Washing Dishes
1% of Domestic Electricity Use
Dishwashers have improved substantially in the past 10-15 years. They do a better job and use less water. Some claim to do as good a job as hand washing. Of course, some people do a poor job of hand washing.
A skilled hand washer can still do dishes using less water (and far less energy) than the best machine. However, if you wash or rinse under running water, you may use far more water than a machine.
Arguments for a dishwasher are generally advanced by people who hate hand washing. Nevertheless, by using water hotter than hands can tolerate, they do sterilize dishes. So if you are worried about disease, the machine may give you peace of mind.
They do save work, but less than you would imagine. Again, a skilled hand washer can finish the job in only slightly more time than it takes to load a dishwasher. But not everybody is skilled at hand washing and few people aspire to this skill.
A lot of energy can be saved by not using electric heat to dry the load. This will be marked differently on various models, but often something like “Energy Saver Dry”. Using electric heat to dry dishes in summer will also add to the air conditioning load, costing you twice! In winter you usually want the heat.
A modern dishwasher uses between 400 and 700kWh per year of electricity costing between $40 and $70 at $0.10 per kWh. No estimates of the energy consumption of older dishwashers are available.
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