5 things to consider before buying a dishwasher:
1. Are you handy with tools?
2. Do you have room for it?
3. Do you want to spend the money on a machine that may not work for as long as you expect it to?
4. How much time will it save?
5. How many pots and pans in your life can fit in a dishwasher?
The standard advice on dishwasher selection is to look for a machine that will make the dishes “slim”. However, if that’s all you want, you don’t need a dishwasher. A slim dishwasher means that it won’t heat up the dishes until they’re perfectly dry, but in practice most people don’t want perfection. I’ve seen people use their dishwashers for years without drying the dishes first. They just want hot water, and with good reason: it’s cheaper than running the dishwasher twice a month.
And even if you do want “slim” dishes, there are other considerations: how many glasses do you have? How often are they washed? How much is your water bill? What about your energy costs? And of course there’s the question of whether you really need one at all. If your kitchen is too small to be able to run a dishwasher, maybe you shouldn’t have one anyway.
1. Is it built to last? You can buy a dishwasher for about $400, but it will probably rust out in the first year or two. You can pay $2,500 for a good one, but you don’t know if it will last as long.
2. Will your local cable company let you watch TV while the dishwasher is running? Dishwashers use more electricity than most modern TVs, and if you have a dishwasher with an old-fashioned TV antenna-style tuner, the extra power will probably shock the cable company into cutting off your service.
3. Do you want a single-function machine (dishes and glassware) or a multi-function machine (with silverware trays)? Some machines are designed to hold up to five sections at once, and those are best for big families because they take up less space. Others are designed to hold only one section at time, which is great for people who live alone or have no children at home.
4. Are you willing to spend $100 on each of four racks of dishes? That’s about how much extra space you’re going to need for that kind of rack angle. You can get by with fewer racks, but the cost per rack will go
This is a very funny book, but perhaps it’s a little too funny. It’s not what I would want to tell my friends, even if they were in the market for a dishwasher.
The book is funny, but it also gives some good advice. There are three main reasons we should think carefully about dishwashers before buying one:
1) Dishwashers use a lot of energy. Because they require so much water and electricity, they are one of the worst kinds of appliances to run on solar power. You can’t put a dishwasher on your roof because it leaks too much water when you run it.
2) Dishwashers will make your water heater work harder than it needs to, which wastes electricity and water. If you have an electric hot-water heater, you need only run the dishwasher on demand, which uses less energy; at night or on days when you have no guests, you can turn off the hot-water heater completely.
3) Smaller dishwashers can’t get enough water into their dishes and silverware to clean them properly–and if they do so poorly as to leave traces of food behind (which is hard to avoid), they’ll probably leave other kinds of junk behind as well, not
Most of the problems with dishwashers are avoidable. The best ones have very little in common. But they are all the result of product-market confusion.
Although there is a wide range of dishwashers on the market, most of them do pretty much the same thing. Many people think that one kind is better than another; few look at what they actually do.
The best dishwashers are expensive, but not terribly so. They generally work well, but there’s usually one important thing they do that most other models don’t. Their main advantage is simplicity-and simplicity isn’t much of an advantage unless you’re prepared to pay a lot for it.
Dishwashers can save water and energy, but they are sacrificing style and convenience.
1.1. They’re ugly. The dishwasher is not a sophisticated piece of kitchen furniture that you want to sit around admiring. It is something you want to interact with while it is doing its job. And if you’re going to interact with the machine, why not do it by just reaching into or over it?
1.2. They’re too complicated. To use most dishwashers today you need to think about how many cycles they’ll run (the number of times per week) and whether you need to wash by hand (by handwashing, in which case you’ll probably also need a special spot for soaking dishes). You also need to think about how many dishes will fit in the machine’s racks (usually somewhere between four and twelve). If you buy a dishwasher, there’s stuff inside it all the time that needs to be cleaned–including other dishes, but also silverware, flatware and pots & pans, which have been washed but aren’t clean just yet.
1.3. They’re ugly on the outside, too.* Dishwashers normally have molded plastic panels that look like steel wool; they look cheap and nasty compared with
A dishwasher is a good example of the problem with technology: it’s hard to break even, and easy to make a lot of money. The “slim” models don’t last as long, but you can sell them on eBay at a premium. The dishwasher business is like the PC business in that respect, which also gives you a sense of what the future will be like.