You shouldn’t wash dishes before you put them in the dishwasher, expert says

For many families, it’s just part of the routine: you wash the ‘worst bits’ off your plates before putting them in the dishwasher.

Family members who fail to do so can earn a scolding from Mum or Dad for stopping the dishwasher working at its best.

But we’re doing it wrong – or at least you’re wasting your time if you’ve got a new, hi-tech dishwasher, one expert has said.

‘Believe it or not, it’s actually more beneficial to not rinse your dishes before putting them into the dishwasher,’ Morgan Brashear, a Cascade scientist with Procter and Gamble said in an interview with Today Home.

MOST POPULAR TODAY ON YAHOO

• There’s a country with a lower opinion of the EU than the UK has

• Parents sue 30-year-old son to force him to move out of their home after he refused to leave

• ‘An act of pure evil’: Student who threw acid on ex-boyfriend who later died jailed for 12 years

• Lotto winner Barbara Wragg who gave away most of her £7 million jackpot dies aged 77

• Couple found guilty of murdering French nanny in trial ‘stranger than fiction’

In fact, modern dishwashers have sensors which work out how long a cycle to run based on what’s on the dishes – based on what comes off them during the pre-wash.

So if the dishwasher detects nothing coming off the dishes, it’ll assume (wrongly) that they’re clean, and run a shorter cycle.

So by pre-washing your dishes first, you’re actually ensuring they come out of the wash dirty, Brashear says.

Brashear said, ‘If you pull a helicopter cleaner and you rinse all of your dishes except for one casserole dish with some baked on cheese or one morning bowl of stuck-on oatmeal, nothing will come off in the pre-wash, telling your dishwasher that there’s no food present, and it will run a shorter cycle, leading to a less thorough clean and potentially some cheese or oatmeal left on the dish.’

Brashear said this applies to most dishwashers bought in the past five years at least – although many commenters on Today pointed out that not everyone has a hi-tech dishwasher.