You can get a basic mobile dishwasher for about $400, and you might want one if you’re going to be washing a lot of dishes. But they are big and they are complicated, and they usually don’t fit in your kitchen.

My favorite model is the Bissel Powerforce Pro. It has an adjustable sprayer that will hit your dishes from any angle; it is powered by electricity and has only one button, but it is reliable; it also works in your car or on a boat or at camp. And it does not require an electric outlet or special plumbing for installation. In other words, it does not take up floor space and does not require strangers who know what they are doing to install it for you.

The Pro costs about $600, but I have seen them at hardware stores for $250-$300, which is a bargain; you can find them in kitchen stores like Lowe’s or Home Depot, too, but usually in the $300-350 range.

You can also find cheaper models that use gas instead of electricity and work only in warm water (no cold water), but I don’t think they are as good.

Dishwasher vans are almost always rented by the month. So you can’t just go to the Yellow Pages and find one. The Yellow Pages contains nothing about dishwashers. You have to get a subscription to one of the regional monthly magazines, as if it were a newspaper: Better Homes and Gardens for the South, House Beautiful for the East Coast, Real Simple for the West Coast, and so on. There is no reason why you should settle for only a month at a time. A dishwasher is something that you use every day, so there is no reason to restrict your choice by geography. If you have a specific location in mind, look up “dishwasher” on Google Maps. Then click on “more information” under the name of each town or city near where you want to make use of your new appliance.

You can also check on Craigslist or Kijiji (the Canadian version of Craiglist) for adverts posted by owners looking to rent their machines out on an hourly basis. When you find one that looks promising, give them your phone number and ask them when they are available.*

Mobile dishwashers are a big deal for restaurant owners. You can’t get them in American supermarkets like Safeway or Costco, but if you’re in Italy, you can walk into a bar and order one.

There are different kinds of mobile dishwashers. There are the ones that sit on the counter, which are designed to place some dishes in a basket and let you wash the rest by hand. That works well when you have a tiny kitchen and only two or three people are going to be eating. If you have a large kitchen with lots of people coming in, the dishwasher becomes dangerously unbalanced because it is trying to hold more dishes than it has handles for. If it tips over, you’re out of luck.

Then there are the ones that mount on top of freestanding sinks or garbage disposals, which is what I use. You plug them into a power outlet, fill them up with water and detergent and whatever other stuff they have to rinse out later, push a button to start them running, come back in twenty minutes (or less if the machine is an automatic one) and tip the dishes out onto the counter or into whatever container is available for them.

This is great for restaurants because you can use all your hot

It is easy to dismiss such businesses as a fad, and it is true that many of them will go out of business, but some will not. At the moment you are reading this, there are several thousand carts operating in the United States alone. It is possible to buy a cheap unit with a small basket, or an expensive unit with a large basket. The units have different styles and prices and features. Many of them will fit under your sink; some will not. They all run on electricity, they all take dirty dishes, they all use detergent, they all dry dishes. Some are man-powered; some are powered by gas; most are powered by both electricity and gas. These things can be used to wash dishes from your home or office; they can also be used for catering.”

The first thing to remember is that the dishwasher is not a device–it’s a machine for getting rid of your dishes. You don’t need one to get clean, and you don’t need one to save time. If you have an excess pile of plates and cups, you’re better off washing them by hand. Not only that, but it’s healthier: hand washing uses less water than the rinse cycle in a dishwasher, and your hands are cleaner than the dishes are. And you keep a lot more of the evidence of eating when you eat off of plates and bowls, not single-serve bowls and plates.

If you want to be helpful to your family or friends, though, having a dishwasher can be helpful. It saves money–no one needs to wash up after every meal–and it saves time. One factor that can make this difference nowadays is that most people use plastic plates, cups and bowls now instead of china or glass; they won’t last as long if they’re washed by hand.

One surprising thing about dishwashers is how much impact they have on our view of time: because we spend so much time loading them with dirty dishes, we forget how big an impact housework has on our lives outside the kitchen

The whole point of a dishwasher is that it does dishes for you. To its designers, a dishwasher is the ultimate “take it off the rack, plug it in, and go” appliance. But to the owners of the dishwasher, it’s just another appliance. And they do want to wash dishes.

This has created a problem. Dishwashers are expensive and inefficient. The only way to get an efficient dishwasher is at least one more efficient step in the process: a dishwasher that can wash dishes by itself.

Dishwasers are often called self-cleaning or auto-dishwashers (because they usually do the job themselves), which makes them sound like something out of Star Trek. But they’re not Star Trek; they’re just appliances designed to work by themselves.

A self-cleaning dishwasher is basically an electric version of a washing machine with a programmable timer and a sensor that tells you when it’s done rinsing and drying. Almost always, it will also have built-in temperature sensors so you don’t have to use soap when your dishes are hot enough for water alone to do the job.

My friend Chris Ransom and I both have a thing for washing dishes. We think it’s the best way to get dirty or “unclean” hands clean.

We have a thing for washing dishes, but we are not very good at it. I would do my dishes by hand if there was no alternative, and I wouldn’t mess with any machine that washed them for me. But in my house, I also have a dishwasher, which washes everything automatically.

I’ve told myself that the dishwasher is justified by the convenience it brings, but eventually—and only after weeks of thinking about it—I decided to break it down into smaller pieces to see what makes me want the dishwasher so much.

The biggest reason is that things get messy in my kitchen: plates and glasses and utensils and cups and pots and pans all over the counters. If you were going to try to clean up after yourself in that mess, you might need a dishwasher; but you really don’t need one. It’s not as though there isn’t a perfectly good way to clean up: just pick something up and put it away, or put everything away before you start cooking or eating or drinking something hot or cold. You’ll probably end up doing both