Short Stuff: Handwashing vs Dishwashers

over dishwashing. Yeah, I can totally see that, because this is one of those things where you're just like, it's intuitively correct one way or another. But this is one of those beautiful and rare things where it's like, no, the one is demonstrably correct the thing you should be doing, and even better, it's the thing that you wouldn't think would be the correct thing to do. It's a beautiful thing. Chuck, and I'm gonna stop talking vague terms and let's really

drill into this. Yeah, and beyond what we're going to mainly talk about, which is is it better to hand wash dishes or use your dishwasher? Uh, the nitpicky how to load a dishwasher thing is the subject of It's just sort of one of the most age old arguments you can have in a marriage, because people come into the marriage or a relationship or partnership with very strong ideas on how to wash dishes, how do so how to load a dishwashers in dispute like should you hang

from the ceiling or lay on the floor? Oh sure? Like should you do half of a dishwasher load? Do you load the silverware? Times up or times down? Or does it even matter times up unless you're like some sort of deranged criminal. Is it knives up or knives down? Knives up? Oh? So leave those stabby things just pointing up. Well, if it's an actual knife, you shouldn't be washing those in your dishwasher anyway. But I'm talking about like a dinner knife or a butter knife. Oh no, what do

you mean? You shouldn't be washing the steak knife. You don't want to run a good knife through a dishwasher, pal, I don't care what the energy your water savings. This is because it wears them down. And also usually if you have a good knife, you have a probably a knife with a good handle on it, and they're not usually made to be run through the dishwasher, they start to crack or if it's would it becomes problematic. And there's no faster way to doll a knife than to

run it through a dishwasher. Yeah, what does it? I believe particulate matter, uh, beating it, kind of sand blasting it, and then also just the water, the effect of the water over time. These are you don't want to do that.

You don't want to do that that People debate incessantly in marriages about dishwasher Emily and I go back and forth about dishwasher stuff all the time because we both do it a little bit, and it seems like one of those things in a partnership where one person just should just be in charge and the other other person should stay out of it. I see, Yeah, there are things like that. You mean, I have laundries once. She's like, I am doing the laundry. Emily won't let me do laundry. Yeah,

but dish washing, we've never really had a problem with. Um, do you both load it? No? We both hand wash. Oh no, you don't know, it's true. We both handwashed. Like I've been researching this and I notice some cass Gate commercials and was like is that true? And then that actually prompted me a cass Gate commercial prompted me to pick this one, and um, it was like like when I researched it, it it was like, no, the cass Gate commercial tells the truth, and this is something I

should not be doing anymore, which is handwashing dishes. So you have a dishwasher and you would still handwash all your dishes. Yeah, we have a nice dishwasher too, and how would you still handwash? Well, one one reason why is we thought that it was it uses less energy, water, all that stuff, which it turns out is just wrong.

And then the other reason why, as I remember seeing like the guy who created the hygiene hypothesis or we talked about his study once where people who eat off of plates or used utensils that have been run through the dishwasher had higher incidences of allergies to like food and other things than people who hand washed because they were exposed to slightly more germs. So we were hand washing because it's dirtier. Basically is that is how you

can kind of boil it down. But now I'm kind of like, man, this is this seems like the wrong thing to do. Handwashing dishes, and I did it like all the wrong ways, water running the whole time, the whole shebang. All right, Well, I think that that actually turns out to be a set up, and we'll take a break and we'll come back and even though you kind of spoiled it, uh, will reveal the real truth

right after this. Alright, Chuck revealed the truth. Well, it is a big misconception that using a dishwasher, even and they say you should really load that thing full, but I have seen statistics that even doing like more half loads per week is still a lot less water than hand washing dishes. Yeah. Um, which is a real big surprise. I think one of the reasons why I didn't understand this because you and I grew up with dishwashers that were terrible as far as efficiency and water uses concerned.

But unbeknownst to us, even though I have a pretty new dishwasher, I'm guessing you probably do too. Um that they they they have advanced by leaps and bounds in the last few years and now they're actually like lean mean energy and water saving machines. They are the Energy Star program in the United States, the government getting involved

and regulating things across the board. The Energy Star program has been a massive success, and a certified Energy Star dishwasher in the US uses less than four gallons of water per cycle, the whole thing, the whole thing, and you can go through four gallons of water every two minutes off your handwashing. Yeah, they have efficiency, high efficiency faucets now that typically come in and about one and

a half gallons per minute. And I don't think it's legal to have a faucet more than two and a half gallons in the United States or two point two

gallons per minute. But even still, like like I did a little math, and like you were saying, you've seen before where even if you run half loads multiple times a week, Um, if you're doing like a quarter of a load of dishes and you're using all four gallons, you're still probably using less water than you would to wash that cord load by hand, because it's probably going to take longer than two minutes to do all those dishes.

So if you have the water running the whole time, even running a quarter load is still going to save more water than if you were doing the dishes by hand. Okay, but hey, you're not using anything on your power bill. You're not burning any coal or even using any solar to use your hands. So it's clearly better to use your hands and not that energy consuming dishwasher right now because that hot water. Thank you for sending me up to look like the smart one here. I appreciate that.

