Nobody needs a faster dishwasher – solve real user needs

https://louison.substack.com/p/nobody-needs-a-faster-dishwasher

by louison11 • 3 years ago

134 430 3 years ago

louison.substack.com

GeneticGenesis• 3 years ago

A more energy efficient dishwasher would be nice though...

kchandra• 3 years ago

And indeed, the author mentions exactly this:

An engineer with no such customer awareness and instead an incessant obsession with optimizing everything that can be optimized, might try to optimize for speed… when it’s likely the consumer cares more about: cleanliness, energy rating and capacity.

tempest_• 3 years ago

They are already pretty good.

Like 1 to 2 kwh, probably substantially less if you dont use heated dry.

morsch• 3 years ago

The worst dishwashers sold in the EU still use less than 1 kWh on the eco program.

https://www.coolblue.de/en/advice/energy-consumption-dishwas...

krono3• 3 years ago

Your children, if you have any, should make for rather efficient dishwashers at no additional cost if you play it smart.

yurishimo• 3 years ago

Except for the drastically increased amount of water usage. The cost is negligible to run the dishwasher compared to the additional hot water usage.

randomdata2• 3 years ago

There is an opportunity cost. Time spent washing dishes means time not doing something more productive.

colechristensen• 3 years ago

I don’t want more energy efficient things. I want more clean energy so that the things I use can work better by using as much energy as they need instead of cutting corners for efficiency.

shellfishgene4• 3 years ago

That's the current tradeoff in dishwashers (and washing machines), more energy efficiency means lower temperature, and then the detergents take longer to work. This is why we have 3:30 eco programs.

eetus• 3 years ago

I'm sure that some restaurants could use a faster dishwasher.

nemo44x6• 3 years ago

They do which is why they have special industrial dishwashers. I worked in a restaurant many, many years (decades?) ago. There was a room dedicated to dishwashing. There was a manual pre-rinse area and the washer itself would blaze through a rack of dishes in minutes. A guy manned it full time during the busy hours.

This wouldn’t be practical in a home.

dosinga• 3 years ago

Restaurants use faster dishwashers. Those things are a sight to be seen

fernandotakai• 3 years ago

yup! i used one once in my life and the amount of pressure they create is absolutely crazy. the one i used could clean + pre-dry everything in like, 90s.

chpatrick2• 3 years ago

I think they already use professional dishwashers that blast the dishes clean in about a minute.

This guy has one at home: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnKAVFBIH1c

abricq2• 3 years ago

This french company sells 'Bob', a miniature restaurant-like dishwasher: https://daan.tech/ch/discover-bob-mini-dishwasher/

hwillis2• 3 years ago

Having washed dishes for a while, actually no. A commercial dishwasher only takes ~2 minutes to cycle and dry. They run hot as all fuck. It's the people like me you wanted to be faster.

Commercial dishwashers are not as good at getting food off plates. Any crap left on the plate will get spread on everything else, so you have to pre-wash everything first. You should really do it at home too, but most of the reason a home dishwasher is slow is because it is actually trying to spray every dish, knock stuff off, and then grind it up enough to go through the exit filter. Also, you should clean your filter.

eru11• 3 years ago

Any crap left on the plate will get spread on everything else, so you have to pre-wash everything first. You should really do it at home too, [...]

Why? If I have to wash my own dishes, that would defeat the point of a dishwasher..

Volundr2• 3 years ago

My dishwasher manual specifically tells me not to pre-rinse.

FredPret• 3 years ago

Restaurant dishwashers are a different beast to what you have in your kitchen. Gets the job done in seconds. Of course, they are also very expensive, really loud, uses very hot water, are really large, and probably use harsher chemicals.

kwhitefoot3• 3 years ago

I worked in a hotel kitchen as a teenager in the early 70s. I don't think we used any chemicals at all in the dishwasher. But we did rinse the dishes first. They were so hot when they came out of the washer that they dried instantly and were too hot to handle with bare hands.

bell-cot• 3 years ago

Oooh, yes. Though the "done in seconds" commercial dishwashers are a good number of model & feature upsells above the most basic ones. Might need 240V and serious amps, too.

jonnycomputer3• 3 years ago

Back in college i spent a year working part-time as a dishwasher for the school cafeteria. That amounted to me using a high-pressure sprayer to pre-clean some of the dishes and utensils (watch out spraying those ladles though!), and then putting them on a conveyor belt that would wash and dry them very quickly. Much like this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCM13eOWVgY

red-iron-pine• 3 years ago

Same idea as every restaurant I've worked at, though some were smaller.

But yeah basically high pressure hose + conveyor belt.

The dishwasher's job was mostly to scrape and spray everything beforehand, pull forks out of the trash, etc. Some glassware had to be done by hand, too.

You're supposed to let the dishes cool before using, but in practice they went out almost immediately. Could cause problems if they were chilled rapidly, hot glasses used for sodas with ice, etc.

carlosjobim2• 3 years ago

Restaurant dish washers are already extremely fast and efficient. They wash dishes in a couple of minutes. They also consume a lot of power and water, and take some time to heat up in the morning when starting work.

leejoramo• 3 years ago

As others have mention, commercial dishwashers are faster. With cycle times well under 2 minutes.

The primary purpose of a commercial unit is to sterilize. Cleaning off stuck food is secondary for the machines, as a by hand pre-wash is assumed.

There are two main styles to achieve sterilization:

1) chemical systems. These need a water source of around 130F, use a series of harsh chemicals for cleaning, sterilization and speeding drying. While a home water heater is usually set to a high enough temperature, the commercial dishwasher requires its compartment water to be at this temperature. This usually requires a near by instant water heater.

2) hot water systems. These rely on a water source that is around 180F and do not typically rely on additional chemicals. To get water hot enough requires an attached heater. In North America, this often requires a Three Phase electrical connection.

All of the commercial systems use vastly more energy and water. They produce huge amounts of noise. And far more steam than a home owner would want, they often require ventilation systems to deal with the steam.

This covers the basic styles of dishwashers that would be somewhat recognizable to a homeowner. In fact there are a vast number of specialized systems, depending on specific task and operational scale.

Source: I own a coffee house/bar/bakery

More info

https://www.webstaurantstore.com/guide/620/types-of-commerci...

akskos• 3 years ago

I'd love a faster dishwasher. So annoying when there's something in there i need and it'll still wash for another 40 minutes

NikolaNovak2• 3 years ago

Happens frequently ; I just take it out and resume the cycle for the rest.

thebigspacefuck• 3 years ago

Always feels like it’s releasing a soapy steam cloud into my face

thiht4• 3 years ago

Pro tip: you can open the dishwasher at any time during the cycle. It's not a washing machine. There's not a lot of water in it, it'll just fall at the bottom of the dishwasher, and you can take whatever you need (or add things you forgot)

anticensor• 3 years ago

Some dishwashers actually lock the door.

rvz• 3 years ago

Or they’re only better ideologically, and in that case, only valuable to those who share the same ideology. Which is fine if the market for that ideology is big ... But other markets, like decentralized social media, make no money, because very few people care about their social media being centralized. They care a lot more about it being entertaining and insightful.

He's perfectly described Mastodon. A magnificent solution in search of a problem aimed at catering to ants. Hence the dominoes of instances shutting down one after another.

dale_glass2• 3 years ago

I don't know, Mastodon seems to do what it intends to do quite well. I don't find the fact that it's not taken over the world that big of a problem.

Mastodon is in my view ideological in the design and of course most attractive to people who share that particular ideology. And that's quite a lot.

I find it very refreshing compared to Twitter: it doesn't want to maximize engagement, it doesn't want me to follow more and more people. It's a boring tool that does a job quite well, which is exactly what I want from it.

bradleyjg6• 3 years ago

Dishwasher cycles have been getting longer and longer and it’s a pain in the neck. Give me back my hour long cycle and actually clean dishes, please.

h2odragon• 3 years ago

But that would require phosphates and those are bad now

ROTMetro2• 3 years ago

Only bad for residential users. They are actually totally OK for commercial users (in America rights and restrictions get split into different classes for different groups of users now).

krisroadruck5• 3 years ago

You can blame detergent regulations for this. About a decade or so back phosphates were banned from detergents. The problem is that was the thing that made them work really well. In order to compensate for less effective detergents, cycle times have gotten longer.

Phosphate detergents are still available in commercial soaps, but I don't recommend skirting the regs here as they had some solid reasoning (algae blooms). Instead you can get away with shorter cycles by doing 2 things.

First - run your tap until the water is hot before starting the cycle, and second, use a booster powder instead of only using a pod or the main detergent door. These 2 things will get significantly more gunk off your food during that first rinse phase. As a result you may be able to get away with the "quick" cycle.

shellfishgene4• 3 years ago

I think the long cycles are more related to energy efficiency regulations, most dishwashers default to a 3h 'eco' cycle with 50 degC, but also have a 1h 65 degC cycle.

The hot water tip does not apply in most parts of the world I think as the heating is done in the dishwasher (hence the temperature settings).

bradleyjg6• 3 years ago

Aren’t phosphates a critical component of fertilizer? I’d think that’d be a far larger source of runoff than dishwashers.

bick_nyers3• 3 years ago

Dishwashers contain a heating element no? Not sure if booster powder is a specific product but yeah detergent on the little lip of the main detergent door is a significant help.

For those interested, here is a wonderful 30min deep dive by none other than Technology Connections about dishwashers and detergent usage: https://youtu.be/_rBO8neWw04

mgdlbp• 3 years ago

Funnily, if you ask around outside America, you'll get the opposite advice: a cold water connection gives better cleaning, because starch and protein do not coagulate in the initial rinse[0]. I suppose conventional wisdom only serves the status quo. Which effect is actually greater? Have yet to find a scientific test.

[0] Compare what you find with

  dishwasher hot water site:reddit.com
  dishwasher hot water site:forums.whirlpool.net.au
  spülmaschine warmwasser forum

PS: dishwashers with condensation drying cool the tub with water for the next run stored in a tank beside it. This is probably why European brands have a reputation of not drying in the US.

