But I've been washing and drying dishes since I was a child and my early years of conscripted dish washing were spent learning to optimize washing and drying procedures. So I'm very fast and efficient.
For a family of more than 4 persons, a dishwasher likely is handy though by no means a necessity. In the absence of a dishwashing machine, one person washed and a second dried.
As for the "pre-clean" phase - soak dishes and utensils in a sink or bowl of warm soapy dishwater for 5-10 minutes to loosen/remove most food residue. Then the dishwasher (wo/man or machine) will work properly.
But the true conundrum is this: in all my years of washing dishes both for myself and for commercial firms (college jobs as dishwasher) I have always washed knives - sharp knives. Yet I have never cut myself on a knife or a sharp utensil. I have learned that I can grab a handful of sharp knives from a soap-and-water filled sink blindly and quickly without fear of cutting my hand.
Something is going on that I don't understand: possibly the soap modifies surface tension around the blades and prevents them from penetrating my skin. This happens whether my hands are dry or soaked by hours of dish washing. Any ideas what is happening here?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwuQPfvSSlo (Extreme example: At one point in time, people would sometimes hold sharp swords by blade -in the middle of a swordfight - and win!)
To cut something you need sharp object + cutting motion. No cutting motion means no effect.
I say relatively safe; because of course you're putting yourself in a position where you theoretically can get hurt if you accidentally loosen your grip.
In my situation I'm grasping a handful of utensils blindly (they're under soapy water), some which are knives. I can pull them up and sort them out w/o damage. Why?
The hand, and the combination of hand + eye, are remarkably facile. But in a suds-filled sink the eye is useless and the hand alone governs.
[0]: https://www.cnet.com/home/kitchen-and-household/how-much-wat...
Would recommend.
I don't get it why all the dishwasher ads tell you not to pre-clean your dishes at all. It is a very quick routine that really helps against permanent stains. It's much easier and faster to wash the dishes by hand if they were quickly rinsed immediately after use.
The dishwasher takes a small amount of (very hot) water and cycles that same water over everything many times. I don't really want a lot of sanitized (or not) food bits going over everything, or clogging the debris filter, thanks.
Fun fact, some 'dirt sensing' dishwashers sense dirt by using a resetable undersized fuse on the circulation pump. The more gunk in the water, the harder the pump works and the more it triggers the fuse. Count the number of activations to see how dirty the dishes are.
Definitely no need to pre clean like others have pointed out (I believe the dishes are steamed/heated before the cleaning cycle so the heat takes care of the heavy grease and stuff).
Uses less water, about 10 liters/ 2.5 gallons per cycle.
May be I am taking a high ground here, but why do you want spend time doing dishes if you could afford a Dishwasher? Do something better?
Overall, I would say a Dishwasher would be useful even for a family of 2.
1. It saves a huge amount of water.
2. It saves a lot of time for me.
That's basically it. If you feel you can spend the time without problems and water is not an issue in your area there is no need to get one.
Dishwashers require a lot of manual labor even without prewashing. Like "flying cars," I dream of robot arms that can clear the table, clean the dishes, dry them, and put them away. How hard can it be? :X
I also thing hiring a maid and a cook are a good idea because I'm so lazy and busy.
Newer dishwashers can handle dirty plates no problem, cheese or no cheese and are much more efficient.
If this dishwasher had been my first experience I would’ve thought the same as you
You really don’t need to prewash anything...
I think the ideal would be dual drawer dishwashers that you use alternately, leaving the clean dishes in one until you fill the other, so that the dishwashers become the cupboard. Do people do this?
I'll use whatever I can to free myself up from a chore and spend more time with my family.
I don't preclean anything, but I do follow the recommended loading procedure.
