Grey Water and Dishwashing

Using an EnergyStar dishwasher is more water efficient than washing dishes by hand.

This is good news for me as I think I could do without almost any appliance but not my dishwasher. Anytime my dishwasher breaks down my husband knows that fixing it quickly is Task A1. When we were first married we did not have a dishwasher and most of our arguments revolved around washing dishes. Just when we could finally afford a dishwasher the very bad news came out that using a dishwasher was a wasteful use of energy and water. I never gave up my dishwasher, but always felt guilty about it.

Recently, however, with the advent of EnergyStar dishwashers, I can lay my guilt to rest. An EnergyStar dishwasher typically uses 4 gallons of water per cycle compared to 6 gallons used by a regular dishwasher. An EnergyStar dishwasher saves an estimated 5,000 gallons of water each year compared to hand washing - woohoo! Of course, saving water means saving money - about $40/year.

In fact, the most water used by any dishwasher is the approximately 20 gallons used to prerinse your dishes. While I do not recommend stopping the prerinse - there are ways to do that without using any water:
1. Use a spatula instead of water - there is always a dirty spatula in my dishwasher that I can reuse for this job.
OR
2. Use "grey" water. Grey water is water you have already used for another purpose, but saved for a second use that doesn't require such clean water. In my kitchen sink I keep a bowl that collects water when we wash our hands, etc. Then I use this water and a dishwashing brush to rinse my dishes. Even if I am washing pots and pans, etc. I still collect that water to reuse to rinse dishes.

It is very easy to save that 20 gallons/day on rinsing dishes simply by making very small changes to your habits.