ROTMetro2• 3 years ago

I love how you just gloss over 'solid reasoning' and 'still available in commercial soaps'. If it's bad enough to be taken out of residential use it should be taken out of commercial use. There should not be separate classes of what people are allowed to do in America. Things like this previously drove me to be an a*hole libertarian out of frustration.

thiht4• 3 years ago

Not sure what you're putting in your dishwasher, but FWIW I have a 30 minutes / 60°C cycle on my dishwasher (off-brand) that I use when I forgot to run it at night. Dishes come out clean as new.

The eco cycle I use at night is 50°C and longer (not sure how long, that's why I run it at night) and everything always come out clean as well.

bradleyjg6• 3 years ago

Whenever anyone complains about how appliances are getting worse and worse in the name of eco friendliness there’s always someone that pops out of the woodwork to say that actually they are great.

If this was true we wouldn’t need bans in the first place. CRTs weren’t banned and where are they now.

t-writescode2• 3 years ago

You may or may not have seen Technology Connections' many, many videos on the subject of dishwashers.

The tl; dr is:

  * use the basic powder stuff
  * put some of the basic powder stuff in the "pre wash" section
  * if your washer doesn't have a prewash, sprinkle a little on the inside
  * turn the sink water on hot until it's producing hot water before starting the dishwasher
  * if your dishwasher has a filter for food, check that it's empty
  * you're probably using too much detergent

https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections/search?query=...

pottertheotter• 3 years ago

I found this to be bad advice. I switched to the basic powder stuff for a while and my dishes were always horrible. Went back to Cascade Platinum pods and I've never had a problem.

skhameneh• 3 years ago

Check out the Miele G7000 series, I got the Miele G7156 (entry-ish model for the 7000 series) and exclusively buy their consumables (except for water conditioner salt). Calibrate your water hardness and double check your install (just in case, install techs where I live will just breeze through menus and do really dumb stuff they shouldn't like run it with the softener dry). Then set it to Quick + Intense Zone and never mess with the settings again... It just works and the time estimates are dynamic, we get ~1h4m full cycles with three washes per cycle. You can make it faster, but only by reducing intensity or reducing the wash count per cycle. It's amazing and possibly my favorite appliance purchase. As I said entry-ish, but only for their latest series, it's still luxury, and the steps up are mostly AutoDos (automatic consumable discs at a premium price), connectivity, and touchscreens. The G7156 is basic non-connected, has push buttons, has a water softener and will auto-open for faster drying (can be turned off, but I suggest keeping it on).

astura2• 3 years ago

My dishwasher (a Samsung) has an "60 minute express wash" option.

I've never used it in a full load, but it works well when I have a smaller load.

goblinux• 3 years ago

My dishwasher has a beeper for when it’s done like a microwave. It drives me up a wall!!

I don’t care when dishes are done, I don’t need to attend to them urgently. They can sit there clean until I’m ready for them.

There is no way to disable this beeper and it goes off every minute after the cycle is complete. Thank god the dishwasher has a wall switch to the circuit so I can just kill it but oh man. Never buying Bosch again

(Edit) I say all this to say my dishwasher was engineered by the same kind of engineer who 1) has obviously never used the product or washed dishes and 2) optimized for “dishes are clean out them away RIGHT NOW” even though nobody uses a dishwasher like that

kwhitefoot3• 3 years ago

My wife had a saying that applied to almost all of this kind of thing:

  Designed by a man!

dudul3• 3 years ago

And yet, I bet women were pretty happy when men created the dishwasher.

MattPalmer1086• 3 years ago

Hopefully we will eventually arrive at a place where it could have been designed by a woman!

the_third_wave3• 3 years ago

Good for your wife and I hope you have some snappy retort. Then, again...

Imagine if someone here said something similar about some dysfunctional piece of equipment:

   Designed by a woman!

Either both of these made-in-jest sayings should be accepted - which is fine by me - or neither of them. Have a look at the way men are portrayed in commercials to see how far this imbalance has gone: Men are smelly badly-dressed clumsy idiots who would not make it far in the world were it not for all those smart women who... [1].

So, ladies, what's it gonna be? Free for all like it used to be with women making fun of men and men making fun of women or shall we have this boring speech-policed culture where each word has to be weighed and approved by the experts?

[1] ...fall in the trap of buying useless products?

bongoman37• 3 years ago

I know people in the Bosch product design team, there are certainly women there.

expertentipp• 3 years ago

Does it have a digital clock? Adjusting the bloody clocks on every appliance twice a year is such fun.

eru11• 3 years ago

Only in places that twiddle with the clocks twice a year.

jjtheblunt3• 3 years ago

That is nuts and I’ll not buy an appliance with a clock for that reason.

Ekaros3• 3 years ago

Mine is integrated... Meaning behind fake door...

So no visible clock... But also no visible indicator of how long it will go on... I might prefer the incorrect time to that...

fallinghawks• 3 years ago

I kinda wish mine had a clock (though I agree it's a pain having to adjust for DST). The power company has a lower rate after 9pm so I'd love to be able to set the dishwasher start time. Instead mine had a start delay, which technically works but is just more klunky.

Angostura2• 3 years ago

From the manual

Cycle Completion Signal The cycle completion signal alerts you when a cycle completes and the dishwasher has washed and dried the dishes. You can choose to disable the tone or adjust the volume. NOTE: The unit must be powered OFF before activating. To activate:

• Press and hold the right "Cancel Reset" button then press and hold the ON/OFF button.

• When the light on the "Cancel Reset" button you are pressing illuminates and the tone goes off, release both buttons.

• Press the far right "Cancel Reset" button until you achieve the desired volume or until there is no tone (to turn off).

• Press the ON/OFF button. The setting is now saved.

You're welcome :)

causi• 3 years ago

Even if it didn't have the option, all you'd have to do is open up the front panel and rip the beeper off the board. That's what I do to my microwaves that can't be muted.

jaclaz4• 3 years ago

From the manual

Out of curiosity, how do you know the make/model of goblinux's dishwasher?

Brian_K_White4• 3 years ago

It's the oldest trope since BBS's, if you want free expert information how to do something, just go on any forum and say it wrong, and 20 neckbeards will step all over each other to provide the most correct most efficient most elegant directions.

I'm guilty myself. It's a fine tradition I have no problem with. ;)

nyczomg• 3 years ago

No idea why I didn't think to look into this more - but my bosch dishwasher has been driving me crazy since I moved into my current house. Thank you! I can now start a load of dishes right before bed without knowing I'll be incorporating a periodic beeping from the kitchen in my dreams!

For other bosch owners out there - older models label the button as cancel/drain. This article was helpful for my model https://www.fixya.com/support/t24500578-want_disable_beep_wh...

Back on topic - if this thing could wash a load in under an hour that would be amazing. No idea what the author of the article is talking about...

shellfishgene4• 3 years ago

It can be useful because if you open it while the dishes are still warm, they dry better. Usually you can turn off the beeping with some button combination, just google it for your model.

_joel2• 3 years ago

Mine beeps and opens it's door, I quite like it. The washing machine make a Yazoo style beep to that I sing along to.

Definitely need to get out more.

hwillis2• 3 years ago

I've got a couple devices that are useable from my phone only. My first reaction to your comment was "why not have a wifi status page for my dishwasher?" Hell, you could put a 90 cent weight sensor on the racks to tell you when they've actually been unloaded vs. the door has just been opened.

On the other hand I don't want another damn app. Why is all that crap bluetooth and phone-only? Why can't I install these things on my router?

bick_nyers3• 3 years ago

I feel like a simple email would be a much cleaner and cheaper solution than literally everything else that "smart" appliance manufacturers do. It might be a really "disconnected from the average person" opinion though.

shellfishgene4• 3 years ago

You need home assistant or something silmilar. It's more of a hobby than a convenience though ;)

peeters• 3 years ago

Thank god the dishwasher has a wall switch to the circuit so I can just kill it but oh man.

Surely just opening the dishwasher a crack would be simpler than cutting the power?

cactusplant73742• 3 years ago

The LG washing machine in my apartment has a lot of chimes (even on the ZZZ quiet mode). And it doesn't appear there is a way to disable them. It's really irritating.

jjtheblunt3• 3 years ago

We disabled them on our LG. How to do so may be hidden well however.

dkresge• 3 years ago

Interesting. I recently admired the creative engineering of my neighbor’s dishwasher which simply, and quietly, projects a small status light on the floor.

It’s a Bosch.

jmull• 3 years ago

I have a Bosch and it doesn't beep when done. So I guess it's not all of them.

bick_nyers3• 3 years ago

Well... there is certainly a way to disable that beeper, but it may void your warranty.

I've been strongly considering cutting out the beeper in my refrigerator, which will aggressively beep after a mere 20 seconds of being open. One way I like to cope with this frustration is to subscribe to the conspiracy that it is an intentional anti-pattern designed to motivate me to upgrade to a more expensive model that has a (stupid) window. I'm very comfortable with the idea that I'm going to stand there and stare mindlessly into my fridge, basking in indecisiveness. I don't think I waste as much energy doing this as the glass does, being a poor insulator.

mgbmtl• 3 years ago

I found it annoying at first, but sometimes we don't close the door properly because it's too full, or a badly closed drawer is blocking the door.

gvb• 3 years ago

Our new(er) Bosch dishwasher beeps three times at the end of the cycle. I like it because it alerts me to open the door a couple of inches to promote drying.

All the dishwashers[1] I had previous to this had a real drying cycle that actively vented the humidity and was effective. My Bosch doesn't vent the compartment so the dishes take forever to dry if you don't open the door.

[1] Said dishwashers all manufactured over 20 years ago, before draconian energy efficiency requirements came into effect.

thiht4• 3 years ago

I wonder if dishwashers could have a setting to automatically open the door. It would be so much more useful than beeping.

Edit: apparently some brands already have dishwashers with automatic doors, so cool!

Doxin2• 3 years ago

Mine just... pops open by itself.

hedora5• 3 years ago

Current Bosch dishwashers are packed full of something that absorbs water as it cools. So, that’s solved. As a bonus, there are no heating coils above the top rack to melt plastic stuff.

speed_spread2• 3 years ago

I'm pretty certain that's not an engineer's feature but rather the great idea of a product manager answering to marketing concerns wanting to make the product more "human" or some shit like that. The engineer sighed, implemented the thing, kept his job and moved on.

