Dishwasher

As Maricar wrote over at Keeping The Castle, the dishwasher is not the labor/time saving device many people think that it is. As a matter of fact, as I have learned, it actually costs more money and time to own and use one than it does to wash our dishes by hand.

Invented by Josephine Cochran in 1886, the automatic dishwasher (Joel Houghton invented a hand-powered model in 1850) was never intended to be a labor saving device, but rather to keep careless servants from chipping delcate china by minimizing the contact they had with it.

As part of our plan to live simply and with minimal stuff, and given my interest in getting rid of Unnecessary Things, the dishwasher was one of the first “conveniences” to fall under a critical examination. Regardless of whether or not we were using the dishwasher, every dish was being touched by us at least once between the sink/counter and the dishwasher. We always “pre-rinsed” our dishes so that the dishwasher could actually clean them.

I could have simply stopped there and see that if we were already, in essence, hand-washing our dishes, then the dishwasher was a redundancy, but I wanted to look a bit closer at the situation. It turns out that filling a sink up with hot soapy water takes about half the soap, and a tenth the water of running our dishwasher, and doesn’t pull power while I wash the dishes. So, I am saving money on soap, electricity and water in addition to removing a redundant step from the dish washing process.

So far so good, but what about convenience and saving me time and effort? Well, as I said, I was already pre-rinsing all the dishes, so it isn’t really possible to save me any effort there – I was going to be in front of the sink washing dishes whether or not I used the dishwasher. However, not having a dishwasher saves me time and effort indirectly, by bringing me closer to the things that go on in my life. By hand washing our dishes, I have come to see just how profligate we were with our dishes, using so many more of them than were necessary. This realization has led us to pare down our dishes and silverware, and to become more discriminating about the ones we use, which means that we finally use our wedding china regularly, which makes us happy every time we do. For some reason, when we used the dishwasher, it seemed like a hassle to use the china, since we would have to hand wash them. Now that everything is hand washed, we see no such barrier to using them, and do so daily.

So, all in all, a dishwasher is an unnecessary thing, as it not only costs more to operate than simply doing your dishes by hand, it also abstracts you from your consumption and creates artificial barriers in thiinking about what dishes to use.