I recently renovated my kitchen. Well, when I say ‘I’, I mean I organised for a team of people to do it.

Part of the renovation was a brand spanking new dishwasher. I’ve never had one of these before and I’m in love.

I love that dirty dishes now have a home and when you’ve filled the dishwasher up, you put some powder or a tablet in it, turn it on, wait a couple of hours and voila – clean dishes.

I love that my kitchen routine has changed because of it. After dinner I used to wash the dishes and I hated having to do that. I’d rather just relax after dinner. Now, I might have a greasy pan to wash by hand, but otherwise into the dishwasher go the dirty dishes.

However, my son is not a fan. He hates having to open the dishwasher up every time he has to put something into it. He also doesn’t like having to put the clean dishes away. He, however, is begrudgingly getting on board. Obviously he didn’t spend enough time washing dishes pre-dishwasher because if he had, he’d appreciate this technology much more.

I had read that dishwashers are more environmentally friendly than washing by hand and upon further reading found that when many people wash dishes by hand they leave the hot water tap running. That’s incomprehensible to me. Before dishwasher, I had two sinks. One would be half filled with hot sudsy water, the other half-filled with hot water for rinsing and this would do for the whole wash unless it was  particularly large, greasy batch. I always started with glasses and cups, then cutlery, then plates, then plastics, and lastly saucepans and other cooking pans. So I don’t think my pre-dishwasher footprint was too bad. The downside was the the shoddy job I was doing, usually because I’d wash while not wearing my glasses.

Now I have a dishwasher I run it roughly every second day for two of us. I sometimes rinse things off before hand but I try not to and dishes are mostly coming out much cleaner. I’m using Ecostore’s dishwashing powder which is working really well for me and doesn’t leave that weird finish on the clean and dry plates that the dishwashing tablet often used by others does.

Oh, and incase you wondered, I bought an Asko dishwasher. I have no complaints so far. To me, it was worth spending the extra few hundred dollars. Others I know have bought cheaper ones and complain about them not cleaning properly.