BTW, my Samsung _played a 30 second song_ (loudly beeping) when it was done. I think it was Schubert or something? And again, no documented way to shut it up permanently. Super fun at 2am to be when woken up by a machine that you bought because it's supposed to be quiet.

pchangr2• 3 years ago

It was possible to disable it on mine with the Smart things app. You can even tell it to send a push notification instead. I absolutely hated the sound but loved the notification as it will remind me and I would just dismiss it when I did it.

yanellena• 3 years ago

Honestly I'd send it back to the shop. Though it's wise to avoid all Samsung appliances because of the huge failure rate.

Chris20482• 3 years ago

There is no way to disable this beeper

Not officially, but there's always a wire that could be snipped, or a speaker that can be smashed..

Tor38• 3 years ago

Which reminds me about where I worked back in the neolithic.. we had an intruder alarm horn in the corridor, which was supposed to sound if someone didn't enter the magic sequence at the entrance door.

But it had some issues, so sometimes it just went off. It was very loud and annoying. One day our tech manager couldn't take it anymore and came running out of his office, with a nipper in hand, and, as he was a really big guy, reached up to the horn up at the ceiling and cut the cables.

userbinator• 3 years ago

My decades-old washing machine has a clearly labeled "cycle end signal loudness" knob. It ranges from off to so loud I can hear it from the other end of the house on a different floor.

The other reply with the instructions on how to adjust the volume of the signal shows just how far UI has regressed. Instead of twisting a knob, you need to know some obscure key sequence.

hedora5• 3 years ago

Now that we have kids, I like the security through obscurity of the poorly designed menu.

Of course, I’ll eventually be unable to read all the necessary tiny print, and will then need to get the kids to fix the settings…

KiwiJohnno• 3 years ago

My dishwasher (LG) plays a cheerful tune to let you know when it has finished its cycle (60 mins) At least its not too obtrusive, and it only does it once.

But.... then it has a cooldown timer, and if you open the door within the next 30 mins it LOSES ITS SHIT at you, beeping and carrying on because the dishes haven't finished drying.

I mean... Why play the happy tune to announce to the world that you've finished... when you actually haven't.

hedora5• 3 years ago

Our LG oven plays all sorts of fucking tunes for preheat, timer done, etc. The only tones you can disable are button presses and microwave done.

Also, it is a dual oven, and the top half is also a microwave. The problem is that the top half oven functions insist on being given cooking times after baking modes preheat. (99h99m is my usual go to, which causes it to round down and demand a second “start” keypress).

The final cherry on top is that it has a fucking modal UI. Like vim, but on a kitchen appliance. The terminal state for most actions is where it says “program complete”, and you have to press “clear” before it will accept any other keystrokes.

I’m pretty sure the people that set the meat thermometer to aggressively cool the oven at target temperature (instead of just beeping out a god awful unmutable song) have never actually cooked. I suspect they don’t even understand what “human food” is.

dahfizz• 3 years ago

My Bosch clothes dryer does the same thing. It will continue to beep at you forever after drying my clothes. Who thought this was a good idea???

Interestingly, my Bosch clothes washing machine has a button to disable the beeper. But not the dryer, even though they come as a stacked pair. ????

Edit: yes, I did read through the manual and entered the magic cheat code to make the dryer silent. Still a befuddling and frustrating experience.

hedora5• 3 years ago

That makes sense. If you disable the beeper on the washer, your clothes will get all smelly and moldy when you forget to unload it. At that point you’ll probably turn it back on.

The poor little beeper on the dryer is defenseless by comparison. If you leave it disabled, how will it find meaning in its life?

poulsbohemian• 3 years ago

My dishwasher has a beeper for when it’s done like a microwave.

You'd hate my LG then - it texts me to tell me it's done.

asadlionpk• 3 years ago

I assume this is a wifi-enabled push notification and not a dishwasher with a sim and modem(!!)

Tor38• 3 years ago

I saw a model house which had two dishwashers. One for extracting clean dishes, one for inserting dirty ones. Switch forth and back. Obviously you wouldn't want dishwashers with alarms for that.

As for microwaves.. the good old ones had a simple spring-driven timer, turn the wheel and when it hit zero it hit a bell, physically.. a single "pling". Perfect.

But the new one I bought as a replacement would beep five times, and keep beeping even if I opened the door. Crazy and totally useless. I want to have a.. word.. with industrial designers sometimes.

The microwave I have now also annoyingly beep five times, but at least it stops when I open the door.

alias_neo3• 3 years ago

I have the same hate. I had a nice Bosch dishwasher I chose and bought in my last home, but I left it behind for the new owners. It would beep 3 times, 5 minutes apart and then stop. The beeps were gently.

My new home has a Kenwood, and it will beep few minutes, forever. If I start a wash before bed, I will literally hear it all night, no matter where I am in the house. Some nights I'll go downstairs just to turn it off if it's particularly bothering me.

Like you, I don't give a shit when the dishes are done, they can stay in the dishwasher until I'm ready to empty it, the stupid forever-beep is terrible design that like the linked article, makes weird assumptions about how you use your kitchen and dishwasher).

jhoechtl3• 3 years ago

My dishwasher is quiet, bit my washing machines and the dryer are talkative. Both have a setup AND a dedicated quiet mode button to silence them. Maybe you should invest some time to RTFM?

askvictor• 3 years ago

Conversely, a washing machine should have a beeper, as you need to take it out kind of urgently. But my Bosch washing machine lacks this.

kardianos• 3 years ago

My dishwasher has a setting that finishes in 1 hr. I always use it and would use a faster setting if available.

First order reasoning often fails in light of actual experience. It isn't that the reasoning was faulty, it was the underlying knowledge of reality was incomplete.

dsr_• 3 years ago

I use the 1 hour setting when I have too many dishes for one load and I would like to solve the problem today instead of tomorrow.

It uses about 4L more water than the 3 hour 'eco' setting. All winter long my house uses hot water anyway, so this is only a technically measurable savings in summer. In practice it is swamped out by other variations.

nemo44x6• 3 years ago

Pro tip about your home dishwasher: Run hot water out of your faucet until it’s extremely hot before starting your dishwasher. (Considering the faucet and dishwasher use the same plumbing to pipe water in)

The reason why is dishwashers line to do a rinse in the first cycle and for most people the water isn’t hot enough. So it fills up with lukewarm water and isn’t as effective.

Another option is to have a hot water circulator installed so you always have instant hot water.

Macha3• 3 years ago

Depends where you live, houses here usually have separate hot and cold water feeds and the dishwashers take only a cold input, relying on an internal heating element if they need hot water.

nemo44x6• 3 years ago

Not according to Maytag:

https://www.maytag.com/blog/kitchen/do-dishwashers-use-hot-w...

maccard3• 3 years ago

This assumes your dishwasher is hooked up to the hot water feed in the first place, most aren't. Most have a cold water intake and a heating element that heats it up internally to the correct temperature, so actually your tip is just wasting water (potentially hot water) for anyone who has a modern dishwasher.

eru11• 3 years ago

It seems hot water feeds to your dishwasher are an American thing. Everyone else in the world has their dishwasher heat cold water.

nemo44x6• 3 years ago

I thought it was the reverse today. They used to heat hot water but now rely on hot water I put due to energy efficiency requirements. They keep water warm but don’t really heat it.

iso16315• 3 years ago

Every dishwasher I've owned has a cold water inlet and uses electricity to heat the water to the required temperature.

nemo44x6• 3 years ago

Maytag says your wrong:

https://www.maytag.com/blog/kitchen/do-dishwashers-use-hot-w...

It they were installed wrong. The heating element just helps keep it warm. It won’t make it hot enough.

Pxtl3• 3 years ago

"people need their dishes clean by next meal"

Sadly, modern dishwashers are not only are slow, they also suck at this too. I don't mind the slower performance since I get why, but the number of times i open the dishwasher to find half the detergent in the dispenser and all the bowls with stuff cooked on kills me.

The HP-ificaton of major appliance brands is so infuriating.

eru11• 3 years ago

You might be using yours wrong? See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rBO8neWw04

Pxtl3• 3 years ago

I've watched that actually. I since started using the pre-wash dispenser, and done routine cleanings (and if your appliance requires routine cleanings, making you disassemble the thing to access the filter is inexcusable). It's improved things a little, but not enough.

Considering that all 3 Maytag appliances I bought at the same time are defective in various ways, I'm treating it as another instance of a major brand strip-mining their reputation by selling cheaply built garbage until consumers finally give up on them.

jonnycomputer3• 3 years ago

Most of the comments here are basically explaining why they actually would like faster dishwashers.

Choose your motivating examples carefully.

yetihehe• 3 years ago

It doesn't matter how carefully you chose your examples, internet is so big that exceptions will happen and people like to voice their contrarian opinions (nothing wrong with that).

jonnycomputer3• 3 years ago

Actually, no. Because you see, we have many discussions here on HN where a substantive post doesn't get sidetracked by it. The article isn't even about dishwashers!

D13Fd• 3 years ago

No surprise it sparked these comments, it's a terrible example. Plenty of people (myself included) want a faster dishwasher, and many people (restaurants) need a faster dishwasher.

yen223• 3 years ago

Most people here don't want faster dishwashers, they want an argument =)

SilverBirch• 3 years ago

A funny way to look at this, is to go the other direction in the logic. The logic in this article is basically all these products have this property, oh and he's a reason would result in this. Well let's apply the same to web3 social media start ups. As the author correctly points out, for the average user these products are pointless. So what's going on? It's as if an entire industry has sprung up of super fast dishwashers (ignore the fact that this exists for commercial businesses).

What is actually happening is crypto/web3 is a scam, and social media is a great fake product because your "customers" think you're trying to get them onto your new social media site whilst what you're actually doing is selling them worthless tokens with the promise of some future value that'll clearly never come.

Businesses exist to make money by serving customer needs.

Yeah, and that's really hard, which is why they're not doing it!

dale_glass2• 3 years ago

I think this is going a bit too far. Sometimes it's perfectly legitimate to serve an ideological need, because there's enough people with that particular ideology.

Eg, things like Mastodon are great if you want to find a community that best fits you, because you have a rare interest or some characteristic controversial for a reason or another that makes existing on some place like Twitter difficult. So you can find a community that enforces standards that are very close to your ideal, and delegate that to them, and just do your own thing.

