Estimated costs based on four loads a week. Hey, we eat 3 meals a day here, cook them, and sometimes bake with them. What kind of family does four loads a week of dishes, really? Some fluffy yuppie couple in the city with a standard-sized restaurant dishwasher?Well, I'm not notably fluffy unless I'm wearing a wooby, and I haven't been accused of yuppiness since I sold the Porsche some thirteen years back (and to be fair, daily bathing probably qualified one for "yuppie" status in the eyes of my accuser...) but four loads a week sounds about right for Roseholme Cottage, which is occupied by only two adults, one of whom eats her lunches elsewhere and the other of whom is kind of hit-or-miss on the whole concept of "breakfast".
When Shootin' Buddy and I visited his friends in Chicago, I was amazed by their humongous and awesome dishwasher, (and it takes a pretty much NASA-grade appliance for me to work up much enthusiasm at all), but it wasn't 'til helping clear the table that I realized the need for it: Add three kids to the family dining roster and the only days that dishwasher isn't going to get a workout are the ones where the family's off to Disney World...
25 comments:
I see my dishwasher every time I look in a mirror...
Heh.
When I lived by myself and had no dishwasher, I had a knife, fork, spoon, bowl, and plate that never left the drying rack except to be used, washed immediately, and put back again. That's how much I hate a sinkful of dishes.
I think the dishwasher is the greatest invention since the electric light bulb.
I think Brian is missing the point of a sticker like that. You use those to compare one model to another. It would actually be worse if they tried to update the numbers once or twice a year.
If one dishwasher makes less noise, but shows 50% more power usage per year, I'm buying the noisier one.
My first apartment (3.5 years) had no dishwasher. I *never* take it for granted.
(Although I am a little disappointed. By the post title I anticipated a "someone dressed up like a Wookie whilst dancing about and singing to the tune of "I Feel Pretty" " video.
I hate doing dishes with a passion, and unfortunately I was given enough dishes and silverware for twenty people. Yeah, it's bad.
Luckily I have a dishwasher in the form of a room mate! Sometimes it's a game of chicken with him though--who will break first and finally start the hot water?
Still do 'em by hand myself. Used a dishwasher as storage bin for flour rice and pasta for years at the old place.
Part of that is that the damn things are almost always beneath the counter, and I'm very tall. So that means everything has t oplace WAAAAY down there, and then removed from waay down there and placed back up top somewhere.
My wife tells me there is useful storage under counters, but getting on my knees to access it is tedious. Maybe I can wall mount one of those suckers.
Am I the only person who had to look up what a woobie is?
BillyBobz,
"Am I the only person who had to look up what a woobie is?"
I seem to have misspelled it, too. (It's actually "wooby".) :D
Kids do help generate an insane amount of dirty dishes.
As the two dish washers the Lord gave me are to busy with other vile things the little ones produce, I would be lost without the one in the kitchen.
My cousins constantly argued over who had to unload the dishwasher at their house. I'd started hand washing the dishes at my house, which had seven people in it, when I was five or six and didn't understand what was so hard or cumbersome about taking clean dishes out of a machine and putting them away.
Then again, my sibs and I argued over who had to get up to change the TV channel. Human nature, I guess.
Dishwasher--a place where all of the clean dishes are kept until needed. Once used, they sit in the sink until the sink is full and the dishwasher is empty, and then all are placed in the dishwasher, which is turned on. This takes place here once every week or so and this is the norm for life in a single guy house.
Did I mention that I'm still seeking a hot, smart gun-loving gal who likes to cook and clean?
Depends on your household. It's just Mrs. and myself, and we go out a fair amount. She usually also works late a couple nights a week as well, so at most we're eating two actual dinners at home together through the week. Our dishwasher generally runs maybe twice a week, tops.
