In every household all around the world, every family tries to purchase as many electronics as they can to try and ease the work that has to be done around the house. From the common washing machine, to the kitchen’s food processors everything is made to simplify one’s hand work.
But are all those machineries really helping us as well as the environment, or are they in fact huge energy consumers that simply make a huge hole in the ozone layer? Read this post about: What is the eco way to wash dishes? Washing machine vs. Hand washing and find out what happens in this case.
Up until a few years ago, the dish-washing machine has been thought of as a luxurious object for rich, lazy snobs. Many considered it useless or a big energy consumer. In 2010 though, there are few households that do not contain a dish-washing machine mainly because nowadays women can say out loud that they hate washing dishes by hand, the prices are not that high anymore and because there are more and more dish-washing machines that aren’t that consuming after all.
Homeenergy.org helps us figure some things out and tells us a few interesting facts like: if we take 12 place settings of dishes, that is 140 individual pieces, glasses, china and cutlery and we dirty them up with 7 types of foods like: spinach, eggs, meat, milk and some others, we will find the following results on both variants. We are looking at this problem from two different angles: water consumption and energy consumption.
When all those dishes were washed by hand we discovered that a huge amount of water can be wasted: more than 53 gallons – that is 200 liters, though the average consumption is around 27 gallons – 113 liters. Looking at it from the energy waste position, we find that an average of 2.5 kWh is wasted on heating the water at a desirable temperature. We almost must take into consideration that the total time needed for cleaning all those dishes, ranged between 45 to 165 minutes, with a clear peak around 80 minutes. Comparing this time to how much time it take to load a machine and unload a machine – 15 min – and then wash the dishes, we see that the total elapsed time before the dishes are clean, dried and ready for use may be twice as long using a dishwasher as it is when dishes are cleaned and dried by hand.
Assuming that 140 dishes is the average number of dishes to clean daily in a household, and assuming it takes 80 minutes to wash them, then it takes about 500 hours a year to clean dishes by hand. This is equivalent to 12.5 weeks of work.
A dishwashing machine, in comparison, uses about 4 gallons (15 liters) to clean a full load and consumes between 1kWh (standard cycle) and 2kWh (intensive cycle) of electrical energy. Clearly, when discussing about water saving a dishwashing machine does exactly that!
All in all, we give the following recommendations to everyone that wants to be eco either washing by hand or with the help of a machine:
- Remove large food scraps from the plates before washing
- Manual dish-washing is much more easy if the food isn’t dried on the plates
- Do not prerinse the dishes under running tap water – whether you are washing them by hand or in a washing machine
- The amount of detergent used should be appropriate to the job – don’t use too much or too little
- If you afford an automatic dishwasher, use one – preferably a new one. A full, energy-efficient dishwasher cleans best and has the lowest environmental impact of any method.
