It is difficult to get an exact number, but it is estimated that households spend up to $1,000 a year on dishes and other household items. That is a lot of money. Whether you want the dishwasher or not, you need to think about how much you are going to spend. If a dishwasher will save $300 per year, for example, then it is worth buying one.
If you are on a budget, you might want to pick a color for your dishwasher that makes it stand out from the rest of the kitchen appliances. The more expensive colors tend to be brighter and more eye-catching than cheaper colors (orange and blue are good examples).
Colors can also make the difference between getting a new dishwasher and just spending $25 or so on a new one each year or keeping the old one while adding another $200 or so in expenses every year.
I’ve been cleaning up our kitchen for years. I’ve tried to build a dishwasher, but it’s expensive, bulky, and ugly. It took me four years to finally find the perfect one: a countertop dishwasher that fits in my tiny kitchen and that I can’t see from the front door. My wife loves it. So do our friends.
The dishwasher is probably the least expensive appliance we own. The cost of a good one is $150 or less, which makes it cheaper than most of the other appliances we have (desk lamps are about $5 each). But because we’re buying this in a special color, it costs more than any of them; it runs about $200.
But why should I care? Because reducing expenses means paying down debt and saving for retirement—and doing those things is what this blog is about. So if you want to save money on your electric bill, this post explains how to get the most from your electric bill by using less electricity than you use now.
I’m not going to tell you how—or even if—to clean up your kitchen. This isn’t a cooking blog; there are lots of people who know more about that than I do. But I will talk about some ways
The color of your dishwasher is a small and, in some ways, surprising part of the kitchen experience. It’s the difference between a kitchen that feels lived-in and a kitchen that feels lived in.
In a normal year, the amount of time you spend in your kitchen is highly variable. You might spend an hour cooking one night, three hours cleaning up after one meal on another night, and maybe an hour washing dishes on another night. The rest of the time it’s hard to say what you’re doing there: you might read a magazine or watch TV or sleep.
In any case, the only time you spend there is when you are working on it. When you cook or clean up after meals or wash dishes, those things happen in other rooms—or not at all.
The important thing about your kitchen is how it makes you feel when you are there: how it makes your mind feel, if that makes sense. You might even think of the kitchen as having its own moods. It can feel intimate —kitchens are often small and personal—or impersonal; depending on what else is going on in your house, maybe even cold; like a cell in an institution where busy work goes on all day long.
The room will
I don’t know a lot about dishwashers. I’ve never owned one. But I’ve been watching this thing called “list building” for the last few years, and I think I now have a sense of what dishwashers are worth and how they work.
I also have a pretty good sense of what color to buy. It’s not that you can’t tell people what color you want. It’s that people who don’t care about dishwashers can’t tell you what color to buy.
Water heaters are generally easier than dishwashers. They are usually red; you can get gray water tanks at Home Depot or Lowe’s, but red is cheaper and easier to match with other appliances.
Dishwashers are not as simple as water heaters, because they have no obvious color. But it turns out that there is a whole industry devoted to helping people choose the right colors for their dishwashers.
Dishwasher companies toy with us like children: you get to pick between eight different colors in four different shades, which means that your choice represents a choice between 256 different possible combinations! Every time you open the box and see the color on a sticker on the inside of the door, your brain says “this is amazing
An appliance like a dishwasher is an example of what economists call an “externality.” An externality is something someone does to you that you’re not paying for. A lot of things are externals, but appliances are among the most visible.
In this case, the externalities are two: a dishwasher uses electricity and water. The owner of the dishwasher is reducing his energy bill and his water bill, but the person who uses the sink and washes dishes is paying full price. That’s why your dishwasher often costs more than your refrigerator or your washing machine.
If you have a large family, a dishwasher can reduce your utility bill by as much as 30%. Or if you live in a large apartment building where people share laundry facilities, it can save you hundreds of dollars every month.
When I bought my house I knew it had a dishwasher, but I didn’t know how to use it. It was a super-duper dishwasher. It was built in Italy by the famous Italian designer. It took three weeks for the design team to make all the parts, and another three weeks for the Italian workers to install it. But here’s the thing: I didn’t have to use it because my house is old, and if you don’t use your dishwasher you don’t have to spend money on an annual tune-up.
I bought a dishwasher, but I didn’t know that it would cost me $500 more in electricity to use one. Or that the added cost would be offset by extra taxes because I used an energy-efficient one.
I was shocked to see that while my electricity bill had doubled, my food costs had gone down. So even though I was paying double for electricity and spending more on food, my real bills were lower. You don’t realize how much you’re paying for stuff until you’re looking at it from a different angle.