It amazes me that after widespread adoption of dishwashers, we still build very customised bathrooms into houses that require manual labour to clean each surface - tiles/grout, basins, benchtops, toilets, floors, etc.
A bathroom that could be sealed and cleaned as though it was a dishwasher would be great. For everything but the toilet, lightly pressured spray of hot water would probably be sufficient. Throw the towels in the wash, close the waterproofed door, press the cleaning button and head off to work. Then the door/vents open to air it out after the cleaning process. There are public toilets that do it so surely we could make an attractive home version of that?
And if not the entire bathroom, at least have self-cleaning toilets rather than almost every single model being a slightly different shape so there's no standardised solution better than a toilet brush.
The lifetime cost of paid cleaners or just cleaning the bathroom yourself has to be worth something that could be invested into a bathroom upgrade when building.
It seems a bit counter-intuitive, but dishwashers are not necessarily self-cleaning. Dishwasher owners really should spend some time every now and then to scrub and clean out their dishwashers, along with running some kind of cleaner through their dishwasher. Mold, scale, and food debris will eventually build up throughout the dishwasher, even if you try to let it air out completely. Proper cleaning and maintenance of your dishwasher will help it last a lot longer than assuming it is self cleaning. I should know, I recently came into ownership of a 12 year old dishwasher which "didn't work". Scrubbing and cleaning the machine led to the machine working for quite a while after.
For a whole bathroom, it would be quite expensive; you'd need a fully watertight room (most bathrooms, even wetrooms, are not) and you'd risk contamination. Would also be difficult to retrofit unless you had a wetroom already. Also the failure modes are quite bad; what happens when the drains clog? You'd need the whole thing sunken to prevent water egress to the rest of the house.
Definitely not saying it's impossible, or even impractical, but it wouldn't be cheap.
In my bathrooms, there's already a drain in the shower (the shower is recessed an inch) and in the centre of the main area. They don't clog. I don't know about you, but I don't tend to wash baked-on lasagne from myself in the shower as happens in a dishwasher. I think it would largely be dust and the like if it wasn't left to build up.
I'm thinking these things would be designed for new-builds rather than retrofitted. Recess the floor an inch. Sealed door. Pressure sprays angling down that hit the wall up to a height of around 6-7' or so. Doesn't need to be fully watertight. Run an exhaust fan during and/or after. Maybe have a linear grate/drain at the shower end, and an air spray to help push water as well as dry the tiles.
Seal or hide power points. Cabinets would need a loose seal (they're sprayed, not submerged).
I'm not thinking of something that sprays a high volume of water for a long period. More like 15-60 second spray down of a shower, for example. And then a second spray if there was a way to rinse/dry/whatever. Shouldn't be enough to flood a typical recessed shower floor, or a purposefully recessed bathroom floor.
> In my bathrooms, there's already a drain in the shower (the shower is recessed an inch) and in the centre of the main area. They don't clog. I don't know about you, but I don't tend to wash baked-on lasagne from myself in the shower as happens in a dishwasher. I think it would largely be dust and the like if it wasn't left to build up.
I'm guessing no one in your household has long hair. my hair will clog any shower without a decent drain grate in a week or two.
I think it would be possible to combine both. Even having a hot pressurised nozzle discretely in the shower would probably take care of that area if it was quick enough to spray down every couple of days.
It's 2020 and whether it's you or a maid, humans are still scrubbing toilets.
That's how I remodeled my bathroom. I opted against materials that require grout lines, among other things. It looks boring and utilitarian but its a hell of a lot easier to clean.
Dishwashers spray hot water around an enclosed space, how would a bathroom work?
Would teach component (bath/toilet etc) have an enclosure, or the whole bathroom? How much hot water would you need for that? What liability would there be for being inside when it went off?
Probably a tile-crawling robot would be a better bet.
Rotating pressure sprays mounted about 6-7' up that spray the shower walls and bathroom floor, aiming diagonally down. Water would quickly drain via floor drains. Besides the toilet, it really only needs to deal with a bit of dust that wouldn't be hard to dislodge if cleaned every few days. I don't think it would need to be so hot that it was an issue if you were caught inside - just like being on the lawns when sprinklers go off.
Powerpoints would need to be sealed. Room would need to be slightly recessed (inch maybe). Cabinets would need some sort of seal.
Or it could just do the shower, which is generally already recessed, has no powerpoints/cabinets/towels. In my bathroom, that would leave the toilet (its own beast), floors (easy to do), basins (bit annoying around the taps) and benchtops (easy).
If a shower had a powered, pressure nozzle, it would probably be easy enough to do yourself once a week while in there.
The toilet is the thing to solve though. My kids are old enough to leave streaks but not old enough to reliably clean them without touching everything they shouldn't!
The key is that the volume of the dishwasher is small, and in fact it has heating elements (plus insulation) to raise the water temp, so it can recirculate that hot water (mixed with soap). I can imagine a bathroom with a drain (mine in fact has a concrete floor and a drain, so I can mop the whole floor into it) but there's no way to recirculate (or heat) water sprayed all over it, so the waste of water and energy would be huge.
