My thesis on dishwashers: why you should have either 0 or 2 at home, because 1 is utterly useless I think the longest-standing fight between my wife and me is about the utility and usefulness of a dishwasher. I think dishwashers are the most useless appliances on Earth; obviously, she loves ours. My argument is super simple: if there are fewer than three people at home, adults, not kids, you are better off, by pretty much any metric, washing the dishes by hand. To me, the whole process of pre-washing them, putting them inside the dishwasher, and then taking them out, sometimes still drying them, and putting them back on the shelves is utterly ridiculous and defeats the whole purpose. I just hate having to take them out the next day and put them back on the shelves. I would rather wash everything by hand in 10 minutes and get it over with. Over time, though, I have slowly realized that what my wife really hates is having dirty dishes in sight. She just hates it: the smell, the way they look, everything. So I have come to this conclusion: you should either own 0 dishwashers or 2. Having 1 makes no sense. Why 2? You start loading one dishwasher until it is full. Once you turn it on, you start using the second one. When the first one is clean, you simply take the clean dishes directly from it, effectively using the dishwasher as their storage place. Once the second one is full, you run it and start using the first one again. This really solves both problems: you never have to leave dirty dishes in the sink, but at the same time, you never have to take all the clean dishes out of the dishwasher and put them away.