UKH

Highligting a Bosch dishwasher to purchase - this model preferred:

https://ao.com/product/smv68md02g-bosch-serie-6-standard-dishwasher-stainle...

Anyone know if the interior is built as a whole sealed unit (as opposed to one which has a base which has sealed joints (which apparently tend to leak after 5-6 years)

Any advice welcomed!

...probably could have raised this under the ongoing thread on 'Worst Designed Thing'....

Alternatively don't buy one of the single most pointless white goods that exists.  Use your hands and avoid wasting energy and all the resources that go into manufacturing pointless products.

Thanks for your input. In our defence we do cook on an open fire using only sustainably logged wood. 

I'm sure I heard that dishwashers actually use less water than washing dishes by hand. Maybe the greener option if it lasts well? We don't have one as we don't have space, but if I am doing a big load of dishes then I can easily go through 2 sinks full of water, so that is a lot of water, the gas to heat it, washing up liquid etc. That's my excuse for being lazy with dish washing!! lol

Depends how you heat your water I guess. 

Not so,

https://www.thoughtco.com/are-dishwashers-good-for-environment-1203932

Added benefits are that you don't end up with a pile of dirty washing up stinking out the kitchen like a student flat when you haven't got time to wash up and of course, you don't have to wash up!

Dishwashers can be repaired, it's not even hard, I always repaired my own which we had for 15 years. Only replaced when we got an integrated one for the new kitchen but sold the old one on ebay so its probably still being used now.

The best white good I own.  Washing dishes, particularly pots and pans, is grim.  If I had to choose between that and the washing machine I'd rather wash clothes by hand once a week (there's only one of me and I "run hot" so T-shirts and shorts is the most of it) than wash dishes daily.  It's also more hygienic as it can use hotter water than a handwash and you don't end up drying[1] with a filthy cloth.

Regarding which to buy, I've always bought down the cheap end and because they are quite simple (and if you have the skills very easily repairable) I seem to get a decent life out of them, and just being metal boxes with a small amount of plastic in them I'd figure they recycle well once dead.

[1] Drying dishes, now there's a pointless piece of work.   The only piece of housework where if you leave it and don't do it, it does itself, not only that but better (more hygienic) than if you did it by hand unless you wash your teatowel after each use.

Our Neff dishwasher seems to have recently given up the ghost - nearly 15 years we've been using it and it wasn't anywhere near new when we moved in. Unfortunately (and this is probably why it's lasted 20+ years) it has a mechanical controller (none of this electronics rubbish) and this is what appears to have gone wrong and the spare parts are no longer available.

We are thinking about replacing it but no doubt everything on the market has 3 zillion programs (same for washing machines) and of course you always only ever need 1 or 2 (one of my pet hates 👿).

So if these things last long enough, then they're not the worst thing environmentally because the "cost" of manufacture is reduced (less overall demand/year). There is of course a similar argument for cars; one study found that the most environmentally friendly car over its whole lifecycle was the venerable Land Rover, simply because the damn things lasted so long.

Generally, our material possessions are becoming more and more complex, usually needlessly because our society is brought up to believe that having more choice/options and bells & whistles attached is better. Cars are a great example of this; does being able to chose 6 different colours of ambient lighting make it a better car - of course not. Much more important would be making sure that parts are cheap and easy to fit when that car's 6+ years old. This situation was much better with respect to this 30 years ago.

Unfortunately, it's not all progress.

Oops, I seem to have gone off on one ☹

Which give really thorough reviews of most household items. You can do a cheap introductory subscription. We bought a dishwasher last year based on their recommendation and were very glad we did. 

10 gallons of water!! How can that be less than a half full sink?

I've just washed up our breakfast stuff, much to the surprise of my missus, and used about 5 litres of water, just over a gallon!

But you don't run a dishwasher after every meal.

Yeah but you run a dishwasher at then end of the day (or two) when it’s full after 4-8 meals. Therefore your just over a gallon for one meal looks just about worse. 
 

edit- also as they use gallons I’m assuming that’s an American website and would expect European machines to use less and be smaller overall.  

Usually just two of us. I don't wash up after every meal, just once each evening  (sometimes leave for two days if have takeaway or meal out). No tea towel: drainer rack plus careful stacking by sink. As someone said: "living like a student", but makes sense economically. enviromentally and timewise.

My parents had a Bendix washing machine for decades. It was not new when they bought it.  It was bolted to the quarry tile floor - no blocks of concrete or flailing drums, just solid engineering.  It had a beautiful brass timing mechanism and periodically needed a new part, which all came from the same little shop. After about 40 years my father asked the guy who ran the shop how long he would be able to get parts for it - "As long as you keep coming in and asking for them", was the answer

Plus they heat the water as they need it, whereas your hot tapwater heats all the pipes from the boiler as well.

You'll be pleased to know our 3 year old Neff one only has 3 heat settings, a full/half load setting and a 3/6/9 hour delay timer. Oh, and Neff = Bosch.

As usual UKC is full of useful information.  You've forced me to do some looking around and my view of dishwashers is that perhaps that they are less evil than I thought.

I'm lucky as our boiler right next to sink. If washing by hand uses less water then that's less energyto heat up, and (from an economic viewpoint) electric energy is probably 2 or 3 times the price.

We crap in the ashes so we have sustainable dried dung to fuel the next evening's fire.

 But then you need about 12-32 sets of crockery and knives and forks!

The people I see with dishwashers are always taking stuff out and washing it anyway because it's not a full load but they don't have a second one of the thing they need. Also, if the thing you want is in the wash then you have to wait for it to finish to retrieve it rather than wash that first then use it.

that might well be true.

