I’m bored by loading and unloading the dishwasher -almost as bored as I would be by handwashing the damn dishes.
Here, therefore, is my proposed solution. Manufacturers please note. Let’s have new machines divided into 2 separate compartments. At any time, one would be involved in washing and one containing dishes waiting to be washed (ie being filled intermittently by people deciding to have some emergency pain-au-chocolat or Shreddies in the brief gaps between main-er meals.
One beauty of the system is that, although it would be running for a high percentage of the time, my kitchen wouldn’t disappear under a mountain of festering, dirty dishes.The system would have a third tray, full of clean stuff, which would fit within a big cupboard or compartment. When the wash is done, whatever small amount of clean stuff is left in the tray in the cupboard gets entered into the machine, to be filled gradually, and the cleaned trayful is placed en masse into the cupboard. The tray which has been waiting can then start being washed.
This eliminates the tiresome step of having to extract randomly-placed stuff from the machine and locate individual items in their designated spaces (our knives, forks and spoons merrily exchange partners in the cutlery drawer about twice a week, when all elements of any two of the three sets are being washed).
This requires three complete sets of cutlery+crockery. The main difficulty with that, aside from cost, is that unless I want to spend a lot of time neatly packing each tray (and I really don’t) the machine itself may have to be bigger than normal (ie wider). I figure that’s a small price to pay for minimising the downsides of all this endless shovelling and display of filthy kitchen things. There would obviously no requirement to store dishes in cupboards any more, since they would all be involved in the eternal waiting, washing, feeding cycle.
Ideally, I’d like to get such a system built into our dining table, so that, at the press of a button, the three trays circulate -the dirty stuff disappears and the clean stuff emerges.
