What is the cheapest, most cost-effective way to get your dishes clean?

If you said washing them by hand, get ready to be surprised. Dishwashers come out ahead on just about every measure. Take a look:

Save Water

Running the faucet to wash dishes by hand takes a lot of water. If every household did just one load of dishes in the dishwasher, it would save over 71 billion gallons of water! That much water could fill over a hundred thousand Olympic swimming pools!

Save Money

It costs more than you think to heat the water that’s running down the drain when you wash dishes by hand. In fact, you could save over $100 dollars a year by using your dishwasher. And dishwashers can heat the water more, so in addition to saving money your dishes can be sanitized as well as cleaned.

Save Energy

It may seem counterintuitive that running the machine will use less energy than good old fashioned elbow grease, but in this case it’s true. Heating water takes a lot of energy and washing dishes by hand uses a lot of hot water. You can lower your carbon footprint by turning on the dishwasher if it has at least eight dishes in it.

Save Time

You don’t prewash your clothes, so don’t prewash your dishes! Trust a premium detergent to do its job and skip the prerinse. It will save lots of time and get the same result. Doing the dishes is starting to sound like a pretty easy chore.

We want to hear about your dishwashing habits. How big is your household and how often do you run the dishwasher each week, on average?