Does anyone have experience with big industrial dishwashers? We had one at a school I visited, based in an old military barracks. It was about the size of a large fridge, extremely loud (used high pressure) and cleaned dishes spotless in about 15 seconds.
I've wanted one of those ever since, along with one of those giant laundromat washing machines with shock absorbers that run a spin cycle in complete silence.
> Does anyone have experience with big industrial dishwashers?
Yes, they're a mainstay for high traffic kitchens. And while the allure of having your dishes pressure washed in 1-3 min cycles sounds cool its actually a much bigger PITA than you can imagine as the maintenance costs on those things is pretty high. In my experience most kitchens don't actually own them, they rent them with a maintenance and supply cost attached to them, which get very costly.
We had to double the capacity of ours in my last kitchen, the problems was that this double sized machine had lots of downtime as the sensors were not reading the cycles correctly, it would randomly shutdown or just freeze, which would create pauses in the middle of service, and this was an old part of town (150 years old?) with tons of other restaurants so the plumbing was less than ideal which created an issue with backups and sudden floods of waste water coming from the machine into the kitchen.
So unless you're regularly hosting banquets in your home and have issues with limited pans, cutlery and flatware I can't see this making any sense and is incredible overkill. The company might love you for the low costs they'll incur, though.
I will say this: after having spent time working in kitchens I really hate doing dishes at home now by hand. But that could be easily solved with just having a domestic sized dishwasher machine and increase my flatware and utensils. Even a high pressure sprayer attachment to a deep sink would make a much bigger improvement and likely save on water as You could just compartmentalize the process.
Hotels and restaurants do indeed have thicker and more robust plates and utensils. Rough handling by guests and staff as well as the aforementioned pressure cleaning with aggressive cleaning agents make it necessary. Catalogues (picked randomly from google results, no relation): https://hotel.seltmann.com/
>In my experience most kitchens don't actually own them, they rent them with a maintenance and supply cost attached to them, which get very costly.
Most kitchens can neither in-house maintenance nor wash dished by hand (because health code) if the machine goes down. If you can in-house the maintenance and can afford to wash dishes by hand for a week while a new widget ships from China then commercial machines are cheap enough to own (up front cost not withstanding).
And clearly a message from the dude selling them not to do it:
>Peeked at reddit for a moment before I fall asleep and one of our items is on the front page! I'm a product expert at the WebstaurantStore. Folks, I know this looks wonderful and all, but, as a rule, we really don't recommend putting commercial appliances in home kitchens. There are many things on our website that are fantastic for home use, but bad and unexpected things can happen when installing professional equipment at home.
That just reeks of "people are idiots and I don't wanna get sued" type ass covering. There's nothing about these machines that's particularly magical. They just aren't stupid proofed against the typical homeowner half-assery. Solution is don't be stupid and don't half ass the install (i.e. read the docs the manufacturer publishes about the machine and do something to mitigate the corners you inevitably need to cut in your specific case).
Like what exactly? I am curious. Is this happening because if everybody was buying industrial dish washers an entire industry was going down or there are legitimate problems?
"One of the things about commercial equipment is the lack of insulation. So there could be issues with the booster heater affecting the counters around it. The moisture that comes with a high temp machine are also an issue. Maintenance can be a problem if he doesn't have a softener. EDIT: probably the worst thing though, which is mentioned by someone else below, is that if a commercial appliance causes a fire or other damage, you might be S.O.L. when it comes to your homeowners insurance."
I’ve been kicking around the idea of a proper commercial kitchen in the house I’m thinking of building in the next few years, and it seems like this is definitely the kind of stuff you need to plan the whole room around.
That said, who doesn’t want a big gas griddle, serious fume hood exhaust, and a giant three door stainless fridge in their kitchen?! I’m so tired of smoke detectors going off when I try to cook a steak indoors, or filling the whole house with burger grease smoke.
A real set of commercial kitchen gear, in a room designed for the purpose, to me is the ultimate luxury kitchen. Beats the hell out of those pot-filler arms and silly islands that pass for such these days in residences.
The ultimate luxury kitchen is the sort one sees in original condition pre-1900 middle class houses: it's very spartan, because the owners never went in there, it having been the domain of the cook.
Yep you can do it. One problem is that they are noisy. You will want to hide the extractor fans in the ceiling if you vent up out the roof. Bear in mind that a newer house will be tightly sealed too so your stove/ vent will need it's own air intake as well. I mean you can open a window but I think code will require it to prevent backdraft. Basically the air intake opens when you turn the fan on. Most of your other gas equipment (gas water heater and a gas clothes dryer) will be direct vent though in new builds.
Does commercial kitchen equipment try via how it's designed to prevent smells from wafting around? I think if you want to prevent that you need doors on your kitchen and to not combine it with the dining space. Which is hard to find because most parties and social life revolves around the kitchen, so most people don't like that setup thus builders never build it. There is also the general trend to make houses into large open spaces for living, dining and kitchen, which makes it even worse. Like the open office trend!