Not everything has to be like Twitter or Facebook, aiming to swallow the entire planet. There's room in the world for places like Hacker News that are only relevant to a small segment of the population. What's important though is to have a good sense of perspective about what need you're serving and how many people are there who need that. If you're aiming for something like decentralization that will have some costs to it that means you're unlikely to ever go world-wide. But so long you're happy enough with that, there's nothing wrong with it.

hanifc• 3 years ago

I think this is going a bit too far. Sometimes it's perfectly legitimate to serve an ideological need, because there's enough people with that particular ideology.

The author would probably agree.

Or they’re only better ideologically, and in that case, only valuable to those who share the same ideology. Which is fine if the market for that ideology is big.

ryangittins• 3 years ago

This is a fantastic analogy for something which has bothered me for years! One example which comes to mind is pushback received on a pull request for a cron job. This script did some heavy lifting so it took a few minutes to run.

The reviewer suggested all sorts of minor optimizations so a script which runs once per week in the middle of the night with no one waiting on it could run tens of seconds faster. A complete waste of time and effort to my mind, and one understandable as the OP describes: a technical challenge which, when solved, equates to zero consumer upside.

louison114• 3 years ago

Glad you liked the analogy! Yes, keeping this in mind is useful for developers, not just product people. It's tempting to fix or automate things that don't need it. I think there is a meme that goes "I could have done this in 2 minutes, but I chose to spend 2 days automating it instead." Sums it all up :-)

Overtonwindow• 3 years ago

After nearly destroying a General Electric we got a Kitchen Aid dishwasher. Quiet, works well, and quick. I've never given my dishwasher much thought. If it cleans then it works. Right?

karmakaze3• 3 years ago

Quiet is my #1 requirement for dishwashers. I've used Kitchen Aid, Miele, and Bosch and wouldn't buy a noisy one after not hearing these.

goldcd• 3 years ago

Most people probably don't need a faster dishwasher - but it's a handy feature to have to sell dishwashers. "Cleans just as well, using the same water & power, in half the time?" - well that sounds like you've just created a premium dishwasher you can sell to people who want to own a premium dishwasher.

I think it's much the same with all the wifi-enabled, app controlled appliances. Their purpose isn't to be sold as useful features - they exist to add a half-dozen bullet points next to that item, that the other nigh-identical products you're comparing it against (or god-forbid, already own) don't have. $5 of extra parts that can be sold to you for $100

Decades back all appliances where white powder-coated. Then we decided they should all be built in and hidden. Then we decided they all needed to be brushed -aluminium feature appliances... except we didn't all decide this. The manufacturers are just always looking for differentiators.

Of course you can opt out of this obvious cash grab, and kit out your kitchen with Miele 'quality' and the like (Did you know Miele is one of the few remaining brands that doesn't outsource manufacture to a Turkish third party? I did, I'm special) Or reject all this modern stuff and buy a Speed-Queen (When pick-up truck owners get to decide what laundry brand to buy and maintain with the same set of spanners)

bborud2• 3 years ago

It depends on what "faster" means.

My dishwasher takes about an hour. If it took 50 or even 40 minutes, that wouldn't change things materially. But if it took 10-15 minutes, it would change the way I plan and execute work in the kitchen quite a bit.

verinus6• 3 years ago

well if I tell you that here in Austria dishwashers, washing machines and dryers (some of most energy hungry systems in a household) get a separate input that allows them to run when lot's of cheap energy (read solar power) is available - that might change again :)

marcjuul• 3 years ago

The author seems to be making an assumption that the average person cares as little about preventing centralization of power and having any semblance of online privacy as they do about the speed of their dishwasher and that the projects that focus on improving these things fail to gain a large user base because users don't care.

That's simply not the case. Talk to most people and they'd prefer that their entire digital lives weren't dominated by a few megacorps with access to all your private data. It's true that a lot of people have no idea how to begin achieving that, but that's not the same as not caring.

The problem is that when you develop a new system, privacy and decentralization generally aren't things that can be easily added in as later optimizations. If you care about those things then you need to build them into the design from day one, and they are hard problems to solve. Something as simply as resetting a forgotten password can turn into quite the challenge when there is no centralized authority. Getting to the point where your basic decentralized and secure platform works well enough that you can build stable, user friendly apps with all the expected niceties takes a lot of time and thinking by highly skilled developers and many projects never fully get there. This doesn't mean that it isn't worthwhile to attempt to develop such technologies.

There is also a weird fallacy going on here around building stuff based on a shallow perception of what consumers* supposedly care about. Looking at the current social media landscape and thinking "this exists because it's what people really want" betrays a particularly narrow way of thinking about the economics and power dynamics of the modern internet. This type of willfully naive thought process would have us optimize toward a highly profitable software skinnner box. The wetware equivalent would be to suggest that we design the most profitable and addictive drugs. After all, consumers are consuming them so that must be what they want, right? Why are you building something that isn't optimizing for maximum consumption? You must be blinded by your own weird ideology or blinded by interesting but irrelevant technical challenges.

Then there's the weird comment about exciting technical challenges not necessarily all being businesses. The author seems to have an underlying assumption that if it's not a viable business then it shouldn't be worked on.

*Thinking about participants in a two-way global communication system as simply "consumers" seems in-line with the rest of the author's thought processes

eternityforest4• 3 years ago

I'm not sure anyone truly is attempting that kind of tech. Making a private communication platform that people would actually use goes against the hacker mindset. People who care about privacy like simplicity.

Every Instagram filter is a GPU accelerated vulnerability to them, to the rest of us, it's a feature.

The ability to use selectable centralized relays for better performance like BitTorrent, so it doesn't eat 100GB a month of DHT traffic is absolutely critical to me, but needless complexity to someone who's priority is elegance.

Being free as in beer is critical. Sure, I'll donate to wikipedia when I can, but I'm not paying $8 a month for privacy unless I get a way higher paying job, and that job happens to involve privacy concerns.

That generally means ads. Open source can do ads, but open devs don't like them.

Self hosting is completely out unless it's P2P running in the background on phones when charging or some equally zero effort platform. I'm not doing unpaid sysadmin work at home and non-technical people certainly aren't.

It has to work well on hardware, that has to be cheap. Generally that's only possible because it's spying supported, although stuff is getting easier to make as tech improves. With Google keep I can tell my watch to add something to my shopping list. With YoLink my backyard motion sensor batteries last years. With Tile I can find my stuff if I drop my wallet in the street.

It has to work in all conditions. As in, if my phone is stolen on vacation I need to be able to replace it and get everything I need working. It can't involve heavy custom setup of any kind, it needs to be so incredibly boring you could trust your life to being able to set it up quickly, which you basically are if a cell phone is your only emergency communication.

There can't be any unreversible transactions for fraudsters to use, password reset has to work, there can't be anything that would make someone fire me for choosing it over a commercial provider if it decides to break. .

Finally, I'm not going to literally argue with anyone to get them to switch. At most I'll be like hey check this cool thing out. And if the thing isn't cool enough that they want it, I'll give up and go back to Facebook, because a platform is useless if nobody I want to talk to is on it.

I have absolutely no idea where to even start building a replacement for anything I use. Nobody seems to even be trying to make a full ecosystem, aside from badly performing Blockchain projects, that rivals the scope of Google and Facebook, and many privacy first devs don't even want such things to exist, they want separate small parts only connected manually or by custom end user scripts.

I'd love it if there was an open replacement for some this stuff. But I'm not sure how you'd attract interest or fund building it.

taylodl• 3 years ago

And then when the "better engineered" product doesn't do as well in the marketplace, because it didn't address actual customer needs, the engineers cry that the product addressing actual customer needs only succeeded because of "better marketing."

Fire-Dragon-DoL• 3 years ago

To be fair, we needed to do two round of dishwasher yesterday and I wished we had a faster one (we were out of dishes and stuff). Yes we could have washed by hand but it was one of those days where we didn't want to do anything...

karmakaze3• 3 years ago

The truth is that products are made to make money for the business first and meet customer need/wants second.

For the dishwasher example, most dishwashers are far too noisy. Unless you live in a large place with many rooms, it will matter. The problem is that quiet isn't a highly visible/marketable and cheaply made feature, so isn't prioritized. After purchase, many would want a quieter dishwasher but very few will bother to uninstall/return/exchange it.

louison114• 3 years ago

Most businesses make money by answering customer needs. I actually believe that when shopping for kitchen appliances recently, dishwashers had a sticker advertising noise levels.

karmakaze3• 3 years ago

I suppose it depends on the market--inkjet printers isn't one of them[0]. Brother printers however have quite user-friendly policies.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35063208

garyrichardson• 3 years ago

Yes, I actually do need a faster dishwasher, thank you. Last 3 dishwashers I've owned have taken between 2 and 2.5 hours to do a load. Between my large family and frequently hosting people I am constantly waiting for the dishwasher to finish.

drewcoo• 3 years ago

coming out with products that are faster, more private, more decentralized, more this, more that.

This isn't just another Howl-like lament. Quite the opposite!

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/06/12/click/

But in no clear way do these products actually improve on what’s existing in a significant enough way that users may consider a shift

This article is apparently shaming engineers for making products that are being sold, but aren't selling well enough. Don't improve products. Don't be concerned with privacy if consumers are not. Just do whatever is going to sell.

This kind of thinking would have prevented the seat belt. Seat belts weren't going to sell more cars, they were going to raise costs. And why? Only to save human lives! Waste!

Brian_K_White4• 3 years ago

I don't care about more private or decentralized? Better yet, my mom doesn't? I in fact do, and she in fact should!

eternityforest4• 3 years ago

It doesn't matter unless you can convince people to use it, )or legally force it on them, causing them to hate all technology because you didn't make it good enough people chose willingly).

Private and decentralized stuff needs to get feature parity, be free as in beer like Google is, and then get a killer app that makes people want it.

I've always thought p2p offline lan messaging would be it, but Blockchain trashed all research on that aside from new tokens for like 10 years. Maybe they'll figure it out, but I suspect AI filters and random games will be more important.

Unfortunately, people who like making private apps hate most features, and think privacy is enough of a killer app for people to switch, but it doesn't seem to be.

Brian_K_White4• 3 years ago

I do hate most features everyone else loves.

