Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Handwashing vs Dishwashers

Episode Date: September 1, 2021

Josh and Chuck finally put to rest the age old debate over which is better – and learn a little about themselves along the way. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck over there,

and this is short stuff, and we're shortening it up stuff person. Yeah, this one is, it's amazing, especially when you are a listener of the Judge John Hodgman episode from our old pal, or old pals, Jesse Thorne and John Hodgman. How many cases come through, and not major cases, they do the smaller sort of just email cases at the end, about couples fighting over dishwashing. Yeah, I can totally see that because this is one of those things where you're just like, it's intuitively correct one way or another, but this is one of those beautiful and rare things where it's like, no, the one is demonstrably correct, the thing you should be doing, and even better, it's the thing that you wouldn't think would be the correct thing

to do. It's a beautiful thing, Chuck, and I'm going to stop talking in vague terms, and let's really drill into this. Yeah, and beyond what we're going to mainly talk about, which is, is it better to hand wash dishes or use your dishwasher, the nitpicky how to load a dishwasher thing is the subject of, it's just sort of one of the most age old arguments you can have in a marriage, because people come into the marriage or a relationship or partnership with very strong ideas on how to wash dishes. So how to load a dishwasher is in dispute? Like, should you hang from the ceiling or lay on the floor? Oh, sure. Like, should you do half of a dishwasher load? Do you load the silverware tines up or tines down, or does it even matter? Tines up, unless you're like some sort of

deranged criminal. Is it knives up or knives down? Knives up. Oh, so leave those stabby things just pointing up. Well, if it's an actual knife, you shouldn't be washing those in your dishwasher anyway, but I'm talking about like a dinner knife or a butter knife. Oh, no, what do you mean you shouldn't be washing a steak knife? You don't want to run a good knife through a dishwasher, pal. I don't care what the energy or water savings are. Why not? This is what I'm talking about. Because it wears them down and also usually if you have a good knife, you have a probably a knife with a good handle on it and they're not usually made to be run to the dishwasher. They start to crack or if it's wood, it becomes problematic. And there's no faster way to dull a knife than to run it

through a dishwasher. Is that true? Yeah. What dulls it? I believe particulate matter, beating it, kind of sandblasting it, and then also just the water, the effect of the water over time. These are the things I'm talking about. You don't want to do that. You don't want to do that. That people debate incessantly in marriages about dishwasher. Emily and I go back and forth about dishwasher stuff all the time because we both do it a little bit and it seems like one of those things in a partnership where one person should just be in charge and the other person should stay out of it. I see. Yeah, there are things like that. You mean I have laundries once. She's like, I am doing the laundry. Yeah, Emily won't let me do laundry. Yeah,

but dishwashing, we've never really had a problem with... Do you both load it? No, we both hand wash. Oh, no, you don't. No, it's true. We both hand wash. I've been researching this and I noticed some Cascade commercials and was like, is that true? Then that actually prompted me, a Cascade commercial prompted me to pick this one. When I researched it, I was like, no, the Cascade commercial tells the truth and this is something I should not be doing anymore, which is hand washing dishes. You have a dishwasher and you would still hand wash all your dishes. Yeah, we have a nice dishwasher too. Why would you do that? Well, one reason why is we thought that it uses less energy, water, all that stuff, which it turns out is just wrong.

And then the other reason why is I remember seeing the guy who created the hygiene hypothesis, or we talked about a study once, where people who eat off of plates or use utensils that have been run through the dishwasher had higher incidences of allergies to food and other things than people who hand washed because they were exposed to slightly more germs. So we were hand washing because it's dirtier, basically, is how you can boil it down. But now I'm kind of like, man, this seems like the wrong thing to do, hand washing dishes. And I did it all the wrong ways, water running the whole time, the whole shebang. All right. Well, I think that that actually turns out to be a setup and we'll take a break and we'll come back in,

even though you kind of spoiled it, we'll reveal the real truth right after this. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help this, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you

through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids relationships life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if

you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Chuck, reveal the truth. Well, it is a big misconception that using a dishwasher,

