Saturday, June 02, 2012

We need a half-sized rapid dishwasher

The current model of domestic dishwasher doesn't work for my family.

It sits, partly-filled, with rinsed and dirty dishes, while we wait for there to be enough to fill it and justify a full cycle.  We run out of spoons, or glasses.  Sometimes bowls.  We wash all the current dishes by hand, so the dishwasher never fills up.  We run the rinse cycle when there aren't enough dishes to justify that full cycle, then pull out the dishes and finish them by hand.  Or we get busy with other tasks by the time the rinse cycle is over, and the rinsed dishes sit in the dishwasher.  If we don't remember to open the dishwasher door, the rinsed dishes go through a warming phase that hardens leftover dirt.  The next day, the spouse who didn't run the rinse cycle thinks that the dishes are clean, and starts using the glasses from the top rack, which look clean from their rinsing, until one doesn't.

To avoid the half-filled problem, we wash a lot of dishes by hand.  Sometimes the best use of the automated dishwasher is that it gives us more rack space to dry the hand-washed dishes.

We don't need a "dry" cycle in a dishwasher.  Has anyone ever used the "plate warming" feature?

What we need is the restaurant-model dishwasher, a small version, to handle the plates from two or three people.  We should be able to place the unrinsed dishes in a simple rack, run a strong hot rinse cycle of less than a minute, a slightly soapy cycle, followed by another rinse.  Also have the option for just the quick, less than a minute, rinse.  We can finish what this doesn't clean by hand.

The cycle must be fast, so that we don't walk away and forget, and so that it is as convenient as washing the dishes by hand.

This would remove the problem of architecting placement of bowls, plates, pots etc to make most efficient use of the dishwasher and electricity.  It would prevent the fighting that goes on because of it.  Did you know that one-third of all divorces in this country stem from a disagreement as to how to load the dishwasher? (And thirty-seven percent of all statistics are made up on the spot.)

The goal of running as much as possible in one cycle would be relaxed.  We would relax.  And have clean dishes.

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