Some I would be neutral on and have no problem with if they weren't just candy coating to deliver lock-in and data collection.

l0b02• 3 years ago

There are market opportunities at all axes:

- Some people genuinely need a faster dishwasher, because having clean dishes in a timely fashion is important.

- Some people need cleaner dishes than others. Cleanliness isn't binary.

- Some people need a more energy efficient dishwasher.

- Some people need a smaller/bigger/more corrosion-resistant/quiet/heavy duty/etc. dishwasher than the market norm.

The trick is figuring out which of these axes have a high ROI.

toss1• 3 years ago

Also key is HOW MUCH of each of these properties.

The article's main point stands only to a certain degree. Speeding the dishwashing cycle from 120 minutes to 60 minutes, or even 30 minutes will almost always be a "who cares?" feature; None of those scale of speed-up change that basic work cycle of load, go away, and come back at another mealtime.

But speeding it to less than 5 minutes or 5 seconds per dish could be a very attractive feature, because it would change the entire work cycle such that the whole meal and kitchen could be cleaned up and put away in minutes.

Now, can you do that feature and have a great ROI is another question, but it's often nonlinear.

Tor38• 3 years ago

I generally agree, except for the "Some people need cleaner dishes than others". I can't imagine someone actually accepting "washed" dishes with food stains on them. Either they're clean, or they're not. Presumably you could do a scientific test to figure out the amount of bacteria left, but I assume we're not talking at that level.

zamnos4• 3 years ago

I think it depends on how you feel about water spots and streaks. Some people can't stand them, others don't even see them. Each side thinks the other is wrong.

l0b02• 3 years ago

I can't imagine someone actually accepting "washed" dishes with food stains on them.

A charitable reading of my comment would find no such assertion. "Clean" is not binary. A restaurant might get in trouble if 1/100 plates have a smudge on them, but that might be perfectly acceptable in a home. Or not.

mhb2• 3 years ago

There's a touch of irony that TFA leads with the obscure, unexplained acronym "JTBD framework".

Jobs-to-be-Done: A Framework for Customer Needs

[https://jobs-to-be-done.com/jobs-to-be-done-a-framework-for-...]

SCUSKU2• 3 years ago

An additional layer of irony is that your comment leads with an obscure unexplained acronym "TFA".

mhb2• 3 years ago

Good catch, hun.

RangerScience2• 3 years ago

In the same way, people don’t buy a dishwasher, they buy clean dishes before their next meal.

Ironically, this tells me some... awkward things about how the author relates to their kitchen. I cook - a lot. I host parties - usually dinner parties - and I use cheap Ikea plates & etc instead of disposable anythings. And like (most?) millenials-ish, the kitchen is where we tend to hang out.

My dishwasher isn't so that I have clean dishes before the next meal. It's so that I have a clean kitchen after.

(If I wanted only clean dishes before my next meal... actually I'd probably want as fast a dishwasher as possible.)

wheels3• 3 years ago

Yeah, I often also do parties, where I cook for 20-ish people, and often have 3-4 dishwasher loads after a party. Speed does matter some.

Where it matters a lot more is that I live in an condo where officially I'm not supposed to run my dishwasher after 10:00 p.m. The difference between 1 or 3 hours is significant there for running it after dinner. (I basically only run it after 10:00 p.m. after parties; got a very quiet model for that reason.) Particularly since I have some stuff I'd like to have clean before the morning.

This is a pretty terrible example for the author's point.

phkahler• 3 years ago

Imagine a dishwasher that cleans a single dish in a few seconds. You could wash and put away in similar time to loading a regular dishwasher, and capacity would no longer be an issue.

Taking something from being a process to being a single step in a process can have huge impact to how we do things and what is possible.

SoftTalker2• 3 years ago

Good lord. I don’t even know 20 people… at least not well enough to have them over for dinner.

kmlx• 3 years ago

often have 3-4 dishwasher loads after a party.

tip: get more dishwashers. it will make your life easier.

fifilura4• 3 years ago

I also often have ~20p over for dinner. Not so uncommon when you meet a couple of families with each a bunch of kids.

However - these types of dishwasher loads stack really well, actually the type of dishes dishwashers are made for packing. You can easily fill the dishwasher with 20 plates of the same type, same with cutlery and glasses. And most of the times at these parties the dishes are fresh, so easy to clean.

Another note. In Sweden and Europe the trend has been for slower programs. To be able to meet the energy consumption benchmarks. 30 years ago dishwashers would typically be done in 1h. Nowadays the default program is often set to 3h. (With an option to do it faster and burn more energy)

jhoechtl3• 3 years ago

This is also telling how thin the walls are where you live. I live in an old house with an old and fairly loud dishwasher. One door closed and there are no vibrations or noise problem.

Can a dishwasher really become a noise problem?

stuaxo2• 3 years ago

Not being able to run after 10 would be a pain.

I guess with a timer it could run in the morning and work from home means the day could work.

Totally stops using cheaper energy at night too.

late2part• 3 years ago

the joy of having two dishwashers is rarely overstated.

ctroein89• 3 years ago

Ironically, this tells me some... awkward things about how the author relates to their kitchen.

It also says a lot about how the author relates to restaurants, where a faster dishwasher is a selling point. Faster is separately important from throughput, because if it the takes 3 hours to run the dish washer, that’s a lot of plates that need to be washed and stacked all at once for a restaurant, and a lot of dishwashers needed to handle that volume.

bawolff• 3 years ago

Tbf, commercial dishwashers are totally different type of device than home dishwashers.

mytailorisrich2• 3 years ago

A dishwasher buys the convenience of not doing the dishes. That frees your time in itself and in general the time it takes the dishwasher to run is not critical.

ihateolives• 3 years ago

in general the time it takes the dishwasher to run is not critical

I have children. They use plates, bowls, cups, cutlery, more bowls, more plates, more cups. I have only limited room for additional dishes. Dishes better be done before dinner or else somebody is going to have bad time. And generally if someone in the family is having bad time then everybody is going to have bad time.

raverbashing• 3 years ago

Taking one-off examples and extrapolating the average problem is also a tendency of some engineers

For most people, most of the time, running for 3h is fine

And unless your dishes are really dirty, the shorter and more energy efficient programs run fine and are done in 1h or less

kbelder• 3 years ago

Like cars; you don't buy based on daily needs, you buy based on exceptional needs. If you're ever going to need a car to haul six people, you're going to get a car that holds six people. If you're ever going to need a dishwasher to wash dishes quickly, you're going to buy a fast dishwasher.

It doesn't matter that it's only needed once every two weeks.

flippinburgers2• 3 years ago

Also nobody here appears to know that different places in the world have quite different size expectations for a consumer level dishwasher. In Japan... tiny as can be.

verinus6• 3 years ago

Having a large family of my own and sometimes hosting get-togethers I can not agree with your sentiment. I would not buy a dishwasher for 1% of my use-cases that otherwise wastes lot's of resources (presumably being much to large for everyday usage). Our standard eco program runs for ~3h minimizing water, electricity and chemical usage.

On the other hand I would be totally fine to buy another set of dishes for said occasions.

masklinn7• 3 years ago

I feel like that used to be pretty standard for my parents’ generation and older: you’d have one set of dishes and cutlery (dented, mismatched, …) for normal use, and you’d get the “good” ware (silverware and fine porcelain) for hosting, with uniform everything for everyone, small cups for tea / coffee instead of the usual mug, …

Obviously that requires a house as you pretty much need a cabinet at least partially dedicated to storing this day-to-day.

patrickwalton• 3 years ago

I've long wanted some kind of miniaturized version of a cafeteria dishwasher where you put dirty dishes in one side and clean dishes come out the other a few seconds later. I want my kitchen to stay clean and it would be so nice for everyone to be able to clean and put away their dish right after the meal.

fatnoah• 3 years ago

My dishwasher isn't so that I have clean dishes before the next meal. It's so that I have a clean kitchen after.

So much this! My first act in preparing a meal is to empty the dishwasher so that I can rinse stuff and put it in the dishwasher as I go. Sometimes, it gets full between meals, so having the "fast" cycle lets me get dishes clean and the washer emptied before I start the next meal.

This article is a great example of the "I don't understand who might want it, so therefore it's not worth doing" mentality of many folks.

crabbone• 3 years ago

I think there's some misconception about faster dishwashers here. Faster dishwashers are almost as good as faster clocks. The idea behind operating a dishwasher is that you let dishes be washed for X time. So, if you wanted dishes to be washed for X - 1 time, you'd just open the dishwasher earlier.

I mean, dishwashers don't guaranty that your dishes will be clean after X time. They guarantee washing them for X time. They aren't concerned with whether or not it will make them clean. So, speeding up the process is trivial, but doesn't result in anything useful, which was the point the author was trying to make.

I'm not trying to defend the author's general claim. I also think that even if the metaphor doesn't work for you -- it's not really all that important in the context of the article. Just trying to give a way to understand what the author probably meant when making that metaphor.

coldtea2• 3 years ago

So, the author is more representative of the average consumer, rather than some frequent-dinner-party-hosting partying person?

JohnFen• 3 years ago

this tells me some... awkward things about how the author relates to their kitchen.

Awkward? What awkward things does it tell you?

I think that all it tells you is that you are different people. It also invalidates his assertion that "nobody need..." -- which is hyperbole anyhow. Any time someone says "everybody" or "nobody" or other universal qualifiers, the statement is guaranteed to be technically incorrect.

You are precisely the sort of person who could use a fast dishwasher, after all.

FooBarWidget3• 3 years ago

Slow dishwasher is a huge pain.

When relatives visit and join dinner (and they do so often) I end up with more dishes than I can fit in the dishwasher.

I can wash the remaining dishes the next morning, but this wastes energy and water because the dishwasher is not full.

I can also "preventatively" turn on the dishes in the afternoon, to wash the breakfast and lunch dishes, so that it's completely empty for the dinner dishes. But this too wastes resources (not full, but better than the "wash remainders next morning" scenario), and I have to turn it on early enough in the afternoon so that it finishes before people start cooking (around 16.00).

It's a pain to have to wait for 3 hours. I would absolutely want a dishwasher that finishes in 1 hour.

hdhrufjdi• 3 years ago

How does a faster dishwasher help here?

Also: you can't cook without the dishwasher running everytime before you cook?