even, and they say you should really load that thing full, but I have seen statistics that even doing like more half loads per week is still a lot less water than hand washing dishes. Yeah, which is a real big surprise. I think one of the reasons why I didn't understand this, because you and I grew up with dishwashers that were terrible as far as efficiency and water use is concerned. But unbeknownst to us, even though I have a pretty new dishwasher, I'm guessing you probably do too, that they have advanced by leaps and bounds in the last few years, and now they're actually like lean, mean energy and water saving machines. They are. The Energy Star program in the United States, the government getting involved and

regulating things. Nanny State. Nanny State. It has really worked across the board. The Energy Star program has been a massive success, and a certified Energy Star dishwasher in the US uses less than four gallons of water per cycle. The whole thing. The whole thing, and you can go through four gallons of water every two minutes of your hand washing. Yeah, they have efficiency, high efficiency faucets now that typically come in at about one and a half gallons per minute, and I don't think it's legal to have a faucet more than two and a half gallons in the United States or 2.2 gallons per minute. But even still, like I did a little math and like you were saying, you'd seen before where even if you run half loads multiple times a week, if you're doing a

quarter of a load of dishes and you're using all four gallons, you're still probably using less water than you would to wash that quarter load by hand because it's probably going to take longer than two minutes to do all those dishes. If you have the water running the whole time, even running a quarter load is still going to save more water than if you were doing the dishes by hand. Okay, but hey, you're not using anything on your power bill. You're not burning any coal, or even using any solar to use your hands. Wrong. So it's clearly better to use your hands and not that energy consuming dishwasher, right? No, because that hot water, thank you for setting me up to look like the smart one here. I appreciate that. Because the hot water that's

coming out of your tap comes from your hot water heater. If you're using a hot water heater, in fact, you're actually using a lot of energy to heat that water and it's going on constantly. Whereas a high efficiency or just a regular new dishwasher uses kind of targeted hot water, not throughout the whole time. So it's not that water is not being heated the whole time while you're washing the dishes. If you use the dishwasher, it is while you're doing it by hand. That's right. With an energy star dishwasher, you can use that thing four times a week and it will only cost you and run up about $130 worth of energy a year. Not bad. A year. And that's even assuming 11 kilowatt, 11 cents a kilowatt hour I saw, which is a little less than average. Yeah, so dishwasher efficiency,

this is where Emily and I really get into most of our scrapes. It's not tines up or tines down. It is my, you know, I'm sort of the family packer. I'm the Tetris master. So when I'm packing a car for a trip or packing when we've had to move and stuff like that, she leaves that stuff to me because I'm really good at like making the most efficient use of a space. And I carry that over to the dishwasher. I can Tetris that thing. So it's so full. It's like can barely even hold the amount of stuff on a rack. And it just makes me so happy. Whereas Emily will get in there. She'll be like, she'll use the juicer in the morning and maybe the food processor that, you know, these things have large sort of multiple components. And that's it. You got like two glasses and then that stuff

to run a dishwasher load and it drives me crazy because then the stuff is stacking up in the sink. And I try to be like, honey, you got to put more stuff in here. And she's like, no, it's better just to run it more. You just got to stay on it. Well, so one of the things that popped up to me is, you know, it's just you, me and Momo and I here. So we have a limited number of dishes that we use and that we even have in some cases, we kind of try to trim it down to whatever we need. Not like, you know, we each have one fork or anything like that. But, you know, like the number of cups and that kind of stuff that we have hanging around is limited to where we couldn't do the dishes just once a week. You know what I'm saying? Like, you just can't. So

that's, it's kind of like, well, should I still run the dishwasher? No, you can't. Yes, of course you can. You come over anytime you want. That's my dream, dude. If Emily wouldn't think I was crazy, I would assign each family member a cup, a fork, a spoon, a knife and a plate and a bowl. And I would throw everything else out because we have, she'll go through eight water glasses in a day because she just sits them down and then goes and gets another one and it drives me bonkers. So you're decorating inspiration as like reeducation camp. Man, it makes me crazy. And then kids, like you'd be surprised at how much, how many dishes a six year old will go through too. Oh yeah, no, you totally can. Especially if you have a lot of

