"And toddlers are great at rinsing dishes before putting them into the dishwasher."
Don't teach them kids to waste water rinsing dishes! The dishwasher works most efficiently if chunks of food are removed (scrape into trash), but not rinsed.
Yep, this is a habit that seems to die hard for people. A modern dishwasher, even a $400 one, does not require you to rinse your dishes. It’s like magic, that turgidity sensor.
That was confusing, but today I learned dishwashers have turbidity sensors[1], and that turgidity[2] is the force that pushes the cell's plasma against the wall. Took a while to sort that out, but thanks! :)
Yes, in my case, it does. Perhaps it's just that the dish washer is old or slightly malfunctioning, but nothing gives me baked on crap on dishes faster than not rinsing the "sauces" off the dishes.
My wife was in agreement with you, until I let her run a few loads without cleaning them off - it was disgusting. So, yeah. 5-10 seconds per dish to rinse them off is often time and water well spent for a hygienic kitchen.
Specifically, it's proteins that set and harden with heat. Oils come off trivially in the dishwasher (unless they became polymerized through heat, a common process on pots and pans).
The other variable is the time the dishes sit dirty before the dishwasher gets turned on.
I'm not against your view, but is the water actually 'wasted'? I think the water you used for rinsing the dishes is recycled in the water cleaning facility. I might be wrong of course, but this water has to go somewhere.
It depends on where you are, I'd say. If you live in a water-rich area, water itself should be fine to use. The question is how much energy goes into heating and cleaning it afterwards though. If you live in a water-poor area, it's a different story.
edit: And the cycle is impacted as well, depending on the water flow. Here, water comes out from the aquifier, and is then entered into a river, so it is a shortcut (no spring, no small trickles that join together, and no staying within the aquifier, so the level might be lowered). If this is a problem or not depends on the specific situation.
> I think the water you used for rinsing the dishes is recycled in the water cleaning facility.
Which is a process that requires resources that otherwise wouldn't have been needed. A better question would probably be "Is the amount of waste non-negligible?" which I don't have an answer to, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's a lot more than you expect.
I suspect it's a holdover practice from the early days of dishwashers, where they weren't so reliably good at cleaning. Now it's generally irrelevant, but like all rituals that once made sense it's now taught as gospel.
Even when the dishwasher is good at cleaning, too much stuck-on food starts to gunk up the drain and jets of the dishwasher. It gets the dishes clean, but there are definitely still long-term maintenance headaches that you avoid. IMO, that maintenance is easier than rinsing every day, but it's concentrated pain rather than diffused.
Needing a couple liters of drinking water daily to stay alive is actually quite universal.
Water is abundant is the ocean, but it is not drinking water. Drinking water is a scarce resources and using it to rinse dishes that are going into a dishwasher is an unnecessary waste of a vital resource.
You know the saying “X doesn’t grow on trees”? Water literally falls from the sky. Sure, there are some parts of the world where it is in short supply, but where it is abundant, there is virtually no impact of overuse in a family setting.
Comparing it to food doesn’t make sense because food has to be planted, watered, fertilized, harvested, and transported. Water that falls into a local reservoir takes a negligible amount of energy by comparison.
Drinking water does not fall from the sky, in part of the world where there are factories, motor vehicles, power plants, lightning and other cause of air pollution rain water is usually contaminated.
It may be considered safe to use to water your lawn unless it is too acid, but you should not drinking without treating it first. Especially if it has been collected and stored in a reservoir.
Then again food literally grows on trees, you just have to collect it.
Point is most of the time dishwashers do not run on rain water but on drinking water which is a scarce and vital resource so we ought to avoid wasting it.
Purifying and moving that water around uses energy. Maybe it's negligible maybe it's not, depending on where you live. Regardless, the seeming abundance of a natural resource doesn't mean that you should willfully waste it. I come from a country that struggles frequently with droughts so maybe I'm biased.
And the point being made is that other resources are being optimized for instead - wrinse cleaning uses less effort and thus time. The resource of concern varies by area as well.
Technically a nonpotatable unpurified water tap could be used for the same purpose but in addition to the risk of "oops accidentally drank direct river water with pollution and/or hazardous natrual bacteria" the infrastructure for the fringe use would be less efficient than just purifying more water to be flushed down the drain as a cleaning process.
Plus in say southern California the freshwater purification is not the limit but the input water hence the dirty looks for bottling it there instead of say the Great Lakes area where it is actually abundant. Hong Kong I believe is one of the few places that uses salt water to flush their toliets despite large seaside cities being in no way rare.
It is like mass production technically wasting more materials - at that point it usually doesn't matter compared to the sheer efficiency gains.
Granted non-sustainable uses of source water is something to be accounted for.
would be nice if true but turning waste water into drinking water is actually among the most difficult things and requires a very significant amount of high tech to achieve.
drinking water is a scarce resource and around 98% of use is not drinking but turning it into waste water and sewage.
Whether drinking water is a scarce resource or not depends on where you life. In many parts of the world saving water makes zero sense, because the sewers need a certain amount of water to prevent clogging. If people save too much the water company has to flush the pipes.
Do you have an actual source (i.e. a document/web page)? I always thought it's just a matter of distilling it, filtering it, and/or doing some reverse osmosis (which is indeed technologically non-trivial, but it's quite established tech).
"Just" a matter of distilling it? Have you ever looked at the sheer amount of water entering and leaving a water cleaning plant? It's not a matter of having the technology, but of doing it at scale.
Don't teach them kids to waste water rinsing dishes! The dishwasher works most efficiently if chunks of food are removed (scrape into trash), but not rinsed.