FooBarWidget3• 3 years ago

It helps with the "wash in the morning" strategy. Right now I manually wash big pans because they don't fit in the dishwasher when there are also dishes. But I need those pans tomorrow morning as well. If the dishwasher finishes before I need to go to sleep then I can just put those pans in the dishwasher.

The "wash in the afternoon" strategy also becomes more viable. That way I don't have to turn on the dishwasher before 13.00 in order to have it finish before people start cooking. Relatives often visit unannounced, or maybe they change their minds around 16.00 and decide to join for dinner anyway, so I can't always plan for this.

A fast dishesher lets me "batch dishes" (maximize efficiency, save resources) without worry.

Cooking with the dishwasher running is a huge pain. Most of the utensils and chopping boards are in the dishwasher right when you need them for preparing a meal. And when you're done eating, the dishwasher still isn't done so your kitchen and dinner table are left dirty for an hour or two.

imp0cat3• 3 years ago

YMMV, but our Bosch dishwasher has 5 modes and one of them is "party" mode. When selected, the machine first preheats water for 30 minutes and then you can load it repeatedly, each load only takes 10 minutes to wash. It does have two drawbacks though. First, you have to use liquid detergent, as tablets do not dissolve fast enough. Second, it consumes a lot of power and water as opposed to the regular 3h+ setting. But it is handy if you ever need to wash a lot of stuff fast.

Tor38• 3 years ago

Sounds interesting. The water isn't metered where I live, so using more water doesn't matter. If it could be connected to the 70 C hot water outlet as well.. that would be even better.

FooBarWidget3• 3 years ago

I wonder what it is about dishwashers that need 3h in order to be efficient, when hand washing can accomplish the same task much faster for similar amount of resources as long as you don't wash under a continuously open faucet.

sixstringtheory2• 3 years ago

Fast. Quiet. Actually cleans. Pick two.

analog31• 3 years ago

I want a faster dishwasher. I want to load the dishwasher after supper, and be able to unload it before bed time, so it's empty in the morning.

sbaiddn• 3 years ago

My only problem with my dishwasher is that it's too slow to setup two loads before going to bed.

ElijahLynn• 3 years ago

If you pre-rinse, ALWAYS use the fast cycle.

If you are lazy, and want to see MAGIC, then leave your food all over the place and use the long cycle. It works great if it is same day, not so much past that.

bravoetch• 3 years ago

Real user needs no longer pay the bills. Subscription models and the anti-patterns that fuel them do.

egypturnash2• 3 years ago

I have a small counter-top dishwasher. It gets water by hooking hoses to the sink's faucet. When it is in use, the faucet is unavailable for something like two hours.

It is better than having to do all the dishes by hand. But we have to make sure we've done things like refil the water pitcher before running the dishwasher. And there's only so much hot water in the hot water heater before it runs out, so we need to make sure nobody's about to take a shower before running the dishwasher, too.

I would love to have a larger one that connects directly to the water pipes, but there is no room in this apartment's kitchen. So I deal with the dishwasher blocking other uses of the kitchen sink, and the shower, for a couple of hours.

If I had a small counter-top dishwasher that somehow got my dishes just as clean in a half an hour, that would make a few low-level annoyances go away.

eternityforest4• 3 years ago

Why is it using water the whole 2 hours? Doesn't it recirculating it for a while with a pump? Can you get one that does?

egypturnash2• 3 years ago

I dunno, man, I just plug it in and hit the button and it runs. I'm no plumber, I just got the one that got the best reviews on Wirecutter. I would describe it as a black box that I put dishes, detergent, and water into, and usually get clean dishes out of, except its housing is white.

It's probably not actually pulling in water for the entire two hours. But it wants to be able to pull in water at several points during its cycle, as well as squirt it back out into the sink, and I have absolutely no interest in trying to guess when it would be safe to disconnect the hose and risk having it piss a bunch of water all over the kitchen (because the hose got left somewhere) or having it error out because it can't get water when it needs it.

justsomehnguy2• 3 years ago

.... just get a plumber. You need a water line splitter and a faucet or even just a spigot. Dishwasher, especially countertop, wouldn't use more than a couple of liters of water in the run, but it needs a pressure in the hose/pipe to be able to do so.

SCUSKU2• 3 years ago

While I agree with the author that engineers tend not to solve customer problems, but technical ones, what I was hoping he would get to is how to actually go about finding problems to solve in the first place.

In my personal journey, this has become the most difficult point in doing any sort of side project development. Sure, I can build prototypes, but for who? And why?

dfxm12• 3 years ago

I think dogfooding (where applicable) and actually talking to other potential customers is most important. It helps in context of spending your resources to make more impactful improvements for your existing project (like building a cheaper dishwasher instead of a faster one).

With that in mind, it really helps to find your niche and converse with others in that niche. If you go to a niche forum like arcade museum or arcade projects, you might find people saying "I wish I had something to enable auto-fire on my arcade cab" and also people with the knowhow to build it and turns that into a product, or people having an interest check for a product they've developed for themselves to see if it has a wider audience.

Meph504• 3 years ago

Sorry this is way too narrow a viewpoint it doesn't actually relate to users and is literally proven false by countless people buying endless parades of goods they don't need.

People don't buy what they need, they think they need, they buy what they want, what they can, what others influence them to, etc... I.E. it is complex to tell what the market will bare out.

And for the record, I would be a lot more for a dishwasher that actually dries my dishes, you know with heat, like they use to, and does it quickly. Instead of spraying a chemical on them to make them dry, and it still taking ages.

intellix• 3 years ago

I don't put dishes in the dishwasher until I need them now. Yeah I know I'm filthy but just incredibly busy where I don't have time for basic things.

Not everyone eats and then instantly washes up

niccl• 3 years ago

These comments seem to make a gloriously meta confirmation of the article's point. The article is saying that engineers (among others) have been known to optimise for the wrong thing. He uses a possibly inappropriate example of faster dishwashers.

Then many of the commenters (quite likely engineers) optimise their comments on the thing they know about -- desirability or otherwise of faster dishwashers -- rather than considering the merits of the main thesis

And it's made even better by some commenters saying things about areas they appear not to know about, like the desirability of faster dishwashers for restaurants

jiggawatts• 3 years ago

Half of all engineers also cook at home(1) and nearly one hundred percent use plates and cutlery.(2)

1) I pulled this number out of a hat.

2) We likely don’t care about the opinions of people that eat food raw out of the garden using their hands only, at least with respect to dishwasher design.

barrysteve2• 3 years ago

Making a faster dishwasher is exactly what engineers are trained to do. They get paid handomsely to optimize and improve existing forms and problems.

Sure it's good to say engineers optimize the wrong stuff... but what's the solution? Be someone else? Start the dishwasher again from first principles?

I love opening up the discussion with awareness, but a suggestion on the next step is helpful too.

louison114• 3 years ago

author here. Next steps would be to define with great details what the actual customer needs are, through diligent customer research, and identifying untapped opportunities.

I don’t know if those currently exist for dishwashers. But in general, you’re looking for pain points that have been ignored by the market because nobody has fully grasped the picture of the customer needs before. In that way, frameworks like Jobs-To-Be-Done or customer personas, while they may seem very “mechanical” offer deterministic disciplines to maximize the chances of encountering fresh insights and thus build innovative solutions.

dgb23• 3 years ago

Before I got a job as a developer, which happened by chance because someone noticed that I was a hobbyist programmer, I actually worked as a kitchen help.

A large chunk of that was cleaning and dishwashing.

Let me tell you that if I didn’t have a very fast dishwasher, I couldn’t do my job well. I was already juggling the time between supporting the cooks, keeping stuff clean and the dishwasher going. I used a fast and effective dishwasher, but any speed improvement would be welcome, among other things.

Engineers sometimes optimize for the wrong things, if they’re not involved with decisions and out of the loop.

But the reality is that there’s many more things that could benefit from optimization than things that don’t.

People definitely care about fast feedback loops and less time spent waiting. They might not always tell you in advance, because they assume it is like it is, but they _will_ tell you after the fact.

People who don’t care are typically disconnected from actual usage.

Whether that’s bosses and consultants who tell stories about “man hours vs cpu clocks” or engineers who excuse themselves with “premature optimization...”: they have that thing in common where they don’t know how it feels to wash a mountain of dirty dishes by hand, because the dishwasher cannot keep up.

verinus6• 3 years ago

Well I read you comment in a way that you did not fully grasp what OP intended to say. Why people get so hung up on the speed thing? Yes there are situations where speed is of the essence, but for a private household it is not (statistically speaking in ~95% of the use-cases).

And if I read op in good faith he never ever talks about dishwashers in a professional settings as there apply completely different rules...

mjaques• 3 years ago

Good to know I'm not the only one noticing this.

johnny_canuck• 3 years ago

I was surprised to pop into the comments and read the same in the first few top posts. Now I want a follow-up article from the author, haha.

louison114• 3 years ago

Author here. I don’t know if I’ll write a follow up but the comments prove my point for sure. I sense a lot of the naysayers here were triggered by the argument, which probably shows that I hit the right spot.

Funny thing is none of what I’m sharing is novel, it’s based on the jobs-to-be-done framework, coined by a Harvard professor and used by some of the world’s most successful and innovative companies. It simply works. Beyond this framework, there is overall the idea that products should be problem-focused (customer research THEN development) as opposed to solution-focused (development THEN hoping it solves a real problem). For some reason, a lot of people get attached to their idea, their solution, and their ego prevents them from asking the hard questions (is this really useful to people?). Maybe I’ll write a follow up on the dynamics of denial involved in that. :-)

barrysteve2• 3 years ago

I would love to experiment with a dishwasher that can accept single items and deliver them cleaned on demand. And scale up to full loads with the same mechanism. Like dropping dishes into a river, with a cage at the start for stacking up dishes waiting to be automatically cleaned.

On a related note, at some point, computer vision models could probably help classify and typify incoming crockery and their target stains for a more accurate clean...

readthenotes1• 3 years ago

Is the JTBD framework another reinvention of customer use oriented requirements? What's the special sauce other than new lingo?

DubiousPusher• 3 years ago

The big one for me in a large consulting business has been watching the account people try to sell enterprises on Blockchain for various use cases. It's just funny because it's like, these customers don't need a zero trust structure for their transactions. They have a directory usually AAD they implicitly trust because they hire the people they put into it.

