apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

I'm not sure I understand--the pencil stream of water is for washing--or pre-rinsing?

We don't have a dishwasher and only a single bowl sink, too.

After the plates are scraped over the garbage, I quickly blast a bit of water on the plates right after we eat and fill others, like the roasting pan, or the bowl once full of pancake batter, and leave them on the counter to soak.

Then, later, I fill the sink and wash them. I don't use too much soap, so I don't actually rinse the soap off. I also use water as hot as my hands can stand--it helps them dry quickly.

It would be more efficient to wash the dishes right away, but I like to relax after eating and not jump up and be busy.

I have a regulator installed on my tap. It took some getting used to, but now I find washing dishes this way easier than with a torrent of rushing water. It even works with my dual-function faucet's spray setting, which is great for rinsing.

Who needs a dishwasher anyway? they do not save you work, forget about energy o water...

Having one glass, one fork, one knife, etc. per person works really well.

I also have a one-pot sink and no dishwasher. Not a big factor in choosing an apartment: I didn't grow up with a working dishwasher. I also worry about the waste of water. I wash a few items at once with the water off (as much as fits in the sink!) and then rinse all at the same time. I save the more difficult stuff last, letting the water rinse from the other stuff help soak the sticking food in the unclean dishes.

We're in the same predicament and deal with it by pre-soaking everything, being careful to soak greasy things in different vessels than things that are simply caked. Conscious de-glazing also helps with making sure that much of the gunk is off of the pot before it heads for the soak. Sometimes that turns into a yummy pan sauce, sometimes it's just with water. And all of the soaking is a good excuse to let a late dinner's dishes chill until the morning, as long as we've got room to fill up the tea kettle in the sink.

gabiushka -- dishwashers actually save LOTS of water and LOTS of energy. Check out this abstract about research done at the Institute of Agricultrual Engineering in Bonn.

http://www.landtechnik.uni-bonn.de/ifl_research/ifl_research_project.php?sec=HT&no=1

I think water-usage depends a great deal on how you wash dishes by hand, and the efficiency of your dishwasher. Factoring in things such as: electricity used to warm the water, whether you turn the stream down, whether you rinse in one bucket (which honestly is a little gross), and how many you wash at once (saves more resources to wash many at once than to split the same number of dishes up into discreet units of wash), in this case (as in every other), sustainability is a matter of trade-offs... so I think everyone has to make the call considering the type of resource you want to conserve.

I also have a one-bowl sink and no dishwasher. I recently renovated my kitchen and got a single-lever sink that can be turned off without changing the water temperature. I soap a few dishes at a time with the water off, then flip the lever up and rinse them. This way I only use water when I need to. The faucet also allows the flow to be controlled easily, so I use as much or as little water as I need.

I don't fill up the sink but let dishes sit a while with some water on them to make cleanup easier.

No dishwasher here, either. Everyone I know thinks we're crazy, but I've never had one and you can't miss what you've never had, right?

My dishwashing strategy involves an initial quick rinse and stacking. Later, I run a modest stream of water for risning as I wash everything with one of those dish-scrubber wand thingies that have the handle you fill up with soap. I don't fill the sink with water at all, because I have a weird issue with immersing my hands in dirty water. I can do a load of dishes really quickly using my technique, and everything's squeaky clean at the end.

I have a dishwasher (never had one before) and now I couldn't live without one. I'm happy that it saves water/energy too.

A Dutch friend told me that in Holland, they wash dishes in a dishpan, then put them on dishrack to drain -- no rinsing at all. She also told me that, no, they don't use edible natural soap in doing so, they use all the same major brands of dish detergent as we use in the US. She also told me that that's one reason she's glad she doesn't live in Holland anymore.

Definitely get a dishwasher.

I've never had a dishwasher, and we do the soak-a-lot method. When we renovate our kitchen, we will be putting a dishwasher in for resale purposes but I will be the judge of whether we use the DW or not.

At home, my family generally uses our dishwasher as a giant drying rack. I like using a stream of water and washing each dish and rinsing before moving onto the next - I mean, otherwise, you're just putting a clean dish back into dirty water, right?

Now that I'm living with a roommate though, we use the dishwasher whenever enough plates have piled up that no one wants to take responsibility for it.

We fill our tiny single the sink with about 5cm of water and rinse any horrible dirty dishes first. Then i do what I always do I empty most of the sink into a bucket (i should probably think about getting myself a little washing up bucket to make this less time consuming) and use the dirty water to feed and water my outdoor potted ferns. They love the dirty water! :)

I also use a bio degradable dish washing liquid so that I can use the dish washing liquid on my other potted plants. Aloe Vera seems to really like it & so do my Brom's.

We have an energy efficient small-sized dishwasher that we cram full of dishes before running a cycle. Since I pretty much eat everything off of my plate before putting it in the dishwasher, I never rinse first and all comes out perfectly clean. From everything I've read and heard, it's much more eco-friendly to use a dishwasher than wash by hand - dishwashers use a lot less water.

I live alone, fill the dishwasher to the brim and run it at off peak hours. If I'm feeling uber-green I turn off the dry cycle
and water heater option( it's a portable so I can run hot water from the tap).........my time is too valuable to wash dishes. Or you could follow a friend's example and serve all meals on paper plates!