Here’s why you shouldn’t wash your dishes by hand any more

It’s very human to think that machines will never be able to replace our skills, no matter how far technology goes.

Take doing the dishes as an example. The first dishwasher was made in 1850, but more than 150 years later, many of us still do our own dishes or at least wash them by hand before putting them in a dishwasher.

But statistics show that modern dishwashers are now faster, cleaner, and better for the environment than we ever could be. So maybe it’s finally time to give up and let the machines take over.

Or, as Consumer Reports says, it’s time to “let the dishwasher do its job.”

People still believe that washing dishes by hand is cleaner and better for the environment, especially if you only need one sink full of water for a whole family’s dishes.

But research shows that this is no longer true. Dishwashers are not only much cheaper to run now, but they also use much less water and energy.

“It is very unlikely that washing dishes by hand would use less water or energy,” said Jonah Schein, the technical coordinator for homes and buildings for the WaterSense program of the Environmental Protection Agency. He was talking about Energy Star-certified dishwashers.

“To wash the same number of dishes that can fit in one load of a full-size dishwasher while using less water, you would have to be able to wash eight full place settings and keep the faucet running for less than two minutes total,” he says.

We get it, it’s hard to use less water than a machine. But shouldn’t we still give dishwashers a hand by quickly rinsing dishes before putting them in?

Steven Nadel, who is the head of the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, says, “Unfortunately, no.” In fact, if you have a modern dishwasher, you don’t have to do anything other than scrape food off the plates.

“In general, old dishwashers didn’t get dishes very clean unless you washed them first,” Nadel told Chris Mooney of The Washington Post back in 2015.

“That’s not a problem with the new dishwashers. Soil sensors are built into almost all of them. They will wash more or less, depending on how dirty the dishes are. They will clean up the dishes.”

Dishwashers can also spray the dishes with tightly controlled jets of water up to 60 degrees Celsius (140 degrees Fahrenheit), which is too hot for our hands. Experts say you only need to set it as high as 48 degrees Celsius (120 Fahrenheit).

“The worst thing you can do for the environment and your energy and water bills is to wash your dishes in hot water that is constantly running and then put them in an old dishwasher that wasn’t built to meet modern standards,” Mooney wrote.

Consumer Reports says that households could waste more than 22,000 liters (6,000 gallons) of water per year by pre-washing dishes.

Still not sure a machine could do your housework better than you? Well, we’re sorry to say this, but you’re wasting your life.

The Energy Star program has found that if you let a machine do all of your dishwashing, you save 230 hours, or almost 10 days, each year. This makes for a pretty strong case.

So, what are you going to do with all the free time you now have? Why not be helpful and work on some citizen science projects that help the environment or help edit some of the beautiful raw footage of Jupiter that NASA’s Juno probe took? Who said technology didn’t need us?