Nice to see you're keeping things green

Depends what he's been eating........

We seem to have found the sweet spot. We manage to load it up throughout the day then it's full by evening (only two of us). I whack it on delayed start so it comes on during the off-peak hours (using mostly unused/wasted nuclear energy here in France) so it's about as efficient as it gets.

I had to Google 10 gallons but that's 37L!!! I just quickly Googled an average Bosch dishwasher in Europe and according to the listing the average water usage per cycle is 12L. I guess the EPA in America has different standards to the EU.

As mentioned by someone else, the best thing though is that stuff gets hidden away straight away. Unloading really only take a couple of minutes so I don't think I'll ever look back. 

Mad discussion - good old UKC - absolutely love it.

Errr....but my original Bosch-orientated Q????

My (reasonably high end) Bosch uses 9.5L and 0.8kWh for a full cycle.   There's no way in the world I could clean a full load of washing up wth that little water. 

I could probably just about use that little energy (on the back of a fag packet, 0.8kWh would raise about 25L of water from 15 degrees to 40 degrees but you'll lose quite a bit of that in the pipes).  But you can choose to run your dishwasher at low carbon times (2pm if you have solar PV, 2am if not) whereas burning gas to heat water is comparatively high carbon at any time. 

Just had a look at mine which is not identical but (I think) reasonably similar. As far as I can see it's one sheet of metal with no lines of seal.

It's 8 years old and we've had no problems at all with leaks.

My late father's ideal kitchen had 2 dishwashers installed. This idea is truly labour saving. Clean stuff out of the dishwasher, use, put in second washer. Saves on the effort of putting the stuff away. 

Thanks Jamie - reassuring to know that one member of the UKC massive is on task!

Yep, this would be my perfect setup.  Two, just acting as ‘cupboards’ that clean for you. Use first set while second is cleaning, then use second set while first is cleaning, never having to unpack and put away in a cupboard. 

Really letting the side down there. I thought we might be establishing a UKC record for not answering the question. Therefore, I’d like to suggest that you need a Skoda Octavia instead of a dishwasher. 

My apologies. For good measure, we'd better put the Octavia on a conveyor belt.

I had a client who has a twin dishwasher setup. Two adults and four kids in the household. It actually made a lot of sense!

I'd love to help but you are coming at the from the wrong perspective.

Ben Fogle knows how to do this and you need four dishwashers.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/parenting/who-needs-four-dishwashers-me/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3589888/Is-one-dishwasher-secret...

If you read the article it says

"Most dishwashers manufactured since 1994 use seven to 10 gallons of water per cycle"

That's a US website and their gallons are smaller than ours so the 7 gallon figure quoted is actually about 5.5 imperial gallons which is actually only about 25 litres.

More modern ones use less still. From this

https://www.homeserve.com/blog/2019/april/dishwasher-water-use

"Conventional dishwashers use about 10 gallons of water per load, according to CNET. However, standards established in 2013 require dishwashers to cap their water usage at 5 gallons per load. Energy saving models can even cut it down to 3 gallons"

Again, that's a US website so the 5 gallons quoted is only 4 imperial gallons which is 18 litres, the 3 gallon figure equates to 11 litres.

Bear in mind if you had to hand wash an entire dishwasher's worth of stuff you'd probably need to use several bowls of water (if you wanted to actually get the stuff clean). As someone else pointed out, you don't run a dishwasher after every meal.

The environmental benefit also comes from using less detergent and more efficient heating.

Come come now;

The real reason we all use dishwashers is to preserve our skin for climbing. 

Skoda Octavia has a big enough boot to take all your dirty dishes etc to somewhere with a dishwasher.

An elegant UKC solution to a question that was never asked 😁

No, I don't agree, I can do a full Sunday diner for 5 with one sink full, and they all get rinsed at the same time, it's simply a matter of doing things the right way. Don't fill the sink with everything first, wash the cleanest things first, use the water going into the sink to rinse the clean items as they come out.

Not sure this is true either, you use as little as possible and add more if needed, you don't get this option with a dishwasher.

Once again you need to have a full load first, which means more crockery and eating irons.

The one they have at work, makes your cups taste like perfume, it's shit!!

Each to their own of course, my missus isn't impressed with them, the one that's fitted in the house we're renting has never been used.

Where is this water coming from?

Obviously the OP should consider Marigolds as a far cheaper alternative to a dishwater.

we have taps, you can use them to turn the water on and off.

If you start washing up as you're filling the sink you wash something and rinse it as the sink is filling.

My sister washes up with the tap running and the plug out, and she has a dishwasher.

My son fills the sink up then puts the stuff in the water, like you would if you were taking a bath.

You'd think so, until you try it.  Without a mangle or a spin cycle it’s damnably hard work to wring cloths from “sodden” down to “wet” ready for them to go on a clothes line.

Quite.  With an optimised approach to table clearing, scraping, washing and racking for the dryer it’s almost no more work to do the washing on top of all the other parts of the task, and very little water is used.  For me it’s time neutral compared to loading/unloading a machine, I get more useful space in the kitchen and I don’t have something making an annoying noise for hours, and I never can’t have something because it’s in the dishwasher.

I’m definitely in a minority on this though.

Probably why women had bigger muscles in the old days.

This is a fairly common setup downunder, has the UK not discovered dish drawers?

Thermoformed one-piece plastic tub (so no leaks) and separate (brushless motor) that is easily (no tools) replaceable... work of genius. https://www.fisherpaykel.com/uk/kitchen/dish-washers.html