Typically the cooking surfaces in a commercial kitchen are installed under an absolutely enormousness hood that sucks a lot of air. That is sufficient to greatly contain smoke. Not sure what smells have to do with anything.
Further up the thread here I mention a friend with a Hobart professional under sink dishwasher unit in his home
Follow the clearances, supply the 240V 50 amp power, install a catch pan under it, soften the water if needed, etc. None of it rocket science if you are mechanically-minded, but requires to educate yourself and pay attention.
My friend is from a large family, and they had a proper commercial kitchen in their house growing up, so no big deal for him.
I washed dishes, by hand and with the industrial machines, for a couple of different sorority houses in college long ago. The machines worked well, but required supervisory maintenance like would be expected for most industrial equipment. They also take a while to heat the water chamber to washing temperature.
A good friend of mine has an under counter version of the Hobart (https://www.hobartcorp.com/products/commercial-dishwashers/u...) machine in his kitchen, as well as a conventional consumer dishwasher. The commercial machines are electricity hogs, unless you use them constantly. He only uses the Hobart for dinner parties or entertaining. It is a nice setup.
Speed Queen will sell you a nice domestic version of their laundromat front-load washing machines for about a 20% premium over a high end unit at Home Depot or Lowe's. Our family is considering one. (https://speedqueen.com/products/home-products/front-load-was...)
In addition to the downsides noted by other responses like electricity and maintenance costs, it's worth noting these industrial machines don't clean food residue nearly as well as domestic machines.
There simply isn't enough time in contact with the chemicals to break down things like starch and protein. You're meant to preclean dishes that go into these things quite well, then they degrease and sanitize them.
There's a blog post somewhere in the web of someone that installed a commercial dishwasher in his kitchen. It requires 220 V and uses an enormous amount of power, but it cleans a load in 90 seconds.
However, does it use more or less power than a regular dishwasher in aggregate? My understanding is that a regular dishwasher takes a while to run. I've never owned one, so I don't really know.
A typical 'eco' cycle might take about 90 minutes. The dishwasher might have a rated peak load of 10A/1200W, but you can't just multiply that by 1.5 hours.
The peak power is for the resistive heater, which runs for several minutes at the start and intermittently throughout the cycle, as heat is lost through the insulated enclosure and out with the periodically drained water. But most of the duration is spent pulsing the small 1.3A/160W/0.2 HP circulation pump. It works out to a little less than 1 kWh for the full cycle.
Like my high-efficiency front-loading clothes washer, it ostensibly reduces energy and water use by running a small, efficient motor for a long time instead of a high-power motor with lots of water for a short time.
A commercial dishwasher might have a 30 amp, 220V heater, and a 3 horsepower 220V motor. The heater draws 6.6 kW for 4 minutes to warm up the machine before you can run the first load, or 0.4 kWh, and the motor runs for 90 seconds at 2.3 kW, so the total power requirement is actually less than the 'Energy Star' consumer unit at 0.5 kW/cycle!
When I used to take part time jobs, I've noticed that the dishwashers in the restaurants are quite different from those used domestically.
Especially for glasses, the job would be done in about 30 seconds, it will come out quite warm and will be ready for re-use as soon as you wipe them (roughly, like for a second or two) with a cloth. Spotless every time.
The plates and everything first go through a larger machine that looks like a carwash for mechanical cleaning, then go to the dishwasher. Comes out hot and ready for use just as quick as with the glasses.
I asked if they use any chemicals and the manager said yes but it was not immediately obvious where they put it and I did not notice any smell, just how water.
> Especially for glasses, the job would be done in about 30 seconds, it will come out quite warm and will be ready for re-use as soon as you wipe them (roughly, like for a second or two) with a cloth. Spotless every time.
I was once visiting an old country estate/hall, in the process of planning an event. We had the tour and were left in the dining room alone, while our hosts went to get us coffee. In the meantime, there was tray of glasses on the side and we went to help ourselves to some water. Without warning one of the glasses exploded.
When the coffee arrived we hastily explained what had happened, thinking that we sounded like idiots: "it broke itself, honest!"
Apparently their dishwasher ran a bit too hot and if it was a cool day occasionally the thermal shock would destroy some of the more well-used glassware, terrifying unsuspecting guests.
Unless you can uninstall someone else's broken one, fix it and install it in your home without F-ing it up you likely have no business owning industrial appliances. These things aren't made to plug and play anywhere any everywhere like consumer appliances are and you're gonna have to consider a bunch of little details in order to make them deliver good service. If you don't already know what that entails you're probably out of your league and the ownership experience will likely be less satisfying than several $500 disposable consumer models of the same time period.
