Dishwasher users...

[hillymum]

Do you rinse your dishes etc before putting them in the dishwasher? If so why?

[Smocked]

yes I rinse them to get all the food off.

[hillymum]

But why? Isn't that what your dishwasher does? I have never rinsed unless it's something like porridge which when it goes cold tends to work better than any glue I have yet to find.

[MamaFern]

i do too.. not sure why. habit? my partner doesn't and they never come out as clean as mine..

[Sailor]

Yes, I do as well. We run the dishwasher once a week. So, if we didn't do this, the food would be so caked on, the dishwasher wouldn't be enough to get it off.

We've tried not rinsing, but the dried food bits just don't come off.

If we ran the dishwasher once a day, then I wouldn't rinse as the food wouldn't have time to permanently dry.

Or maybe if we had a better dishwasher things would work without rinsing.

[taramoon13]

we rinse as our dishwasher is a piece o' crap!! some of the newer ones do say specifically NOT to rinse as the oils, etc. off the dishes helps keep everything lubricated. a relative has one and it works like a charm, i believe these are expensive though.

[anywaybecause]

I rinse my dishes first, for two reasons: we have crappy water pressure, and no garbage disposal.

[greenmansions]

We scrape food off the dishes, and rinse only if it's something that we know our dishwasher has a hard time getting off (like avocado for some reason) or that stains other dishes (like ketchup). In general we do not rinse the dishes. We run the dishwasher most nights tho, and put in pots and pans too to fill it up. We don't rinse the pans either and everything comes out very clean.

[lovesdaffodils]

I don't rinse. If I wanted to wash dishes by hand, I wouldn't have bought a dishwasher. But no seriously, I just do a quick scrape of any leftover food and right into the dishwasher. It gets ran just about every night, occasionally we skip a day if we eat out or something. My dishwasher isn't top of the line or anything, but everything almost always come out clean.

[Contrariety]

I view my dishwasher more as a sanitizer than anything else. I run a sink of water to pre wash all my dishes. It occurs to me that every time I eat at my MIL's house (who loads dirty food covered dishes straight into her very new, very fancy dishwasher) I am politely picking a crusty onion or leftover ketchup goo off my "clean" plate before dinner. I don't trust dishwashers to get the food off, I just don't... so I do a quick handwash before and use the lightest, quickest cycle in the dishwasher to sanitize.

[sewchris2642]

Yes. The dishwasher will last longer and have less plumping problems if you rinse first even if the manual says that you don't have to. Even if the dishes come out clean, all that left over food has to go somewhere. And that's in the pipes along with the water. We run ours twice a day, sometimes once, sometimes 3x. But then we are a multigenerational family of 4 adults, an 11 yo, and 3 kids under 5 (ok, so the baby doesn't use any dishes . And then there are the other family members that don't live here but show up frequently.

[Ironica]

We definitely do... because our dishwasher is decades old and doesn't do much besides get things really hot.

Dishes are way cleaner if we put them through the dishwasher, but they don't get clean at all if we leave stuff on them. Especially peanut butter.

[clraelle]

We dont rinse, if something needs to be rinsed we wash it by hand. I've read somewhere that your dishwasher needs dirty dishes for the soaps to work properly.

[flapjack]

Yes, or scrape thoroughly. Just habit, I suppose?

[cristeen]

Yes, we do. If I didn't, they'd come out dirty. Part of that is we only run the dishwasher twice a week, part of it is that the machine is fairly old, and part of it is that it's a free-standing machine, so it just doesn't have the bells and whistles of a built in.

[ShellieC]

Our dishwasher user guide specifically says to scrape food off of dishes, but not to rinse them. I'll let a plate soak if it's been sitting with dried on pasta sauce on it, or something else that's really caked on, but generally don't have to.

[onlyzombiecat]

I rinse things that I think will be difficult to remove.
Part of it is because I didn't have a working dishwasher for most of my life.
I got a new one in February and it is pretty good but it's still habit to rinse those dishes.

[springbabes]

I only rinse certain things--oatmeal, cooked-on egg, smoothies, canned cat food. It's a waste of water and time to rinse the dishes first. Sometimes one or two things come out of the dishwasher dirty so those get scrubbed and put back in for the next load. Oh, and I do pre-soak stainless steel pans.

[hibana]

I rinse thoroughly as it is easier to pre-clean the dish a little than it is to wrestle the catch screen out of the bottom of the dishwasher to clean it off. But we have a countertop dishwasher (thank you craigslist) so it's different from the undercounter or roll-around kind.

[Barefoot~Baker]

I scrape the food off and then put it in the dishwasher. It's made to handle very dirty dishes and pans and I often set it to "soak" or "power scrub".