When I was growing up, a good friend who lived across the street always had to help his two sisters wash dishes after his family had had dinner. This consisted of “pre-washing” each dish before placing it in the dishwasher, something I had no concept of since my parents’ kitchen had a sink, and the only “dishwasher” was Mom and me.
“But if you have a dishwasher, why do you have to wash the dishes before you put them in the dishwasher,” I’d ask my friend.
“I don’t know,” he’d reply, “my parents just say I have to.”
I could never figure that out. By the time I was out of college, working full time, and able to afford a home with a dishwasher, I simply scraped the larger collections of carbon molecules from each plate, set the plates in the dishwasher, and 30 minutes later had a set of perfectly clean dishes. I never pre-washed a dish unless, say, a plate coated with egg yolk or pasta sauce had been fermenting in the sink for a couple of hours. I just assumed that in the 15 to 20 years between the time of my friend’s pre-washing and my experience with a dishwasher the mechanical technology of dishwasher engineering had grown by leaps and bounds.
Dishwashers are one of those appliances that, in my book, once you have one there’s no going back to life before you had one. I can backpedal quite comfortably, but I have my limits. Turns out what cleans those dishes so well isn’t so much engineering as chemistry! Phosphates are what gets today’s dishes clean so easily.
Phosphates down the dishwasher drain and into ground water also promote the growth of algae which decreases oxygen supply for fish. Man mucks with nature once again, and nature always seems to lose. That’s one reason Oregon and Washington banned phosphates in dishwasher detergents July 1. See the following SeattlePI story, www.seattlepi.com/local/6420ap_wa_dishwasher_soap.html.
Like other offspring of small families, Lucy and I have a nice collection of “Grandma’s” china, silverware, and glassware, which, of course is never placed in the dishwasher. It’s washed by hand, for heaven’s sake! Our everyday plates are restaurant quality, and can take just about anything. But our cheap discount store brands of everyday glassware begin to cloud up within a month or two of purchase, almost as if they hadn’t been rinsed properly. I learned that phosphates’ abrasiveness also cause that clouding, probably why Grandma’s wine glasses are never touched by phosphates. We have very soft water, by the way; water hardness, a common alibi, is not the reason for the cloudiness.
We can’t have company over for dinner looking at their water glasses like Socrates must have looked at that cup of hemlock, so a couple of weeks ago we purchased new daily use glassware. And we also purchased phosphate-free detergents. The new detergents don’t work as well as the old better-living-through-chemistry brands, but at least now our glassware can remain clear, as will our consciences the next time we visit the fish in a lake. See the following Detroit Free Press comparison of phosphate-free detergents, www.freep.com/article/20100701/NEWS05/7010389/New-detergent-falls-short-for-some-buyers. And I’m now pre-washing dishes like my old grade-school friend did.
My daughter-in-law has her own ideas for homemade dishwasher detergent, a combination of borax and baking soda, plus vinegar for the rinse cycle. I haven’t tried this yet, but I expect I will eventually. My problem is once I start the dishwasher I usually disappear; I don’t stand around waiting for the rinse cycle to notify me that it’s time to add vinegar.
Backpedaling has its drawbacks. It almost always requires more work on one’s part. But doing one’s best to avoid phosphate-based detergents also helps our global home and also one’s wallet.
Let’s see – am I missing something? Pay a hefty price for the device. Pre-wash a dish. Put it in the dishwasher. Wait, on the average, three or fours days while you wonder what to do without your chef’s knife or favorite teapot until the dishwasher fills up so you can wash everything at once. Use chemicals that are more detrimental to the environment than doing them by hand. Trust your dishwasher to do as good a job as you can. Maybe it will. Maybe it won’t. Excuse me but I think you dishwasher people have been sold a bill of goods. Overall I think it takes less energy and less time to wash them by hand and
all of the negative effects you mention don’t exist. I need a dishwasher like a bird needs a kite.