IF you use a dishwasher you could be needlessly pouring your cash down the drain by not following these simple hacks.
Almost 8 million households waste £71 a year by using dishwashers incorrectly.
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Needlessly rinsing items before loading the dishwasher, and not switching to ECO mode, is costing households around £70 a year in electricity and water.
This sees more than £450 million being poured down the drain each year, according to a new study.
Utilita Energy analysed the results of a 2,000-household study to reveal the two most common – and costly – dishwasher habits.
Three in five of the 12 million households with a dishwasher admit to pre-rinsing their dishes before loading the dishwasher (62%) at the cost of around £38 a year when using hot water, and £11 when using cold.
For the one in three households who use their dishwasher twice a day (31%), the associated costs will double to £76 and £22.
The average cost of double dishwashing is £25.48 per household, which wastes 4,576 litres of clean water each year – across all households that’s 2,422 Olympic-sized swimming pools of clean water each year.
On average, ‘double dishwashers’ rinse for 30 seconds up to two minutes each time, with two in five households (42%) admitting to rinsing items until they are sparkling clean, despite the machine having a rinse mode.
The study revealed that three in five households have never used their dishwasher’s eco mode (62%), which has the power to save each household £34 a year, on average.
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Almost half of all dishwasher households have never changed the machine’s settings at all (46%).
The results of the study revealed why households pre-rinse and the top five reasons were given:
- Concerned about clogging the dishwasher – (59%)
- Want to keep the dishwasher clean – (39%)
- To avoid breaking the machine – (39%)
- It’s a force of habit – (37%)
- To avoid the dishwasher smelling – (30%)
Households who choose not to pre-rinse gave the following reasons:
- It’s a waste of water – (59%)
- Pointless when the machine rinses them – (53%)
- My dishwasher has a rinse on the cycle (31%)
- My dishwasher tablets advise not to rinse (25%)
- I can’t stand touching dirty plates (7%)
The environmental impact of ‘double dishwashing’ alone is equivalent to the carbon emissions generated by driving 849 million miles in a standard car – that’s 34,000 times around the Earth’s equator.
Utilia’s head of sustainability, Archie Lasseter, said: “Knowing what our habits are costing us can encourage us to reconsider our behaviours, and in this case, the savings are significant, so should hopefully make households think twice.
“We can tell households how much money they’ll save, but until they load the dishwasher without pre-rinsing, and see positive results every time, they won’t be convinced.
“We hope that this informative campaign will encourage people to put confidence in their machines and save the pocket and the planet in the process.”
