Why You Should Stop Hand-Washing Dishes

Do you prefer hand-washing your dishes over utilizing your dishwasher?  In short? Don’t. Ace Plumbing spells out the reasons to use your dishwasher, or to have one installed if you haven’t already got one.

 

Should You Hand-Wash Anything?

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: some things should be hand-washed. Wooden bowls and cutting boards will crack or warp under the high heat of a dishwasher. China and gold-trimmed dishes, some plastics, insulated mugs or tumblers, and aluminum dishes can also be damaged by a dishwasher. For everything else, there are some important reasons to load up instead of hand-washing.

 

Why Use the Dishwasher?

There are some compelling reasons to use your dishwasher rather than hand-washing most items.

It’s Far More Efficient

Even if you’re a dish washing champion, you would have to be able to wash service for eight in about two minutes to be as efficient as a dishwasher. Your dishwasher uses far less hot and cold water to do its job than even the quickest human.

Your Dishes Will Be More Sanitary

In order to get your dishes as clean as they look, NDSU says you need to run the water at 140 degrees or hotter. That’s not a good idea for those of us with kids in the house, or for anyone whose sensitivity to temperature isn’t what it used to be. Using rubber gloves is an option, but that leads to another problem.

Your Kitchen Won’t Be Awash in Bacteria

That problem is bacteria. What you’re using to clean your dishes could be making them dirtier, since your dishrag, kitchen sponge, or scouring pad is harboring up to ten million bacteria per square inch (that’s more than your toilet seat). You can sterilize a kitchen sponge — but it’s suggested you do it in the dishwasher, which raises the question of doing the dishes, rather than your sponge, in there instead.

Spend Less Time

Loading and unloading the dishwasher takes much less time than washing those same dishes by hand. The time that your dishwasher is running is time you can spend on other things, like chatting with your dinner guests, playing a game, watching TV, or listening to your kids argue over whose turn it is to put the dishes away.

Spend Less… Everything

If you’re coming to this article with only an old and inefficient dishwasher as your point of reference, we can understand a bit of skepticism. After all, older dishwashers were noisy, could be expensive to run, and often didn’t clean well unless you loaded them with dishes that were mostly clean to begin with. Times have changed, and the humble dishwasher has changed right along with them. Modern machines — not to mention the detergents they use — are more advanced and much more effective, not to mention that they run quietly and cheaply.

If your home either lacks a dishwasher, or has an older machine you haven’t used for one reason or another, contact Ace Plumbing for dishwasher installation. We’ll discuss your options and get you on the way to saving time and money.