Should you pre-rinse your dishes before loading the dishwasher?

Don't pre rinse. Great idea if you want to create an aunt colony in your dishwaher. These same aunts will also eat your timbers. We have seen this in Ontario, Canada. Try writing an article on the merits of loading cutlery handle up or down instead. I suspect an uninformed answer for that question as well from the author of this article.

WTF? Maybe if your dishwasher is state-of-the art and costs £3000. If I put dishes in the dishwasher without pre-rinsing they come out DIRTY. I've also been told by someone who works in a restaurant that dishwashers do not WASH dishes, they only STERILIZE them; based on my experience of 20 years of using dishwashers I find this statement highly plausible.

Yes all of you people are ignorant and retarded. Sure if you leave dishes in there that have been sitting in your sink for a few days after you tried to make nachos with shredded cheese and tortilla chips... i wonder why it won't come off. if you scrape your plates off promptly after completing your meal, do what the article suggests, and have some common sense you may get somewhere in life. it really scares me when i see people as ignorant as yall on this planet, and really makes me worry about what the planet will look like when my children inherit this savaged, pillaged, and hopelessly lost place.

If the drain is clogged ? would water remain in the bottom of the dishwasher? what would be the best way to declog it

No way! We always rinse our dishes. The machine is only run every second day. There's no way my NEW machine will clean it if it's not pre-rinsed!

This article is indecent. Experts agree? Who are these experts? Do they live under a rock? If you don't pre-rinse your dishes first, here is what happens: Your dishes come out dirty with gobs of food on them. Yummy. Who want to to eat off that? Then you get to wash your dishes all over again scrubbing those chunks of food off and running the dishwasher all over again. How environmental is that? If you decide to keep the chunks of food there then you can get contamination and food-borne illness. My husband actually read this article and believed it and tried to "educate me." If anyone believes this article I would like to remind them that any moron can cook up an article and publish it. Please consider the source before trying to sound informed. Do you know the difference from The Onion and The Economist? It is really sad the lack of intelligence and education of so-called informed such as this journalist. Where is her PhD from?

I'm guessing that if you use the very expensive nuclear-powered designer diswasher tablets (Cascade Complete?) that this article might be right, but for your run-of-the mill powder or gel you need to pre-rinse to get the dried up gunk off

Whoever wrote this article, perhaps is not a regular user of dishwasher. It is a 'common-sense' work to rinse your dishes for removing food particles. It is hygenic to remove the particles before pre-loading, avoiding any clogging later on etc. I wish the writers like this article's, have more common sense and perform proper due-diligence before misguiding readers. A bad article, with wrong information!

I'm guessing that if you use the very expensive nuclear powered designer dishwasher tablets that this article might have some merit, but for your run-of-the mill powder or gel, yes, Virginia, you need to rinse/soak the dishes to get the dried-up gunk off.

100% of people in the U.S. disagree with this article. Period.

We have a new, top-of-the-line Kenmore Elite. It's not supposed to matter which way you put the dishes in and you're not supposed to have to rinse them. Completely and utterly B-O-G-U-S, just like this article.

Ha ha ha! Who is the dummy that wrote this article? Hey dummy, you go ahead and not pre-rinse. let me know how it turns out for you.

I'm not sure if my comment entered in all. There are sometimes that dishes need to be rinsed after scraped. Oatmeal, peanut butter, eggs, etc., or left to soak. Not every one has the time to scrape, load, etc. till later. It only takes a few minutes & little water to rinse some things off. I've been using a dishwasher for almost 40 years & have several different brands of dish washers over the time, so I feel I know something about using a dish washer!

Yes, this muckraking reporter obviously didn't check out the truth of the industry spokespersons advising against pre-rinsing? Actually, pre-rinsing doesn't make a difference: one has to completely and thoroughly totally wash off every little bit of shmutz!!! Then, one can use the dishwasher to sterilize -- which can be important when one has a house full of little rugrats trading off whose turn it is to have strep each week. As kathie_B noted, any little flake of anything left of a single dish will dissolve and attach a little bit of itself to each and every dish in the dishwasher. But, you know, that doesn't meant the dish isn't really clean, as in STERLIZED, or whatever, BUT good luck getting your little rugrats to drink from a "clean" but yucky-looking dish or cup -- let alone the comments your mother-in-law will come up with to insult you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Rinse ur dishes always and u will not have any food left on ur dishes or in ur dishwasher. I do not know who decided to write this article but they are completely wrong. If u want dirty dishes by all means do not pre-rinse them. I am not stupid either.

I disagree with rinsing dishes before putting it in the dishwasher. There definitely are some things that need rinsed even after

I'm a single guy and I run my dishwasher every 5-7 days, more often as needed. There is no way I am leaving dirty dishes sit for that long, a quick 5 second rinse and a spray of bleach water inside the machine keeps odors away. My dishwasher is a base model GE that is about 7 years old, I always run a quick wash with roughly a tablespoon of liquid Palmolive eco+ detergent as my regular washing cycle. Everything comes out spotless and squeaky clean, no streaks, no particles, nothing. I've turned up the temperature on my water heater (no kids here) and I make sure to fill my rinse aid about every 8 months which is about how long it takes for me to go through a 120 oz. bottle of liquid detergent. I believe it is in the way that you load your machine and pre-rinsing that does the job along with the water temp. One more tip I always make sure to run the hot water tap at the kitchen sink before I turn on the machine so it fills with hot water right off the bat. I see people with dishwashers that cost more than one months mortgage and they work like crap because they're not used properly. You can't overload and then leave a half plate of food in there and expect it to not be splattered everywhere at the end of a cycle... not to mention the abuse on your drain.

I have the best dishwasher known to man, I never have to clean her she showers all on her own!

"In most cases, all you need to do is scrape your plates over a trashcan to get rid of bones or chunks of food. One caveat: It's a good idea to pre-soak pans or dishes that have something really burned on them. Pre-rinsing doesn't help in this situation."

It's a badly written article, but some commenters sound like they got offended at the first sentence and refused to read the rest of the article.

You don't need to rinse if you thoroughly scrape dishes right away, unless you are dealing with food that cakes on no matter what, like eggs etc. In the latter case it is easier to soak it in hot soapy water and then handwash it.

The thing about glass getting cloudy is true. This is not news, many items labeled dishwasher-safe will still degrade and get pitted over time due to the abrasive nature of dishwasher detergent. With glasses if it's just limescale deposit you can clean it off, but if it's from abrasion the damage is permanent. If something is valuable enough, I don't care what the label says, I'm not putting it in the dishwasher.

It's such a waste using a dishwasher when you're pre-rinsing everything...While you're at the sink you might as well go all the way and finish washing it. Unless you are a procrastinator most dishes don't get so dirty that you need to practically wash them 2x.

LOL @ people letting dirty dishes sit in the washer for days waiting for a full load & then blaming the dishwasher for stinking