Do you let the dishwasher do the work for you?
We don’t know about you, but we couldn’t imagine life without a dishwasher anymore. Many people own one of these fantastic machines and gratefully use it every single day. It saves us a lot of time to not have to clean our pots and pans by hand. These days, dishwashers are becoming more and more cheap and economical, but can we actually rightfully say they’ve become more economical than washing by hand?
Doing the dishes or turning on the machine?
Costs
Research done by the Dutch Consumer Association shows that the average dishwashing programme costs €0,22 per load, which is €80 (or £70) a year. Of course, this doesn’t include the purchase or maintenance costs. This is much more expensive than doing the dishes by hand!
Economical washing up
The Consumer Association says there are three condition to doing the dishes by hand. You shouldn’t rinse your dishes with warm water before actually washing them; you should do your dishes in a dishpan and you shouldn’t use too much dish soap. If you follow these conditions when washing up, you’ll definitely be more economical than the dishwasher would be.
Using the dishwasher economically
Are you not convinced and do you want to keep using your machine? There are a few ways to make sure it runs cheaper:
- Don’t rinse your dishes before putting them into the machine; most machines no longer need this. Just scrape off the food scraps into the trash can and put the dirty dishes into the washer.
- Only turn on the machine when it’s completely filled.
- Use the eco programme, since this will save you about €20 a year.
- If you have an electricity supplier that offers cheaper tariffs at night, turn on the machine at night.
Read more: Very dangerous: this why you should never do the dishes during a thunder storm
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Source: Consumentenbond, Margriet| Image: Pexels