Do You Pre-Rinse Your Dishes?

Do you pre-rinse your dishes before washing them in the dishwasher? You may be wasting water, if you believe this research by Consumer Reports:

Some time-worn habits are hard to break like rinsing your dishes before you put them in the dishwasher. But stopping this ritual pays off in time and money. Not only will you save water but the energy it takes to heat it as well. Dishwashers are made to do dirty jobs so just scrape the excess food from the plates and let the machine do the rest of the work.

Pre-rinsing your dishes in the sink can easily waste more than 6,000 gallons of water per household each year. If you want to wash your dishes before the machine is full, use the rinse-and-hold cycle, which uses about half the water you'd consume hand washing them. And to get the dishes their cleanest, load large items at the side and back so they don't block the water. And face the soiled surfaces inward so they're hit by the spray.

What do you think? Do you believe Consumer Reports?

Link - via The Consumerist


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Newest 5 Comments

It's called a dishWASHER for a reason. AND... today's detergents are so strong that if they don't have food residue to break up, they can etch your dishes that much more. The detergent will be more concentrated in the flushing water rather than in leftover food bits, and will wreak havoc on your pretty place settings over time.
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I pre-rinse and occasionally wipe them with a paper towel because if I don't, they come out filthy. But then again, this dishwasher has had to be repaired over 20 times since we got it. So like anything else, you get what other people make you pay for. I wanted a really nice Bosch dishwasher and everyone else shot it down in favor of a POS Maytag. With the amount of money we have spent on repairs, energy, water, detergent... well, to put it mildly, we could have bought the Bosch and had the money to replace the ruined wood floor the dishwasher's flooding caused with a new wood floor instead of that ugly vinyl.
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With over 25 years of dish washing acumen I can say that if you don't wipe of the remnants, load it incorrectly or fail to use a rinse agent then your dishes will look dirty even though they are sanitary. And seriously, it sucks to have first world problems just ask JFHC.
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@Brent "you get what other people make you pay for".

No. You make your own choices. If you choose to be influenced by others that's your problem.
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