Also if you're not gonna do all your own maintenance just forget about it and buy cheap disposable appliances. Skilled labor is just too expensive these days to do anything else. Also, many commercial operations that are small enough to not be able to do maintenance in house (hotel laundry is a good example) buy a fleet of consumer appliances with the extended warranty and buy more than they need to that when one or two are down at any one time it's a non-issue because doing that is actually cheaper than maintaining commercial equipment.
> if you're not gonna do all your own maintenance just forget about it and buy cheap disposable appliances
Besides the physical waste that I can already see accumulating behind this advice that I find quite poor, it also makes no economical sense. I own high quality home appliances and they don't break down, or need replacement. My washing machine is 30 years old and runs once or twice a day.
Don't buy cheap shit would be my advice. If you can't afford a good quality appliance, wait for a couple extra months.
In Norway we have ASKO Professional. They are built for commercial use.
In Norway they can be bought at the big consumer electronics shops.
I plan to buy their cheapest commercial dishwasher DWCBI231.W during Black Friday in November. They also have the industrial DWCFS5936.S
I am very pleased with their washing machine WMC743PS.
It has shock absorbers. The drain pump makes the most noise. This machine is not afraid of unstable loads such a single wool sweater. It is fascinating to look at the door getting tossed around while the the rest of the machine is stable.
In most consumer machines this heavy wool sweater would come out soaking wet as the safety features of the control board would stop the machine.
Check out the door seal on ASKO compared to normal washing machines. It is very hygienic unlike the common deep rubber seal that will get moldy over time.
I managed to get it for ~1700 USD.
The ASKO Professional vented tumble dryer does not reverse the spin direction, so I got the Miele T 8302 vented tumble dryer instead. I toss the exhaust hose out a window, temporarily. It had to be vented, non-negotiable :)
I'm always running them when I'm home. I was taught that getting a broken machine and water damage while you're away can mean negligence and insurance won't cover. Not sure how true that is as I've never really read the fine print in my insurance though.
Here the principle of insurance is to make life better by avoiding worry over low-probability events. (I just called mine and double checked, and they said run the machines anytime I like.)
Oh, I thought the urban legend was that she was fed up with the servants breaking her prized porcelain so she wanted a machine that would wash automatically and safely. (actually the article says that as well)
"As a socialite, she was expected to hold frequent dinner parties. She served the meals on her expensive, heirloom china. When the household staff hand-washed the dishes, the delicate china often got chipped. She opted to wash the dishes herself, but after she damaged many a plate, she decided to design and build a machine that could handle the task—faster and more carefully."
Used to have a top of the line unit. These look very pretty, but they do a really shit job washing the dishes. Replaced with a Miele unit, was a bit harder to integrate nicely but now the dishes come out clean without having to handwash them first.
Cabinets with integrated dishwashers would be something... Look like cabinets from outside, but with racks inside and once filled with dirty dishes, seal and wash everything. Not a bad idea.
Grabbing things out of a cabinet is easier than grabbing things out of a dishwasher. And I think other things would need to change to make it work above ground level, e.g. sealing with side swinging doors. But there is certainly a market for something like this, albeit in the $100,000 range.
I've actually wondered why this isn't more common for people with big kitchens who do a lot of entertaining. While there's always some hand washing in any case, when I have people over, there is invariably a need to do a lot of it because I can only fit so much in the dishwasher.
Those would need to be two identical dishwashers, with easily removable racks, so that you could just swap the whole racks. Otherwise, it isn't buying all that much.
Semi-related: anyone here, like me, not find automated dishwashers very useful? To me it seems to take nearly the same amount of soap exposure, and time at the sink, to wash dishes by hand.
Maybe if I needed gloves, I'd get frustrated with the smell your hands take on from dishgloves, but honestly washing dishes (particularly dishes that aren't precious) is pretty easy.
a lot of people tend to think you need to pre-rinse dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. no, you don't: in fact, this can remove the substrate that's needed for the detergent to be most effective.
most of my dishes, which I have a lot of: finish eating/drinking, straight in, no sink stage.
Maybe because when people get their first dishwasher, they are single and it takes days to get a full load? When food hardens overnight they work a lot less well.
Most dishwashers are designed to drain into the disposal, but they usually still have some kind of filter going to the sump before that line. Maybe you have some extraordinary model which truly has no sump filter, but otherwise you should still regularly examine and clean out your sump filter even if your dishwasher drains to the disposal.
The water in the dishwasher is being reused by the pump and sprayer while in cycle. The sump filter ensures no particles larger than the sprayer heads are being sucked up by the pump and pushed through to the sprayer jets, as tough food particles could damage the pump or get clogged into the sprayer heads.
> anyone here, like me, not find automated dishwashers very useful?
No, when we got our fist dishwasher after our second child was born the dishwasher was like a miracle. We got so much time back each evening. It was life changing.
> same amount of soap exposure, and time at the sink, to wash dishes by hand.
What are you doing with your dishwasher that requires any soap exposure? With ours there is none. Scrape the dish into the bin/compost, stick it in the dishwasher. Every once in a while something will require a cursory rince with cold water before just to dislodge any stubborn food bits, but most of the time no prep is required.