And companies don't want decentralization. The entire purpose of most conglomerates is conspicuous centralization. It is funny that we see corporations strictly as competitive actors. But often when one company buys another, they are trying to realize efficiencies through cooperation. Therefore, much like being an government bureau, corporations are trying to create cooperative centralizations.

bni• 3 years ago

Without having read the article, I want a faster dishwasher.

8n4vidtmkvmk3• 3 years ago

I'm reading this as I listen to my noisy ass dishwasher in my small apartment running for over an hour now while I'm trying to go to bed.

Yes, I very much wish it ran faster.

It also matters when I have to run 2 loads because I let the dishes pile up.

ithkuil2• 3 years ago

Yes, I very much wish it ran faster.

Or more silent.

8n4vidtmkvmk3• 3 years ago

That would also help. But then I probably wouldn't trust it to be blasting the heck out of my dishes. But if they came out clean, I certainly would not complain.

8n4vidtmkvmk3• 3 years ago

An engineer with no such customer awareness and instead an incessant obsession with optimizing everything that can be optimized, might try to optimize for speed…

Bugger off with that. No one is optimizing anything these days. Please do optimize for speed. Speed is a feature. I don't want to wait for more than 200ms to do anything. In a world where we can render video games at 100 FPS at 4K...yes, I want my websites to load in under a second. And I want my IDE to be responsive. And I want my autocompletes to complete before I've finished typing the whole thing out.

The computer responding to my inputs should never be the bottleneck. It should always be faster than I can think. I hate to stop and wait for 60 seconds twice today as my computer choked while trying to render a chat app. Chat. Really messes up a conversation.

Tor38• 3 years ago

When my dishwasher still worked I did actually care about the speed. Of course cleanliness is the number one priority, but I also cared a lot about how long it took. Having a dishwasher going chunka-chunka for three hours in the kitchen, which is next to the living room (open solution) is absolutely unacceptable.

dsego• 3 years ago

There are silent dish washers out there, I have one, turn it on and there is just barely noticeable hum.

codeddesign• 3 years ago

I have never understood people who place dirty dishes in dishwashers. You have to rinse first. Dishwasher essentially sanitize, rather than clean food off your plates.

xiconfjs• 3 years ago

no, you don't

bradwood• 3 years ago

So true. The main use case to solve is unpacking the damn thing - a cause of a lot of friction in my household.

A great solution to this was created by a firm called Fisher and Paykel who made a 2 drawer dishwasher designed to permanently house your crockery. While one drawer is washing, you fetch your stuff outa the other drawer.

https://www.fisherpaykel.com/uk/dishwashing/all-dishwashers/...

sixtram• 3 years ago

If you have the money, you can buy an industrial dishwasher. It can still be under your countertop. The price is about 5x-10x and it can finish in a few minutes. You can usually see these machines in coffee shops.

rpmisms• 3 years ago

Except that if a dishwasher was significantly faster, people would love it. 20 minutes would be enough to make people go "wow, that's really nice", and that would become the new "cool" dishwasher.

shalmanese• 3 years ago

There are plenty of dishwashers faster than 20 minutes, they're all in restaurant kitchens which do have a speed requirement. Several bleeding edge people have installed restaurant style dishwashers in their private homes but the requirements (in terms of energy use, danger of the chemicals involved, noise, temperatures reached) make them not a good fit for almost all homes.

verinus6• 3 years ago

even image one that does not require water, electricity or chemicals! ;)

ggm• 3 years ago

A good example of "nothing gets faster engagement than wrong facts" social media.

"Nobody" the author knows. Lots of people, not all of them didactic contrarians actually do want this one thing.

I am a little from box A and a little from box B on this, myself. If the dishwasher is too fast, I'd suspect it does a poor job, or I would face revaluation of the relative worth of shared work: if cleaning declines in burden then more of it may have to be done.

k__• 3 years ago

Didn't Hillel Wayne write about how he made some software faster? His co-workers first thought it was a waste of time, but when they actually used it they didn't want to go back anymore.

I think, the moral of that story was something like: When you make a software process faster by an order of magnitude, it lends itself for new use-cases.

Jaxan2• 3 years ago

It’s interesting how this thread shows how differently people use their dishwasher. From multiple times a day to only in the night and everything in between. So the take away is that dishwashers should not be optimised for a single type of usage!

Ekaros3• 3 years ago

I'm lazy have huge amount of dishes for single person. So I do them rarely. And then I would like to do multiple cycles back to back, maybe on Saturday or Sunday... 1h vs 3h at that process would add up and faster would be better.

f_allwein• 3 years ago

Ok, so everybody wants a faster dishwasher and nobody wants to discuss the article. Fine with me, so I can add my 2 cents:

In Germany, dishwashers (and washing machines, but let’s not go there) fall into two categories, either Miele or everything else. Miele has amazing quality, so it feels like the dishwasher might outlive you.

Mine has a „quick power wash“ programme that takes about an hour and gets the job done, but uses more energy and is maybe more aggressive to dishes, so I usually use other programmes, between 1 and 3 hours. There’s also a timer for starting the machine in n hours, operated by a single button. User interface is also brilliant in that there are no strange symbols, but reach light/ button clearly says what it does (in German). I like it.

ErikHuisman• 3 years ago

Can vouch for Miele dishwasher. The rollers on the racks are not comparable to any other brand. Sooo smooth.

thecopy• 3 years ago

Swiss V-ZUG makes good appliances as well.

tastyfreeze• 3 years ago

I would settle for a dishwasher that doesn't have some part break in under 5 years.

frankreyes• 3 years ago

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” (sometimes attributed to Henry Ford)

jhoechtl3• 3 years ago

I have fairly old dishwasher, probably not very energy efficient. It finishes it's job in about 1:30.

If I would have a more modern, energy efficient but slower dishwasher, in a four person household I would need more dishes.

Now the fallacy is, more dishes (if you have the space to store them away) are far more cheaper on the long run but sticking to your old dishwasher.

Take-away: Get a new dish-washer.

alias_neo3• 3 years ago

New dishwashers are incredible. I had a Bosch in the home I moved from, I picked out the best I could afford and was very happy with it, but decided to leave it behind for the new owner.

Moved into a place that has a Kenwood thats a few years older, maybe 5+ and I hate everything about it; not only does it not clean my dishes as well, it takes ages to do it, and it will beep forever until I switch it off after a cycle finishes.

We intend to replace it with another Bosch as soon as we can, but we just moved so, priorities are elsewhere right now.

Take-away: Get a new dish-washer as soon as possible.

asimpletune• 3 years ago

People don’t even need dishwashers.

Xcelerate• 3 years ago

I think most customers would like a dishwasher that actually works, which—having used quite a few of them—appears to remain an unsolved problem.

First, there’s the mystery of “wet dog smell” on glasses that has persisted across multiple apartments in multiple states for us (and appears to be a well-known phenomenon across the internet). And then there’s the issue that despite their claims to also dry dishes, most dishwashers do no such thing as the plasticware remains soaked despite many interesting but ultimately unsuccessful hacks by dishwasher manufacturers.

nopassrecover• 3 years ago

I’m sure you’ve tried it all, but as someone who also dislikes odours in glasses that have been through the dishwasher we’re pretty attentive to only ever putting glasses in their own cycle, and minimising cleaning dishes with eggs in the washer (hand cleaning or at least washing off).

Agree with you on the challenges of finding issue-free appliances (feel the same on vacuums, stick blenders, and probably a half dozen other examples).

XorNot• 3 years ago

It does strike me that to really dry dishes you basically need to incorporate a dehumidifier into the system.

Which actually surprises me that no one's done it, because small dehumidifiers are quite cheap, and if it would be a hell of a premium feature.

I've never had any problems with weird odors though.

ianvisits• 3 years ago

I would love a faster dishwasher -- not because I need the dishes washed faster, but becuase I live in an open-plan flat with the kitchen and living room in the same space, and anything to reduce how long I have the dishwasher churning away would be wonderful.

Fortuanately, I tend to get away with a 30-min wash for most days, but someone please invent a 10-minute dishwasher please :)

barnabee3• 3 years ago

Dishwashers in commercial kitchens are rapid, much less than 10 mins. I have always wondered why, exactly, we can't have that at home. A dishwasher so fast that it's done while you're still clearing up from dinner and you can put stuff away immediately would be fantastic and is clearly absolutely possible.

tomn• 3 years ago

From my limited understanding:

- the mechanism is large compared to the capacity

- they are noisy

- they require lots of power

- they need to be pre-heated (so only make sense if you're running more than one load)

- they require more chemicals for the same load sizes

People have done it, but it's not that practical for most people, especially if you're only washing up for one or two people.

actionfromafar2• 3 years ago

It is possible, but I think the market is tiny.

Arnt2• 3 years ago

I asked at the shop where I bought our dishwasher. They have a different precondition. Home dishwashers deliver clean results from messier inputs. Dried fat on the plates from yesterday's breakfast. The fast dishwashers have to be run within minutes, and you have to be more careful about how much dreck there is on the plates.

I too would like to have a faster dishwasher. When we cook while the dishwasher is running, a queue builds up on the working spaces, and there's only so much space. It's a problem.

More pertinently, this isn't the first article I've read titled "nobody wants [x] — [conclusion]" that was confident and wrong about the starting premise. Is this the kind of thing women call mansplaining? Sounds like it.

masklinn7• 3 years ago

I have always wondered why, exactly, we can't have that at home.

You can. It’s just way less efficient, way noisier, and way more expensive. A Hobart conveyor dishwasher has a cycle time south of 3mn (and throughput of 3 racks/mn, with conveyor speeds reaching 6ft/mn). But it’d probably take most of your kitchen and blow up your electric panel (they need an exclusive 208V 3-phase, and if you plonk for the booster heater that’s a separate supply of the same).

It might also be less reliable, as it won’t really have the occasion to get up to spec (like only running a car for a few miles at a time and never getting it to temp before stopping).

Home dishwashers are designed to work with essentially random inputs (with acceptable results), work very efficiently, and last for long at relatively middling loads / cycling. The middle one is an especially big factor, modern home dishwashers use very little water and less power, so e.g. they’ll often cycle between top and bottom racks rather than have the water and power to run both.

justsomehnguy2• 3 years ago

we can't have that at home

Home dishwashers are:

delicate: do you want to replace all your dishware with horeca dishware?

quiet: nobody cares how loud commercials are , they aren't in the customers ear shot

energy-saving: commercial require 30A instead of 15A of home ones

aren't fast: how much it can clean for a 120 seconds?

