Do you wash your dishes before you put them in the dishwasher?

[Lemonwurst]

11. We stopped doing that, on good advice

We always rinsed & scrubbed everything on its way into the dishwasher, for years, and for the same reason as you both.

6 months ago we entirely stopped, on the advice of a Bosch repairman who was fixing our microwave but telling us how to increase efficiency and longevity of all our appliances (not all Bosch).

He explained that dishwasher soap is designed to stick to grease, muck, etc. as would normally be on dirty dishes. That’s how it gets sudsy - and without any schmootz to stick to, it just glides over everything and goes down the drain.

We still quickly rinse off larger food chunks, but for the most part, dishes now go in very dirty, and they come out sparkling. Same with stainless steel cookware.

Two small downsides: 1) we can’t let the dishwasher filter get too dirty, so we set a calendar reminder to rinse it every three months. 2) if you have few enough dishes where you don’t run it every day, it could get a little smelly.

Keep doing what you’re doing if you’re happy with the results, but it’s not true that you’re making your dishes cleaner because of it.