I live alone, and still find the dishwasher to be the most useful appliance in my house. I cook a lot, and love not having to think about how many pots/pans/dishes I'll use and how I have to scrub them later. I don't do any prewash either. Everything goes straight into the dishwasher and comes out sparkling every time. Maybe I'm just really lucky with my machine/detergent.
It's also great because I don't need extra space for a drying rack.
As a single person I preferred the laundromat. I could use 3-6 machines at a time and everything was done fast. I owned enough cloths for a full load of each, and so I only had to do this once a month.
As a married person with family we are doing laundry all the time anyway and so having it in the house is an advantage.
Two people in a small apartment and currently spend 15-20 minutes a day hand washing but I feel like its right on the line where 3 or more people it is clearly faster to machine wash.
We are in a similar situation, both working from home. It very much depends on how lazy we are during the day. If musli bowls and lunch plates haven't been handwashed when we start cooking dinner it's a "dishwasher day". We have a half size one, which means one day's worth of dishes fills it up at least 3/4.
I suspect it might be more water efficient and energy efficient to do this instead of repeatedly heating up water, which takes 30s or so and wastes a lot of cold water / hot water that gets left to cool down in the pipes.
I tend to wash the cookware while I'm cooking, and wash my dishes when I'm done, rather than letting them pile up. It takes a handful of seconds each time, and they're often seconds I can't spend anywhere else to begin with.
What about your chefs knife? A small spoon for sauces, a measuring cup perhaps, a chopping board, a spatula or wooden spoon or something to stir the dish, the pot or pan you actually used to cook, perhaps a lid for said pot.
Why is this being downvoted? A balanced plate may be easier to wash. Starch absorbs fat, some acidic liquid will keep the fat and starch from sticking too much. Get your plate to the dish washer, rinse, and without need none to little soap will get rid of all the residues. The fat is already stuck to other particles so won't need much soap. What's the point of teaching Chemistry if the kitchen always looks like a cumbersome time-consuming mess to most people.
There are widely known fresh ingredients containing fat, acidic liquid, or starch (e.g. avocados, tomatoes, sweet potatoes respectively, although tortilla would be a more conventional third example given the first two).
I did my dishes by hand for years after moving out; on my own, it was just once a week, took about 20-30 minutes.
Now I own a house and have a small (3 person, 4 animal) household, and the thing runs daily. To me it makes a ton of difference; to the family I wouldn't be able to rely on the others, because the one is a teenage child and the other has debilitating joint problems.
I'd rather load / run / unload the thing every day than do things by hand again.
It's not that it is complicated, it's the amount of it. Your threshold may vary, but I find that with 3+ adults, or 2 adults and children (one or more) then I prefer the dishwasher.
To me a dishwasher is the equivalent of asynchronous execution: load it up, start it and come back a few hours later to clean and dry dishes. In the meantime I keep on doing whatever else I need to do, which is something probably more important than doing dishes.
Another thing that helps is having extra dishes and silverware. That way I keep on loading during the day and turn it on only once before going to bed (pots and pans that are not solid metal we still have to do by hand though).
I'm looking forward to the dish washing robot to be invented. Something that can actually scrub a dish, not just spray it. Combine it with an automatic cabinet so you don't even need to unload it.
If you live by yourself and only have to wash one bowl and one spoon every day, a dishwasher can be overkill.
But that's not the situation for everyone. If you have a larger family with babies, a dishwasher can be very useful. Baby bottles have many of different parts and washing them by hand can be time consuming, baby toys can be washed in the dishwasher as well...
And if you cook your own food rather than buying prepared food, you'll also be washing a lot of stuff: frying pans, pots, cutting boards, blender cups, etc.
Same. I live alone. I have a spot for a dishwasher under my counter, and I could afford one, but I've chosen not to own one. The problem is that there are many things you can't wash in the dishwasher, and it often does a poor job, you have to pre-rinse some things. At the end of the day, it's like, whatever, I can spend 5 minutes a day washing dishes. But I agree with others, it might make more sense when you have a family with several people.
> The problem is that there are many things you can't wash in the dishwasher
I have had a dishwasher for years. I either don't buy stuff you can't wash in the dishwasher, or wash it in the dishwasher anyway because I have better things to do than pamper some random crockery.
Except my chefs knives which never get put in there, but they are the exception.
> you have to pre-rinse some things
For me (and we cook every meal) it's the minority. It's a rarity that we ever pre-rinse.
If I lived alone it might feel differently about having a dishwasher, but it was life changing when we got one after our second child was born. However, I wouldn't not get one for the reasons you listed.
If you cook for 4+ people they are super useful. It's not just the time saving, you also can just eat your meal and relax for the rest of the evening, compared to having to wash stuff up - even for a small time.
It's a good saying; every once in a while there's a post on HN about yet another household robot, but people forget that things like washing machines and dishwashers are the only robots that will actually end up in people's homes in the long run; things that try to be more generic will remain hobby / research projects for a good while longer.