    SPECIFICATIONS
    Capacities
    Cycle Time (seconds)  . . . . Light 120 / Normal 146 / Heavy 275
    Racks per Hour  . . . . . . . Light 30 / Normal 24 / Heavy 13
    Tank Capacity – Gallons . . . 2.9
    
    Motor Horsepower
    Wash  . . . . . . . . . . . 0.85
    Rinse . . . . . . . . . . . 0.19
    
    Water Consumption
    U.S. Gallons per Rack (maximum use) . . . . . . . . . . 0.62
    U.S. Gallons per Hour (maximum use) . . . . . . . . . . 14.88
    Peak Drain Flow – U.S. Gallons (gallons per minute) . . 4.0
    
    Temperatures °F
    Wash . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  150
    Rinse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
    Incoming Water Temperature (minimum recommended) . .55-80

https://www.hobartcorp.com/products/commercial-dishwashers/u...

https://cdn2.webdamdb.com/md_Ay2GESwcF7v9.jpg.pdf?1566411389

beerandt• 3 years ago

You want a "Professional" dishwasher, not a "Commercial" one.

Commercial are for high throughput. Professional are for special needs, like labware or medical equipment, and have customizable cycles.

Typical cycles of 25-30 mins, and some with cycles as short as 3 mins.

But they're still about 5x the cost of a basic residential model, even if cheaper than commercial types.

WillPostForFood• 3 years ago

30min? mine runs for 3 hours. Faster please!

throwaway290• 3 years ago

I read it as "I want a quieter dishwasher".

sokoloff3• 3 years ago

My Bosch dishwasher is inaudible from 2 meters away in a typical background level of sound. There are several other brands with similar levels of quiet.

2Gkashmiri• 3 years ago

why do you guys use a dishwasher? we traditionally never have used one (not just me, i mean the community) so there is no "need" for it. rich people buy one just to flaunt their wealth but dont use it because it is too much of a bother and even for them, the dishwasher soap is prohibitively expensive for no apparent reason.

elbow gease, is just a part of the routine. You cook, you eat and you clean.

sokoloff3• 3 years ago

even for [rich people], the dishwasher soap is prohibitively expensive for no apparent reason.

The dishwasher tablets we use are $0.16 each. If we ran the dishwasher everyday, that’s under $60/yr. Rinse aid adds about $0.04 per load, so < $75/yr total for daily use. Are they wildly more expensive in other places?

The powdered detergents are even cheaper I think, but I’ve never had reason to consider further economizing as we run 3-4 loads per week for a family of 4.

shswkna• 3 years ago

why do you guys use a dishwasher?

To free time so we can pursue the things that could let us become rich.

rich people buy one just to flaunt their wealth but dont use it

Yes, because they have people do the dishes for them

throw0101c3• 3 years ago

why do you guys use a dishwasher?

Try measuring your water usage with elbow grease.

An EnergStar-rating dishwasher has to use ≤15L on its normal cycle, even with a full load. Imagine how many dishes and pots and pans you can fit in a standard dishwasher.

* https://homeguides.sfgate.com/many-gallons-water-used-dishwa...

throw0101c3• 3 years ago

[…] but becuase I live in an open-plan flat with the kitchen and living room in the same space, and anything to reduce how long I have the dishwasher churning away would be wonderful.

Once you hit a sound rating of 44 dB, anything lower is not perceptibly different to human ears; there's a video with 55, 44, and 39 dB samples at:

* https://blog.yaleappliance.com/what-does-a-quiet-dishwasher-...

* https://blog.yaleappliance.com/quietest-dishwasher-by-decibe...

There's no sense paying for a unit that is quieter than 44 dB (though there may be other features you want to pay extra for, and you get the quieter operation 'for free').

mighty_plant• 3 years ago

Be careful what you wish for. Professional dishwashers as most commonly used seem to be linked to health disorders: https://studyfinds.org/dishwashers-harm-gut-health/

barnabee3• 3 years ago

I really dislike this article and fundamentally disagree.

Sure, some engineers need to be looking at the problems people have or the products they're trying to buy or whatever, but that's not why I'm here.

The goal, especially when starting out, is to:

1. Obsessively understand, improve and optimise everything, knowing that many of the results will not make it into real products or if they do will flop; and

2. Invent things that nobody asked for. Things that are weird and ideological and unlikely and confusing and just plain cool, knowing that many of thee too will fail.

Why 1? Because sometimes the things in 2 only become possible by mashing together a bunch of the things in 1 that looked like they weren't really worth it or useful.

Why 2? Because noone can really predict what people want or need, or would like, once you get into the realm of new technology and ideas that are sufficiently different from what we have today.

Many things about life in the future will and should be radically different than they are now (this is not something special about now, it has been true on generational timelines at least since the beginning of the industrial revolution and on longer timelines forever). Experimentation and ignoring business cases and customers is that future happens.

If you want to think about "consumer challenges" and worry whether your idea is a viable business rather than just giving it a go, iterating rapidly, and having an idea about when to stop if it doesn't work out, be my guest, but to me this is an incredily dull, mercenary view of the future.

cj• 3 years ago

This is where YC's motto "Build something people want" is helpful.

You can live by the advice you're giving, but if it doesn't end with you having built something people actually want, you won't have a viable business (if that is indeed your goal)

barnabee3• 3 years ago

I agree. For me the journey has definitely been that learning about and working on things that interest me and I care about eventually presented the opportunity to have a shot at a viable business, rather than some innate desire to create a business that works no matter what (which, rightly or wrongly, I look down on a bit!)

sgerenser• 3 years ago

Reminds me of the (supposed) Henry Ford quote “If I had asked people what they want, they’d have said a faster horse”.

college_physics• 3 years ago

Businesses exist to make money by serving customer needs

this is both correct and inadequate as a principle. Leaving aside the excessive focus on money and the convenient blindness around externalities, customer needs are not static but evolving. What fraction of today's customer "needs" existed 10, 100, 1000 years ago?

Needs are shaped in collective feedback loops that identify and match "desirable" new facets of consumption with deliverable technologies. That non-linear game is much more complex than identifying and serving true customer needs.

While physical tech (hardware) places real world constraints on what can be created (popular culture has a flying car "need" but they are not deliverable), software has almost no such constraints. It is closer to the business nature of movie making or book writing. You use information and code to create an almost entirely pure cultural artifact.

That is why people engage in "faster dishwashers". While it is hard to read the mood of the times and engineer a blockbuster movie, it is much easier to work on a more predictably successful sequel. Of course at some point people tire of sequels.

bborud2• 3 years ago

The “people don’t buy a quarter inch drill, they buy a quarter inch hole” thing is a catchy phrase, but it isn't always true. Or even a useful way to think. It is a very limiting way of looking at products. The reason it isn't always true is that sometimes focusing on what you think the customer wants leads to lost opportunities.

It reminds me of a Neal Stephenson quote from Zodiac:

"Most of my colleagues go on backpacking trips when they have to do some thinking. I go to a good hardware store and head for the oiliest, dustiest corners. … If they're really good, they don't hassle me. They let me wander around and think. Young hardware clerks have a lot of hubris. They think they can help you find anything…. Old hardware clerks have learned the hard way that nothing in a hardware store ever gets bought for its nominal purpose. You buy something that was designed to do one thing, and you use it for another."

If you build stuff you will sooner or later realize that when tools that can do new tricks turn up, it provides you with new opportunities that perhaps you didn't think of before.

If you own equipment to make holes you know that there is a vast difference between a spade bit and a forstner bit. They are two very fundamentally different ways of making a hole. Both make holes, but one will make an absolute mess of certain materials. If all you have is a spade bit, then for some tasks, you have to come up with a different strategies for achieving what you want. You have to design yourself around the limitation. If you use a forstner bit, its ability to make clean holes may mean that not only can you use it for making holes - you may be able to use it in situations where you are not primarily making a hole, but removing a curved bit of material.

I want a faster dishwasher because a faster dishwasher would solve actual problems for me. But it is a bit more nuanced than that. My dishwasher spends about an hour on one load. Getting it down to 50 minutes or even 40 wouldn't change anything. But if you can get it down to 10-15 minutes, it really starts to matter. It means the way I sequence tasks in the kitchen can change. And that's for everyday use. If I were to have a dinner with a lot of guests it would also mean that I'd need fewer plates because I can wash plates between courses.

I've been to a few design thinking workshops, and the thing that always gets me is how arrogantly stupid a lot of these workshops end up being. They pretend to be about learning the customer's needs rapidly, but more often than not what happens is that people try to replace actual insight with ceremonies and suppositions only to arrive at either the wrong conclusions or be in such a hurry to demonstrate cleverness that you miss most opportunities.

But hey, there is good money in teaching ceremony.

jmtucu• 3 years ago

3 hours? Mines has up to 90 min, and I always use the 30min program which is enough.

scotty79• 3 years ago

Recently I was wondering why vacuums with metal pipes don't have them grounded.

After vaccuming a lot of fine dust from synthetic rug the static electricty was enough to create almost 2 inch (5cm) spark to grounded metal element I put the pipe close to.

EDIT: One use later apparently static electricity fried circuit that was used to control the vacuum cleaner from the handle. The button on the body of the vacuum cleaner doesn't work either. The funny thing is the system is stuck in ON position so I can no longer turn off the vacuum.

So the fresh new almost $200 vacuum from Hoover brand lasted about two cleanings because of serious design flaw.

cudgy2• 3 years ago

Customers don’t always know what they want until they experience it. The overall point of this article might be true most of the time, but in order for there to be advancement of products beyond the obvious pain points, teams must sometimes move forward with novel features that customers are not asking for yet.

EricE• 3 years ago

lol - just read the reviews for most modern dishwashers and the biggest complaints I regularly see (although I do agree it seems silly) is the length of the dishwashing cycles.

wizofaus• 3 years ago

A dishwasher solving a real problem would be one that was capable of preventing arguments over how best to stack them.

Nobody needs a faster dishwasher – solve real user needs

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