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You probably waste more electricity running your dishwasher instead of by hand than running a laptop. If battery usage is a problem because of climate change, t

by c3534l 5y ago

You probably waste more electricity running your dishwasher instead of by hand than running a laptop. If battery usage is a problem because of climate change, then tax carbon and you can decide to cut back or pay more on dish washing, food deliveries, big houses with huge heating cost and the like, and everyone who wants a cool laptop can spend their money (or carbon credits) on that. If that's what's bothersome, then regulate the problem, not try to micromanage people's hobbies - which brings illegitimacy to people who advocate for actual change, instead of scoring petty political points making it look like you're doing something by adding another useless regulation with a short shelf-life of relevancy.

lmm 5y ago
> You probably waste more electricity running your dishwasher instead of by hand than running a laptop. Handwashing wastes energy compared to using a dishwasher, because it uses significantly more water that costs energy to purify.
Filligree 5y ago
Dishwashers are, in fact, fabulously efficient. They use far less hot water than warning by hand, and the majority of the energy spent on dishwashing is spent on heating water.
- Marsymars 5y ago
  > They use far less hot water than warning by hand This must be based on a horribly inefficient method of hand washing. Google says that a modern, efficient dishwasher uses about 3 gallons of water per load. I just went and measured the volume of my kitchen sink to roughly where it gets filled to when I'm washing an equivalent of a full dishwasher's load of dishes, and it came out to a bit over 3 gallons. If it's not summer, I then let my hot sink water sit until it's cooled down to room temperature to avoid wasting heat.
ashtonkem 5y ago
It’s funny how wrong people are about what consumes electricity and not. Washing dishes by hand is far less efficient than a dishwasher. It depends on exactly how you load it and how your water is heated, but running the dishwasher produces probably half the greenhouse gasses that washing by hand does. As a general rule of thumb, the guide here is to track heat and where it goes. Hot water down the drain is a bad thing to be avoided as much as possible. Dishwashers reuse a small amount of hot water repeatedly in an insulated box until it’s fully spent (from a cleaning perspective). Hand washing sends a continuous stream of hot, soapy water down the drain, wasting both water, soap, and the energy required to bring that water up to temperature.
- c3534l 5y ago
  I wouldn't be wrong if you just charged me for carbon. I'm sure there's plenty of things people are wrong about carbon emissions and have no idea, because no one pays for the negative effects of pollution and therefor everyone does.
  - oofbey 5y ago
    Carbon tax is a really nice and simple idea. But its key problem is that it costs the same whether or not there is a viable alternative for lowering carbon. So it punishes industries for which there is no viable alternative using today’s technologies. And it also provides relatively low pressure to adopt the technologies we know are on the cusp of working. In theory in the long term it encourages innovation in all the right ways, but in practice there’s no way to usefully spend billions of dollars on pure research projects to fix the problems we don’t know how to fix yet. Targeted incentives and regulations, in contrast, can force industries to adapt quickly in ways that we know are actually not economically painful. (You just gotta enable low power mode on your laptops Dell, seriously it’s not hard just stop whining and do it.) Yeah it is a bit annoying, but it’s just annoying, no worse - not like putting a carbon tax on concrete which would be super expensive, basically impossible to avoid, and drag down economic growth everywhere.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    In many cases this would be true. I think people would be a bit shocked if every pound of steel or concrete they bought came with a carbon tax attached, for example. But in the case of dishwashing vs. hand washing you are already paying for the decreased efficiency in the form of your water and heating bill. The issue is that most of us have no way to measure the relative hot water consumption of either, so we’re left with the heuristic of “more convenient is less efficient”.
emodendroket 5y ago
Probably worth the electricity to conserve water in California.

by c3534l 5y ago

lmm 5y ago

> You probably waste more electricity running your dishwasher instead of by hand than running a laptop. Handwashing wastes energy compared to using a dishwasher, because it uses significantly more water that costs energy to purify.

Filligree 5y ago

Dishwashers are, in fact, fabulously efficient. They use far less hot water than warning by hand, and the majority of the energy spent on dishwashing is spent on heating water.

Marsymars 5y ago
> They use far less hot water than warning by hand This must be based on a horribly inefficient method of hand washing. Google says that a modern, efficient dishwasher uses about 3 gallons of water per load. I just went and measured the volume of my kitchen sink to roughly where it gets filled to when I'm washing an equivalent of a full dishwasher's load of dishes, and it came out to a bit over 3 gallons. If it's not summer, I then let my hot sink water sit until it's cooled down to room temperature to avoid wasting heat.

ashtonkem 5y ago

It’s funny how wrong people are about what consumes electricity and not. Washing dishes by hand is far less efficient than a dishwasher. It depends on exactly how you load it and how your water is heated, but running the dishwasher produces probably half the greenhouse gasses that washing by hand does. As a general rule of thumb, the guide here is to track heat and where it goes. Hot water down the drain is a bad thing to be avoided as much as possible. Dishwashers reuse a small amount of hot water repeatedly in an insulated box until it’s fully spent (from a cleaning perspective). Hand washing sends a continuous stream of hot, soapy water down the drain, wasting both water, soap, and the energy required to bring that water up to temperature.

c3534l 5y ago
I wouldn't be wrong if you just charged me for carbon. I'm sure there's plenty of things people are wrong about carbon emissions and have no idea, because no one pays for the negative effects of pollution and therefor everyone does.
- oofbey 5y ago
  Carbon tax is a really nice and simple idea. But its key problem is that it costs the same whether or not there is a viable alternative for lowering carbon. So it punishes industries for which there is no viable alternative using today’s technologies. And it also provides relatively low pressure to adopt the technologies we know are on the cusp of working. In theory in the long term it encourages innovation in all the right ways, but in practice there’s no way to usefully spend billions of dollars on pure research projects to fix the problems we don’t know how to fix yet. Targeted incentives and regulations, in contrast, can force industries to adapt quickly in ways that we know are actually not economically painful. (You just gotta enable low power mode on your laptops Dell, seriously it’s not hard just stop whining and do it.) Yeah it is a bit annoying, but it’s just annoying, no worse - not like putting a carbon tax on concrete which would be super expensive, basically impossible to avoid, and drag down economic growth everywhere.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  In many cases this would be true. I think people would be a bit shocked if every pound of steel or concrete they bought came with a carbon tax attached, for example. But in the case of dishwashing vs. hand washing you are already paying for the decreased efficiency in the form of your water and heating bill. The issue is that most of us have no way to measure the relative hot water consumption of either, so we’re left with the heuristic of “more convenient is less efficient”.

emodendroket 5y ago

Probably worth the electricity to conserve water in California.