Could work for large volumes, but TBH I feel like the logistics involved make it overly complicated; the industrial dishwashers mentioned elsewhere take like 90 seconds for a run. Why spend the time loading, driving, unloading, cleaning, loading, driving, unloading for a 90 second cycle?
I mean I get it when it comes to laundry (at hotel scale), the volume of stuff is much larger, it's not fragile so packaging and handling is a lot safer, and they use massive industrial laundry machines. One laundry factory can handle multiple hotels too.
There is AI involved. That means data and visual identification.
It would be very easy to turn this into an automatic plating robot. When they were giving out google glass years ago, I remember talking to a Belgium company that was using it in food service to train employees.
Example: assembling a hamburger. First teach glass what is lettuce, bun, condiments etc and the order in which it will go. Next when a new employee comes..all they have to do is wear glass..then it would highlight which item would go in which order to assemble a hamburger. Etc.
The dishwashing robot ..IMO..should be the first step to an automated restaurant kitchen. Or catering outfit. Or cruise ship. I have fine dining BoH experience and I can see that there are many possibilities here. So easy to train if it has a vision system. My 2c.
DAAS, interesting concept. However, I'm now left wondering what type of work or jobs you could not turn into an "xxxx-as-a-service." Dishwashing was something I never expected to see offered in this model.
IIUC, for all that people explicitly complained about not being able to find good help anymore, "one less gossip", especially in the zero gossips[1] limit, was a strong implicit driver for household automation[2].
Phone for the fish knives, Norman
As cook is a little unnerved
[1] especially now that one can verify consumation via the 'gram instead of either doing so conspicously in public or relying upon the servant grapevine to spread the word.
[2] this is a falsifiable hypothesis: it will be interesting to see how covid lockdown in india affects middle class household employment.
> Convince them clean air is more important for their health than the next Mediterranean carnivore diet and we might start getting the tech we need.
Rich people already have fancy air filters in their cars and homes, they spend several months a year breathing clean air in places like Courchevel and St Barts. In places like London they have special taxes to keep poor people and their nasty polluting cars away from the posh areas.
Unless you’re going to convince them to wear masks, there’s probably not much tech can improve here.
I don't think that's what people mean by a "Mediterranean diet", vacations and resorts aren't really representative of a traditional diet, which is what I think people are referring to.
The most common turkish[1] food around here is the "kebab shop" which is the equivalent of a Californian burrito joint and is definitely meat centric. (Compare "kofta") As for greek, gyros and moussaka are two counterexamples.
[1] I've heard a story that Döner Kebap as served here was actually invented in Berlin, but that hasn't kept people with mediterranean complexions from asking me if I knew of any turkish food around and then being very happy when I gave them directions to the kebaberie.
Sure, now, but like with most of the world I suspect that the food most people ate traditionally was what they could grow because meat was too expensive for most people to afford most of the time and that's what they mean when they say "Med Diet", not what you can get now which is kofta and chips.
I’ve never understood why there is no ‘in-sink’ dishwasher. Many American sinks have two basins, and the second basin often contains a dish rack for drying dishes. Why not just have a top cover that you lay over the second basin, that you could close?
There’s already a drain, so the water has somewhere to go. Ideally you could use the already existing faucet to provide the water source to negate the need for a pump — just attach the faucet to a spout, and it provides the pressure to wash the dish.
Since the racks are cheap, you could fill it up, turn on the dishwasher, and then just move it to the side to dry, and swap in the empty rack to start the process all over again.
Seems so obvious to me, and cheap to build too. Am I missing something?
You need a pump (and a filter) to recirculate the water, a heater for hotter water, and you need volume so that you can arrange everything so that they aren't touching and can all be washed. With a washing machine the size of half my sink, I'd be able to wash my largest pot and nothing else. With my small dishwasher, I can wash my largest pot plus almost everything else that's likely to need washing. Plus you'll want a seal that can keep in the steam, and some insulation to reduce the amount of energy you use continually reheating the water. Where does the lid go when you're not washing something? Does it lie flat on the counter next to the sink, taking up space you won't be able to use for anything else? What about the hinges? They'll be splashed with water repeatedly when you use the sink, so they won't last forever.
But sure, you could build a dishwasher into a sink; it's not impossible.
I find that recent models of dishwashers don’t work nearly as well as older models. They don’t heat up enough to dry water off of plastic, and the enzyme based detergents don’t seem to clean as well as the old phosphate detergents.
Also, the dishwasher in our current apartment (a cheap Whirlpool) often leaves a wet dog smell on the glasses, and we can’t figure out where it comes from or how to get rid of it. Apparently, this is a rather common problem, with hundreds of posts scattered across the internet where people with the same problem unsuccessfully try dozens of home remedies that fail to fix the issue. I never remember wet dog smell from the older units so I can only assume this results from some sort of energy saving feature that backfired.
I have the exact same problem and have gone down the exact same rabbit hole with no real solution.
