Alex Tabarrok takes on federal dishwasher regulations today:
Why do today’s dishwashers typically take more than 2 hours to run through a normal cycle when less than a hour was common in the past? The reason is absurd energy and water “conservation” rules. These rules, imposed on dish and clothes washers, have made these products perform worse than in the past, cleaning less well or much more slowly. One of the best things that the Trump administration did (other than Operation Warp Speed, of course) was creating a product class–superwashers!–that cleaned in under an hour and were not subject to energy and water conservation standards.
First off: Operation Warp Speed was a sham. All the important work had been done by Congress long before Donald Trump came up with his (admittedly terrific) marketing slogan.
But back to dishwashers. Honest question here: Why does anyone care if a dishwasher takes two hours to finish a cycle? I typically load the dishes at night and then turn on the dishwasher. The next day I unload it. Who cares how long it took?
Obviously (I guess) there must be people out there who run their dishwashers in the middle of the day and then sit on the edge of their seats until it's done. But why? This isn't like a clothes washer, where you might want to put in another load right away.
Can somebody help me out here?
In graduate school, I did laundry at a laundromat that was also a bar.
I was eternally grateful for long wash cycles.
I use an all-in-one washer. The best thing is clean, dry clothes when I get up in the morning.
There is perhaps an additional subtlety going on having to do with sanitizing the dishes.
The US Food Code require that commercial dishwashers:
- have a 185 F rinse water for removable tray dishwashers
- have a 165 F rinse water for fixed tray dishwashers (typical built in dishwashers)
But home dishwashers do not have 165 F rinse cycles. The hottest have about 162 F rinse cycles which officially does not meet the Food Code requirements.
To compensate, home dishwashers use a longer rinse cycle to compensate for the lower heat and provide comparable sanitizing.
Now the hottest rinse cycle home dishwashers have about 162 F rinse cycle. So it does not appear to be a technical issue (the dishwashers typically have their own internal water heating system) to achieve the higher temperatures.
If you look at the price of fixed tray commercial dishwashers and home dishwashers, it looks like the longer home dishwasher cycle is in part at least a marketing positioning so that home dishwashers do not get used in commercial establishments.
Sometimes when we do a lot of cooking, we have more than one load of dishes and we need to run it twice to catch up. But that's not a major concern, only a minor inconvenience.
My dishwasher takes a good 3.75 hours. That wouldn’t be so bad were it not for the incessant beeping afterwards. So I cannot turn in on after dinner. Mornings are generally an option unless I’m working from home, in which case I really need to think of it before 08:30. That pretty much leaves after lunch. It’s a minor inconvenience.
But here’s the good news: Before posting, I decided to check and make sure I was correct about the machine. I was. Sort of. What I hadn’t realised was that the previous tenant had set the machine to energy-saving mode. Turns out I actually have a range of choices, one as quick as an hour. My minor inconvenience has become a minor convenience. And all thanks to you, Kevin. You’re making a difference in the world!
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