Laughingdog has it right though- it isn't so much a prediction of how much energy YOU will use, but a standard point of comparison for others. Like the EPA mileage estimates for vehicles, they only mean anything in comparison to one another, not in comparison to what you'll get in the real world. If you drive with a heavy foot, adjust expectations accordingly, but the little econobox will still get better mileage than the large SUV.
When we got the kitchen redecorated, the designer asked if we had a dishwasher. I held out my hands. And said "We WILL be getting one." Which we use maybe twice a week, on rare occasions. In fact, Mrs. Drang still washes a lot of stuff by hand, but I prefer to go until the dishwasher is about full, once a week or so. The new washer at "the other house" (which we will be moving into, any week now) has a "half load" setting, as well as a "china and crystal" setting, so I can do my beer glasses more often...
And, yes, once we had grown enough to where we each had our own chores, my sister switched to complaining about doing dishes, to complaining about rinsing dishes prior to loading the dishwasher. (For the younger among us, before you get off Tam's lawn, we used to have to pre-wash dishes before loading...)
In college I got financial aid via a work-study job... in the University SAGA food-service, washing pots. WTF? Was it some kind of time-and-motion study? I'll never know, but it was beer money - would have been gas-money but I didn't have a car. I worked Thanksgiving Dinner a couple times and at 10:00PM after scraping the gooey detritus from over a hundred and thirty roasted-turkey sheet-pans, four stacks about 5-feet tall, I lurves me some diswasher. Our Bosch in the New Kitchen is mo' quieter with the ultra-quiet dispo's-all, but now I'm back standing in front of a stainless-steel sink again... I hate Thanksgiving.
I have a dishwasher. It gets used sparingly. I'll usually just hand wash whatever I've used.
We run ours once or maybe twice a week. We're two adults, we cook simply, and we mostly wash the pots and pans by hand.
The folks wonder why I'm so willing to do their dishes whenever I head that way. Well, since I have yet to ever own a dishwasher of my own, I am more than happy to watch that miracle machine in action.
I don't have a dishwasher, and I don't feel any need for one, myself.
(I'm just in the habit of, as with my cooking, cleaning immediately.
Makes for less work, an un-filled sink, and no hassle.)
I mean, hey, I'll never mock someone for loving one, but I just can't make myself care.
(And like the others, I think Brian misses the point; there's no set of data that would be "right" for the real world in general, but picking one standard is good for a comparative benchmark.
Especially pricing, since that's widely variable by region...)
We run about 5 loads a week here at Casa G, but that means that the sink's generally full of dishes. 7/week would be far better.
We have two Bosch machines.
We also have two kids. Two dishwashers sounds extravagant until you try it.
(Four loads a week? We do 7-10.)
Putting a price on it's kind of silly. They would have done better to do something like "Average KWH per a hundred washes". There's no dollar figures to confuse people, just a "this one uses more power, this one uses less."
Me-- The obvious solution to your problem is TWO dishwashers, one clean, one dirty.
Early chore as little kids was loading/unloading the dishwasher. This was in the '50's. We had one most places we lived, and we moved a lot. Mom was as much a gadget freak as dad (both had ADD).
My sisters and I eventually realized that loading a dishwasher correctly was essentially a test of mental ability/talent. (Watching friends and relatives attempt it was informative.)
They basically called it an IQ Test, but that isn't quite accurate. However, in all the mechanical/technical areas I've worked, it would have made an excellent pre-employment filter to weed out those who had good book knowledge, but were lousy with actual hands-on work.
If your day job is in an office, and you do a bunch of shade-tree mechanic work at night, GoJo only does so much. Washing the family's supper dishes made my hands more "socially acceptable" around the office.
Nowadays, what with coyotes and ravens visiting the front yard, I don't need a mechanical pig under the sink, either.
Ou dishwasher (for two adults two cats) is run twice a week. Allour pots are non-stick so no dishwasher for those.
I do remember my mother saying that she didn't need an electric dishwasher. She had given birth to 6 kick-start models.
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