dishes, you go through a lot more. You know what I'm saying? Yes. Yeah. And then they build up too. They just kind of just accumulates. Dude, we've got like 25 coffee cups and I don't drink coffee. It's ridiculous. Oh my God. Emily likes cute coffee cups though. So what are you going to do? Deny her, her, her collection? No, and I don't actually blame her because that is the thing that we have the most of too is coffee cups. Yeah, because you can get cool stuff. And we like her plates. We have lovely plates that we like, but we also get into it with the other things in the efficiencies, which is resisting the urge to pre-rinse. I'll do a scrape and throw it in the dishwasher. And Emily's like, no, man, you got to rinse that stuff off really good or

it's not going to get clean. And they're saying not true. No, Emily's a demon from hell for even suggesting that apparently. I'll tell her that. Yeah, like you do not pre-rinse the dishes. That is a, as one of the guys from the Natural Resources Defense Council, I think the senior scientist, his name is Noah Horowitz, says it is a complete waste of water and energy and that you're a demon from hell if you do it. That's what the dishwasher is for. That's what I always say. But there's another thing that comes from our upbringing and our being 80s and 70s kids too is that did not used to be the case. Those things basically had to go in sparkling clean. Yeah, true. For them to come out sparkling clean. And now dishwashers are just that much better,

where if you scrape the stuff off and you put them in there, they're going to come out clean. Remember that ad for either dishwashers or dishwashing detergent where they baked in frosted a cake and then put the whole thing with the plate on it into the dishwasher and ran it and it came out clean? I don't remember that one. It's gross. It's almost as bad as that Lysol commercial where the woman uses the raw chicken to wipe her counters down rather than... Oh, I haven't seen that either. Oh, it's tough to watch. This one was not nearly as bad, but in the same ballpark for sure. Well, they say scrape it, fill it up as good as you can. Don't do the pre-rents. And then if you can afford to upgrade from that 1990s model that is using way more energy because it's going

to cost you in the long run with your water bill and with your power bill. So if you can scrape together the money to upgrade that to a better, more efficient newer machine than do so. Yeah, but it sounds like even those older machines, depending on how many dishes you have to do, they still save water compared to hand washing. Yeah, and I will admittedly hand wash really big mixing bowls or salad bowls. I'll hand wash that stuff because going back to my pet peeve, that takes up 40% of a rack. Right, it does, which is kind of inefficient. And plus also, it's satisfying to wash and then dry that off and put it back quickly. Yeah, I kind of like that. You guys are neat like that too. Yeah, I love the chaos. If you have... Well, you should come move in with us

like you're... I'm telling you, I'm really loving it. You can. All right. We'll give it a trial run. Okay. So if you don't have a dishwasher and you're like, well, I'd like to save energy and water, you jerks, but I don't have a dishwasher, there are things you can do to save water and energy. And that is if you can manage a two tub sink, you know what I'm talking about, the one with the divider in the middle, split tub, nice. You want to fill one up with warm soapy water, let the dishes soak in that for a while, and then fill up the other one in clean water and rinse them off in there and just put them up. Don't run that water while you're doing it. That is good enough. And that should do the trick. That's the key. And don't run water while you're

standing there brushing your teeth. No, I came up with the biggest waste of water that you can possibly do. It's where you dump ice out. So you're wasting water to begin with. And then you run warm water over that to make it melt faster. Oh no. I've done that before and I was like, this is the biggest waste of water you could possibly do. You throw that ice in the pot. There's no point in making, that's a great way to do it. There's a lot of stuff you can do just starting with the ice, but really trying to make it melt faster for zero reason whatsoever, then it bothers you that there's ice in the sink. That's a big waste of water. I've learned my lesson everybody. Okay. Well, is that it? Yeah, I think we admitted some things that didn't make

us proud of ourselves, but we can all move on now. Yeah. Well, thank you to everyone for listening and short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.