Fully disassembling (essentially uninstalling), cleaning, and sanitizing everything that touches water seems to fix it for a few cycles, but it slowly comes back over time.
The problem has followed me across states, houses, and dishwashers. I’m assuming it’s modern enzymatic detergent like you suggest.
Slightly more frustrating is that not everyone seems to smell it, or not as strongly as I seem to. It’s like dishwashers everywhere are gaslighting me.
I’ve had the same experience at my parents house. Some glasses smell odd and nobody else seems to smell it. I also typically have a terrible sense of smell but find this off putting.
It doesn't help that the detergent manufacturers, who have an interest in selling more detergent, tend to be generous with their dosing instructions. Always follow the appliance manufacturer's dosing, not the detergent manufacturer's.
It's in the name of energy ratings; using less water at a colder temperature will reduce energy usage.
As for the smell "wet dog smell" is usually mold; rinse your plates of food remains before putting it in the dishwasher, clean out your filters regularly (not as necessary if you rinse beforehand), and run a hot, empty cycle with soda crystals. Also, leave it open to air out if it's not running (doesn't need to be open all the way, just enough for the insides to stay dry). All of that also applies to washing machines. Basically, moisture in a closed space will cause mold and smells.
I wouldn't worry about the rinsing thing with modern machines. Leaving the machine open to avoid mold is definitely advisable, though (some machines have vents for this, but most don't).
Our newer Bosch unit is the best-performing unit we've ever owned. We do follow their instructions to always use rinse aid (it has an automatic dispenser that needs to be refilled every couple dozen cycles), as well as the recommended detergent (Finish Powerball tablets, which we happened to be using already). We scrape off as much food as we can into the compost, but we only rinse things when we know they'll be problematic if they dry out before we run it (such as bread dough, eggs. etc.).
Yeah, it takes a few hours to run, but it's so quiet for most of the cycle we need to rely on the status LED to know it's running. We usually start it right before we go to bed (or better yet, set the timer after dinner so that we don't forget but can still load in dishes from a late snack or whatever).
My SO and I have been discussing this for years and everyone we've spoken with about this stared at us like we were crazy. It's weird finally encountering someone who is describing it in the exact same terms.
We do experience it in relation to our dishwasher sometimes, but I don't think the dishwasher is an essential component: it happens with handwashed dishes too. The essential factor, as far as we've been able to determine, is wet dishes which get in contact with outdoor air. However it only happens on some days and more often in some months/seasons!
My theory so far has been that it's a reaction between some molecule in air (something which varies in concentration over a period of days, perhaps a pollutant) and water. But it may as well be that it is interacting with detergent residue.
The interesting thing is that we don't actually manually measure detergent for our dishwasher but use detergent tablets, so the quantity never varies.
We had a bad fish smell on glasses; it was due to food particles trapped in the pump housing behind the screen filter. Disassembly and a hose-down of the screen, plus a vinegar load, fixed the issue.
I suspect the offending food particles will tend to always be somewhere near the heating element, aka bacterial incubator.
Do you open your dishwasher as soon as the cycle is done? For best results, according to my layman's opinion, make sure to open it and even pull out the racks / give the top rack a nice shake / check for any water left in recipients
You’re supposed to throw leftovers out before putting dishes in the dishwasher but rinsing before is overkill and greatly reduces both time and environmental gains of using one.
when I first got a dishwasher, it paid for itself in 8 months in water bills. you might argue my dish washing technique may have been suboptimal and you'd be right, but i believe many people do dishes in running water.
But why would you do that? It's a waste of time and energy, in my experience, when the washing machine does a perfectly fine (and often even better) job.
Your preaching to the choir to me. I know a very large number of people who do rinse everything nearly clean before putting into the dishwasher, they do not understand me.
I noticed that as well with a fairly new dishwasher but I just assumed that is because new dishwashers generally optimize to use less heat and less water, so the way to achieve similar results in this 'eco' mode is to have longer programs.
The regulations on the wash cycles, including water volume, time, energy, and detergents, are very restrictive. Older units were not subject to the same regulations.
For example, due to laws in California most commercial dish detergents won’t contain TSP (trisodium phosphate). I’ve been adding a bit of powdered TSP with the detergent pod to each load and it seems to have improved the results.
Indirectly, they do. Same thing as ES rules. The EU rules do not apply to the US, but by virtue of being a huge market, products are designed to follow those requirements. And companies will want to avoid creating entirely different product lines for different markets - so at least some of those rules and restrictions will end up in those products.
> She designed her first model in the shed behind her house in Shelbyville, Ill. Her lack of formal engineering education, however, became an obstacle, so she sought out someone who could help. Mechanic George Butters agreed to assist her in building the prototype.
So the engineer did all the actual hard work here in coming up with a working prototype, but the wealthy funder takes almost all of the credit, and puts the patent solely in their name.
A much fairer framing would be that the two of them were co-inventors.
No. She came up with the idea, she built the prototype, she had the vision. To name some lackey who only did what they were told an inventor is a disservice.