Because the hot water that's coming out of your tap comes from your hot water heater. Uh. If you're using a hot water heater, in fact, you're actually using a lot of energy to heat that water, and it's going on constantly, whereas a high efficiency or just a regular new dishwasher um uses kind of targeted uh hot water, not throughout the whole time. So it's not that water is not being heated the whole time while you're washing the dishes. If you use the dishwasher, it is while

you're doing it by hand. That's right. With an energy star dishwasher, you can use that thing four times a week and it will only cost you and run up about a hundred and thirty dollars worth of energy a year a year. And that's even assuming eleven kill a watt eleven cents to kill a watt hour I saw, which is that's all less than average. Yeah, so dishwasher efficiency. This is where Emily and I really get into most

of our scrapes. It's not times upper, times down, it is uh my, um, you know, I'm I'm sort of the family packer. I'm the tetris master. So when I'm packing a car for a trip, or packing when we've had to move and stuff like that, she leaves that stuff to me because I'm really good at like making the most efficient use of a space, and I carry that over to the dishwasher. I can tetris that thing. So it's so full, it's like can barely even hold the amount of stuff on a rack. And it just

makes me so happy. Whereas Emily will get in there, she'll be like she'll use the juicer in the morning and maybe the food processor that you know, these things have large, sort of multiple components and that's it. You got like two glasses and then that stuff to run a dishwasher load. And it drives me crazy because then the stuff is stacking up in the sink and uh. I try to be like, honey, you gotta put more stuff in here, and she's like, no, it's better just

to run up more. You just gotta stay on it. Huh. Well, So one of the things that popped up to me is, you know, it's just you, me and Momo and I here.

So we have a limited number of dishes um that we use and that we even have in some cases we kind of try to trim it down to whatever we need, not like you know, we each have one fork or anything like that, but you know, like the number of cops and that kind of stuff that we have hanging around is limited to where we couldn't do the dishes just once a week, like you just can't. So that's it's kind of like still run the dishwasher. No you can't, Yes, of course you can. You come

over anytime you want. That's my dream, dude. If Emily wouldn't think I was crazy, I would assign each family member a cup before, a spoon and knife, and a plate in a bowl, and I would throw everything else out because we have She'll go through eight water glasses in a day because she just sits them down and then goes and gets another one, and it drives me bonkers. So you're decorating an inspiration is like re education camp. Man.

It makes me crazy, and then kids like you'd be surprised at how much how many dishes a six year old will go through it too. Oh yeah, no, you totally can, especially if you have a lot of dishes you go through, you know what I'm saying, Yeah, and then they build up to they just kind of just accumulates. Dude, We've got like twenty five coffee cups and I don't drink coffee. It's ridiculously like a cute coffee cups though,

So what are you gonna do deny her her her collection? No, And I don't actually blame her because that is the thing that we have the most of too, because you can get cool stuff and we like our plates. We have lovely plates that we like. But we also get into it with the other things in the efficiencies, which is resisting the urge to pre rense. I'll do a scrape and throw it in the dishwasher and Emily he's like, no, man, you gotta rinse that stuff off really good or it's

not going to get clean. And they're saying, not true. No, Emily is a demon from hell for even suggesting that. Apparently, I'll tell her that, yeah, like you do not prerense the dishes, that is Ah, as one of the guys from the Natural Resources Defense Counsel, I think the senior scientist his name is Noah Horowitz, says, it is a complete waste of water and energy, and you're a demon from hell if you do it. That's what the dishwasher

is for. That's what I always say. But there's another thing that comes from our upbringing and our being eighties and seventies kids too, is you That did not used to be the case. Those things basically had to go in sparkling clean for them to come out sparkling clean. And now dishwashers are just that much better, where if you scrape the stuff off and you put them in there,

they're gonna come out clean. Remember that ad for either dishwashers or dishwashing detergent where they they baked in frosted a cake and then put the whole thing with the plate on it in the dishwasher and ran it and it came out clean. I don't remember that. One's gross. It's almost as bad as that lys Al commercial where the woman uses the raw chicken to wiper counters down rather than Oh, I haven't seen that either. Oh, it's tough to watch this one. Was not nearly as bad,

but in the same ballpark for sure. Well, they say, scrape it, fill it up as good as you can, don't do the pre rents. And then if you can afford to upgrade from that that nineteen nineties model that is using way more energy because you're you know, it's gonna cost you in the long ground and with your water bill and with your power bill. So if you can scrape together the money to upgrade that to a

to a better, more efficient, newer machine than do so. Yeah, but it sounds like even those older machines, depending on how many dishes you have to do, are still better. There's still save water compared to hand washing. Yeah, and I will I will admittedly hand wash um like really big mixing bowls for salad bowls. I'll handwash that stuff because going back to my pet peeve, that takes up a rack, uh right, it does, which is kind of inefficient.

And plus also it's it's satisfying to washing them, dry that off and put it back quickly. Yeah. I kind of like that. You guys are neat like that too, Yeah, yea. If you if you have, you should come move in with us, like you can all right, Um, we'll get a draw un okay. Um, So if you don't have a dishwasher, and you're like, well, I'd like to save

energy and water, you jerks, but I don't have a dishwasher. Um, there are things you can do to save water and energy, and that is uh if you can manage a two uh tub sink you know what I'm talking about in the middle split tub nice, Um, you want to fill one up with warm soap, you water, let the dishes soak in that for a while, and then fill up the other one in clean water and rinse them off in there and just put them up. Don't run that water while you're doing it. That is good enough and

that should do the trick. That's the key. And don't run water while you're standing there brushing your teeth. No, I I came up with the biggest waste of water that you can possibly do. It's where you dump ice out, so you're dumb, you're wasting water to begin with, and then you run warm water over that to make it melt fast. Oh no, I've done that before, and I was like, this is the biggest waste of water you could possibly do when making That's a great way to

do it. There's a lot of stuff you could do just starting with the ice, but really try to make it melt faster for zero reason whatsoever. Then it bothers you that there's ice in the sink. That's a big waste of water. I've learned my lesson ethic. Okay, well is that it? Yeah? I think we admitted some things that didn't make us proud of ourselves, but we can all move on to now. Well, thank you to everyone for listening and short stuff is that stuff you should know?

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