I have never had a dishwasher, so I know very little of dishwasher culture. When we were kids and someone would ask my mom if she had a dishwasher, her patented response was, "Yes, I have three of them!". She was referring to me and my sisters, of course, and she thought she was hilarious.

Both of my siblings have dishwashers now and make good use of them. All of my friends have them. But I'm still the only dishwasher in my house. Should I ever get one, I'll be prepared with the information contained in a recent Wall Street Journal article, that indicates most people are doing it wrong.

Not only are people loading their dishwashers incorrectly, but they also need to stop rinsing them too. Yes, you should move large pieces of food debris, but rinsing them could backfire on you. A scientist with Procter & Gamble says that dishwasher sensors tell the appliance how long a cycle it should run based on the dirt it detects on your dishes.

So if you rinse every dish but one, your dishwasher will run a shorter, less cleansing cycle and all of your dishes could end up with goop stuck on them from the one dish that didn't get the once over.

The fact is, all dishwasher manufacturers recommend that people stop rinsing their dishes right now. Another upside is that you could be saving up to 20 gallons of water everytime you do a load of dishes."

That is of course unless your dishwasher is an oldie, minus the sophisticated sensors in dishwashers 5 years old and younger. Then, I guess, you're still okay doing the scrape, rinse- -repeat dance!


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