Lackey? That's like saying steve jobs founded apple and steve wozniak was a lackey. Ideas aren't worth anything unless you have someone who can actually turn the idea into a reality. Strange to see this kind of dismissive response of an actual engineer here.
Your making assumptions here. There's no details on what exactly was needed from an engineering perspective. Was it design? Was it merely the knowledge to work the tools? She hired this person, but would any engineer have worked? If all he did was follow instructions and a plan and build what she designed then he was a lackey. Now he may have been more then that. But all the information I've seen so far has pointed to her being the designer, her being the driving force for this.
Normally the person who comes up with the idea and basic design is considered the inventor. For anything even vaguely complicated, it's likely that multiple people are involved in building the prototype.
This propensity to give one person all or almost all of the credit is the problem. And it tends to be biased towards either the wealthiest person involved, or the one that just had the idea.
As you note, it is often a team effort, and so the whole team should be rewarded with the credit for the invention. Rather than basically ignoring those whose design and/or engineering expertise were essential to its completion and delivery.
I mean, I think the term 'inventor' is probably pretty unhelpful, in that in the popular imagination it _is_ a lone genius, and you're never going to stop people thinking that.
I think we need to know more about the employment details to say whether this is unfair. as an engineer myself (albeit of a different sort), nine times out of ten I would rather be paid a little more than have a patent in my name or receive "credit".
We had such pressure-operated dish-washer in 1958. It operated spendidly until the kitchenmaid advertized how convenient it was. They realized it wasted about a ton of heated water everytime, no recirculation of any kind. And this heat was created by janitor shovelling coal in the boilerroom for hours everyday. No central heating plants in Helsinki at that time.
There's an old time trick where you put a bottle with a wick (like a woolen thread) from the bottle into the house plant. There's pots with a system like that built in; water reservoir at the bottom, wick going to the top part.
I'm sure there's more expensive options involving timers and internet-of-shit as well.
I am actually looking into building something that helps with watering house plants.
Is your problem that you forget to water them, overwater them or just the sheer amount it takes to water your plants because you have so many? (Or maybe something else?)
Tip for the pro when buying a dishwasher. Make sure the distance between so lower and upper drawer is big enought that the "washing wheels" can still spin if you have your plates inside.
All recent dishwashers I have own have had adjustable upper drawer so you can move it up or down a few centimeters depending on where your load requires extra height.
You mean the filter at the bottom? Ideally you want to do it every time. Bosch/Siemens have an interesting way of measuring the amount of water:
Other manufacturers (and older BSH appliances) use a simple pressure switch. Bosch went all German engineering with a fully electronic system.
The intake has a propeller with magnetized blades and a reed switch that counts the rotations, so it knows exactly how much water goes in, which is pretty damn cool.
The turbidity sensor in the drain plays a vital role in this - it assures the mainboard that the dishwasher is, in fact, empty. Otherwise it would overfill.
And because of that, BSH dishwashers are very trigger happy with the drain errors. They could also be caused by pieces of food/glass in the drain pump, btw.
Surprisingly, this over-engineered solution is more reliable on a dishwasher because a traditional pressure switch gets clogged more often and is harder to fix.
Not often enough and yes. And then error 9 after the heater shorts out when the top up salt warning stops working :/ Fortunately the pump with integrated heater strip is relatively easy to replace.
I hated those heaters. The most common failure point. Made a lot of money selling them, though :D
And replacing the pump/heater assembly on a Bosch/Siemens is harder than on Indesit/Beko/Whirlpool. Have to fiddle with a screwdriver and a flashlight from the side.
On that note, the drainage needs cleaning often (or the sensor whines about it), and I liked the water flow sensor (which they use instead of a pressure switch) on Bosch/Siemens.
I've only had to do it once (3yr old machine), maybe every 2 years or so? Never seen error 24; I can just tell by ear when it's slowing because our air-gap seems to amplify the sound of draining water.
Most dishwashers have either adjustment handles or two sets of wheels/rollers on the upper tray. You can adjust the height by taking it out completely and switching to the other set of wheels.
Though I have seen ones that can't be adjusted. You could try getting an adjustable upper tray from a similar make/model. Usually they are interchangeable.
A socialite I can get behind. Imagine modern socialites doing the same!! Like, for example, Paris Hilton to invent cool new tech stuff instead of being famous for "one night in Paris".
A bathroom that could be sealed and cleaned as though it was a dishwasher would be great. For everything but the toilet, lightly pressured spray of hot water would probably be sufficient. Throw the towels in the wash, close the waterproofed door, press the cleaning button and head off to work. Then the door/vents open to air it out after the cleaning process. There are public toilets that do it so surely we could make an attractive home version of that?
And if not the entire bathroom, at least have self-cleaning toilets rather than almost every single model being a slightly different shape so there's no standardised solution better than a toilet brush.
The lifetime cost of paid cleaners or just cleaning the bathroom yourself has to be worth something that could be invested into a bathroom upgrade when building.