The simple answer, says Christian Britschgi at Reason, is dishwashers take too long to wash dishes—nearly two-and-a-half hours, reported one survey in 2018. And that’s due to federal energy standards that President Trump tried to relax.
The Biden administration went back to the previous rules. Says Britschgi, those regulations “limit the amount of water and electricity that dishwashers use. Manufacturers have met those standards by building machines that recirculate less water over a longer wash cycle.”
Twenty percent of people surveyed use their dishwasher less than once a week, says Britschgi.
Yet frequent dishwashing by hand wastes more water and isn’t good for dishwasher sales. Procter & Gamble is running ads to persuade people to use their dishwasher every night.
Image above by jhenning at Pixabay.
I’ve noticed dishwashers take longer now and so have people I’ve talked to. My wife and I had a Bosch dishwasher that is now probably 15+ years old. I say now because we sold the house and moved. It lasted forever and is probably still going strong. It would run a cycle in 90 to 120 minutes. At the new house we bought a GE Profile after the 6-year old Whirlpool leaked water on our hand-scraped hardwood floors and refused to run on numerous occasions. We wanted another Bosch but Bosch stopped using a heating element to heat the water to dry the dishes (all the European brands did this). This is a quote from a BestDishwashersForTheMoney.com, and it is totally bogus, “Bosch dishwashers do not have a heating element. All Bosch dishwashers use the condensation drying process to dry dishes. This patented drying method is considered more advanced than traditional heat-based drying methods because it doesn’t require an additional energy source.”
Guess what? We wanted a heating element to sanitize so we had to buy a GE Profile. On the “heavy” cycle it takes 248 minutes. That is four hours. On “medium” it’s 184, while “light” is 160 minutes. We run it every night to start around midnight. The recirculating motor/pump has a high-pitched whine that my wife can hear and it drives her crazy if I forget to run it at night and start it in the morning.
Devon: You’ve seen it all! I guess people just give up. I tried my dishwasher on the “speed wash” (1 hour) and, well, it didn’t work very well.
On my 1-hour cycle it still takes 160 minutes. That doesn’t make sense according to my math.