Hidden in a regular-looking office building in Ohio is a secret lab packed with over 70 dishwashers, all being put to the test with your worst nightmare: piles of dirty dishes and hundreds of crusty pots and pans.
In this innovative dishwasher lab, a team of scientists has cracked the code on the best ways to use one of your home's most powerful machines — the dishwasher — to save you money, time, and, perhaps most importantly, family drama.
As the co-founder of The Cool Down, I recently got an exclusive tour of the secret lab, and I'm here to report that it pretty much changed my life — in the kitchen, at least — and now I'm letting you in on the secrets.
Here's what goes on in the secret dishwasher lab
Morgan Eberhard is my guide for the day. She's been a dishwasher scientist for Procter & Gamble, America's biggest dishwasher detergent manufacturer, for 13 years, and she's incredibly knowledgeable.
First on the tour is the "spa" — short for "soil preparation area," where the dishwasher team has some fun purposefully dirtying the most commonly used dishes, pots, and pans. That's all based on what they call "soil studies," where they spend thousands of hours with consumers to understand what and how different people cook (even testing the wash water that comes out of their dishwashers) and hearing about their biggest frustrations.
Those dirty dishes are then brought into the actual dishwasher lab, where dozens of different makes and models of dishwashers are put to the test with different detergents. There are 72 dishwashers in the lab, representing 80% of what's installed in people's homes, and they're swapped out every five to seven years as new technology hits the market, according to Eberhard.
Once the dirty dishes run through the machines, they're given a visual grade by sight and from an image analysis system where a computer program analyzes how much of, say, a lasagna or oatmeal dish is left behind, if any.
What's actually inside the "black box" in your kitchen
P&G's goal with the lab is to improve its own dishwasher detergent products and make sure they're surpassing competitor brands. But beyond that, Eberhard said, "our biggest hurdle is trying to get more people to use the dishwasher more often, just in general. Part of that is understanding what happens inside of it and understanding the sustainability benefits you can get," she told me.
"It's our personal mission to make sure that people are getting clean dishes out of their dishwasher when they use the dishwasher and the right product … so that they can get those water savings, energy savings, time savings, and money savings," she said.
To that end, the crown jewel in the lab is a custom-made plexiglass-front dishwasher that lets us see what's actually happening inside — instead of the typical opaque solid door. Unlike at home where I can just hear my dishwasher humming, here I can see the blades spinning, when and how much water is being released, and the exact moment the cleaning pod pops out of its container.
Why you should use your dishwasher more to save more
The most important thing I learn as we walk through the lab is how much less water dishwashers use than washing by hand. And less wasted water means less wasted money and time.
To break it down, typical Energy Star-certified dishwashers use less than four gallons per cycle, which is the same amount of water that comes out of a running tap in just two minutes. To put it another way, if you hand-washed a full load of dishes, the average person could typically use closer to two dozen gallons of water, compared to those four gallons your dishwasher needs.
Energy Star estimates that using a dishwasher could save you between 5,000 and 8,400 gallons of water each year. And because we typically wash dishes in warm or hot water, using a dishwasher actually uses two times less energy to heat the water, according to P&G's research.
This translates to money saved on your water and heating bills. Energy Star says that just by using an efficient dishwasher, you can cut your utility bills by about $220 per year, or $3,300 over its lifetime compared to hand-washing.
Plus, Eberhard told me those savings are increasing as machines continue to become more and more efficient.
Dishwashers also typically clean your dishes better — partly because they boost water temperatures to 140 degrees, allowing for better disinfection than what you can do by hand.
Pro tips: How to make your dishwasher work for you
Here's another type of savings to consider: your time. Think about your nightly routine — washing dishes probably takes you 15-20 minutes, but putting everything in the dishwasher probably takes less than five. In fact, Energy Star estimates that a dishwasher can save you over 230 hours (that's almost 10 days) of personal time over the course of a year.
For those who already use their dishwasher a lot to save time, this may be preaching to the choir, but some reports have suggested as much as 20% of people with a dishwasher say they don't use it. And a lot who do tend to under-use it, either by pre-washing by hand too often or withholding certain items that are fine to throw in there.
I cook a lot, and I use a lot of dishes. But since my lab visit, I've been putting almost everything in the dishwasher, from plates and cutlery to even pots and pans.
Side note: I did ask Eberhard about the placement of plastic items in the dishwasher, and while she said it's a personal choice, she recommends putting plastic like baby bottles on the top rack, away from the heating element at the bottom of the dishwasher, to prevent leaching or melting. She advises against putting chef's knives, delicate china, or wooden spoons and cutting boards into the dishwasher, because the temperature can crack wood, and aluminum and cast iron are also not dishwasher-safe.
Speaking of time and water savings, Eberhard told me emphatically to stop pre-rinsing my dishes. "If you do a quick rinse under the faucet, that's actually the worst habit you can do," Eberhard explained, because sensors in the machine won't recognize your dishes as dirty, and your detergent won't work as well, potentially leaving a film on your dishes.
For the best results, just scrape your food into the compost and put them right into the dishwasher.
Eberhard's other big tips include:
• Clean your filter regularly, especially if it looks grimy, which is about every two weeks for me. Check your manual if you don't know where it is.
• Actually put the detergent pod in the pod cup (don't just throw it in the machine).
• Make sure the pod and your hands are not wet, which could lead to the detergent getting stuck.
And remember: Don't put big pots and pans in the front, where they could block the detergent from getting to all of your dishes.
The bottom line
Since visiting the lab, I feel less guilty about running my dishwasher more frequently, even if it's not jam-packed (often every day, with a family of four), because I know it's using far less water than hand-washing.
Letting the dishwasher do the work has given me more time to read to my kids, check my emails, or get to the couch sooner, and way fewer fights with my husband around all the dishes I've stacked up from making dinner (although there's still the occasional argument about unloading the dishwasher, so he's not off the hook completely).
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