[glangdale]

Note that this is almost certainly less efficient in terms of time, water use and energy use, than using a modern dishwasher.

The other benefit we find of using a dishwasher in a family is that the dishwasher produces a consistent and good result as compared to a 8-12 year old trying to hand-wash, and kids can be trained to competently unload things if you store plates and glasses "low". So the aggregate effort for parents is almost zero.

I'm thinking that the bulk of people giving advice like yours live in smaller-scale households and don't entertain, or don't entertain in a way that generates any dishes. I think a dishwasher would probably be a bit weird if I lived alone, as it would take ages to fill with dirty dishes and I would probably wind up having to retrieve stuff from it all the time.

[tragomaskhalos]

If your kids are rubbish at washing up, which miraculously results in their being exempted from this thankless task, you may be witnessing what Scott Adams identifies as "strategic incompetence" :-) I suspect my wife of the same tactic, as the thought of her greasy half-washed efforts on the draining board always gets me to volunteer to do the dishes every night.

[glangdale]

Being rubbish at a task, at our house, results in you getting more. My youngest's crappy/lazy vacuuming job on his own room, for instance, earned him some "practice". :-)

We just don't have that much hand-washing to do. They are still rubbish at the task even when made to do it.

[bigiain]

Household of one checking in. I eat at home maybe 6 or 8 times a week.If I eat breakfast at home, I'll usually just drop the bowl or plate int he sink and fill it with water, then wash it while doing my dinner plate if I eat at home that night, or while waiting on the coffee machine the next morning. Mostly I wash dinner cooking utensils as I go, and my cutlery and crockery after I'm done (Friday or Saturday nights if I've eaten at home, they'll sometimes sit in the sink overnight...)

When I entertain, I deal with things as required. (Admittedly not often...)

[kingosticks]

I used to do this. Then I moved into a place with a brand new (efficient) dishwasher and did some rough experiments comparing the water usage. Now I just run the dishwasher every few days. It also has the added bonus of not needing to stack up stuff to dry.

[EADGBE]

Slightly unrelated, but depending on where/what you moved into, upgrading toilets to efficient ones* also makes a big different, for relatively little coin.

*I mean the efficient ones (a gallon of golf balls with 1 gallon of water marketing gimmicks, etc), not the "low flow" crappy ones.

[bornonline1]

That statistic of efficiency probably deals with averages and we should certainly not measure anything against American averages because American waste levels are absurd.

[rsynnott]

Generally the statistic is based on studies comparing a full dishwasher to washing the same stuff in a sink. The "just in time" handwashing described above is probably more or less the worst case from an efficiency point of view, though.