Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Wash Dishes By Hand
Updated: Jan. 14, 2019
Good news for everyone who hates to wash dishes by hand: it's time to put down the sponge and use your dishwasher! Your dishes will be safer, and it's more eco-friendly, too.
Dishwashers are way more water efficient than your faucet!
The dishwasher is like a magical kitchen creature: feed it dirty dishes and you’ll receive sparkling clean ones in exchange. It’s almost too good to be true, so it must save water to wash dishes by hand, right? It certainly feels like you’d be doing a solid for the environment, but it’s actually more eco-friendly to put down the sponge and use your dishwasher.
It turns out that using your dishwasher is a thousand times better than washing dishes by hand. According to the EPA, the standard flow of a kitchen faucet is 8.3 litres per minute. That’s a lot of water! You’d use an estimated 102 litres by washing an entire dishwasher load by hand. (You should always add this one ingredient to your dishwasher!)
In contrast, ENERGY STAR® dishwashers use no more than 21 litres of water for the entire load (and some of them use as little as 11 litres). Even older dishwashers only use 38 to 58 litres per cycle, which is still half as much water as handwashing. New dishwashers also have sensors that detect how much grime comes off the dishes, using only as much water as required until the water runs clear. You’d have to you wash an entire load of dishes in less than 2.5 minutes to compete with that.
The dishwasher sanitizes your dishes, too.
It’s not just about water conservation, either. The dishwasher can heat your water to extremely hot temperatures–from 140° F to 155° F–which sanitizes the dishes as they’re washed. Even while wearing gloves, I don’t think I could handle water that hot. These high temperatures mean you can stop wasting time (and water) by pre-rinsing your dishes in the sink. Just give them a quick scrape into the trash to remove excess debris and let the dishwasher handle the rest.
No matter how much you use the dishwasher, there will always be items you have hand wash—like your cast iron skillets, that expensive Chef’s knife and any wooden utensil or cutting board. But go ahead and be lazy for the rest of the time: load that dishwasher up, guilt-free. Just make sure to only run it when it’s full. Since it uses the same amount of water regardless of its contents, you’ll save money by loading it up.
These 15 everyday items are dirtier than a toilet seat. Who knew?
