subject: How To Save Energy And Money With New Dishwasher [print this page] Almost any new dishwasher will use less energy and water than the one you have now. The fact is just about every dishwasher made today meets EnergyStar efficiency standards. If you are thinking about getting a new dishwasher, now may be the time because over the life of the new dishwasher, the energy and water savings can easily pay back its initial cost.
Another important advantage of newer dishwashers is that the one you get will be a lot quieter than the one you have. This is because the newer ones have a better motor and pump design and higher levels of insulation.
The cost in running a dishwasher is for the energy needed to heat the water. If the new dishwasher design consumes less water, then less energy is needed to heat the smaller volume of water. Depending upon where you live, the cost of water consumption is just as an important environmental issue as how much energy is being used. To make sure you are comparing apples to apples when you purchase a dishwasher, compare the overall water consumption specifications for an average load cycle for the models you are thinking of buying.
How well a dishwasher cleans is, of course, a crucial feature. If it does not clean well, people tend to run it on the heavy cycle when normal should do as well or they hand rinse the dishes first. Rinsing uses more than 10 extra gallons of water and some people eve use hot water to rinse. Hand scraping should be good enough.
The best dishwashers use a 2 pump design. One pump is used for spraying the dishes and the other to drain the unit. Two smaller pumps use less water than those models that still use a single reversing pump which sprays in one rotation and rains in the other.
Most consumers can get along with the three basic cycles of light, medium, and heavy, rather than the half dozen which complicate cleaning. Newer electronic controls are convenient and efficient and when they are hidden it looks good but you cannot tell where the dishwasher is in its cycle. New models also have automatic dirt sensors which measure how dirty the water is to automatically figure out when the dishes are clean.
Other water and energy saving features include a filter option which strains the water inside the dishwasher to remove food particles. Self cleaning ones use a grinder for the food but this does make those models noisier. And finally, a rinse-hold feature uses only 2 gallons of water to rinse the dishes if you are not going to run the dishwasher for a period of time.
