Natural Harvest: Dishwashers, better than you?

I, for a long time have thought that using a dishwasher meant the use of more water and more gas/electricity but for most machines that is not the case.

Dishwashers use less water than washing by hand. Unlike washing in the sink which requires you to submerge your plates, cutlery and pots these machines use powered jets of water to BLAST the food and muck off and on top of that the dishwashing machines reuses an allocated amount of water over again through the jets when in washing mode.

After being told that I then thought, but it must use more power than me? (I use no power to operate by the way). Well I was then told that most dishwashers take in cold water and heated within rather than being filled with hot water and thereby no gas or (extra)power is used to heat the water which helps in two ways.

Firstly, as most people find it takes time and precious H₂O to wait for the hot water to make it all the way out of the tap. Secondly most heat is also largely lost while traveling from water heater to your tap when your pipes are not insolated.

Being a modern appliance there are always setting to control just how economic it is you want it to run the machine from guzzler to eco-man and let’s not forget the energy rating star system that the government has in place to help us buy smarter.