Why do domestic dishwasher cycles take hours instead of being extremely fast like commercial dishwashers?
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Commercial dishwashers are fast. They are also huge, loud, use strong chemicals and steam to clean quickly.
Domestic dishwashers are slow. They are also small, quiet, use mild chemicals, and use water from your hot water heater.
You can get one or the other, but you can’t have both.
*Edited stupid autocorrect typo. Thanks u/CouldBeARobot for keeping me honest!
Because there’s a certain nostalgia to having a dishwasher running in the background and the dishwasher manufacturers have us under their spell
Most restaurants have two dishwashers.
The first is called either Juan or Jesus and he does the bulk of the work cleaning the dishes and getting off anything stuck on. He’s all the cooks’ best friend and super important to the running of the business.
The other one is a machine and mostly just acts as a second pass for the first one. It still uses much hotter water and harsher soaps than what you’ll find in a home.
Home dishwashers use the water once, then throw it away. Because of this they need to take a long time to “pick away” at the dirt gently over time to maintain efficiency, using as little water as possible. My dishwasher has a “quick” mode that isn’t as efficient.
By contrast commercial machines store the wash water, keep it steaming hot and reuse it for each load. By reusing the water and keeping it really hot (rather than struggling to barely heat anew each time), they can get both efficiency and high performance, if they’re doing a high volume. Doing a single load in a commercial machine makes it really inefficient though: it takes more water, spends more energy heating it and then throws it away.
To add on to what others have said, most commercial dishwashers would not treat plastic very nicely.
I use the 35 min cycle on dishwasher and everything’s looks just as clean if I used the regular 2.5 hour cycle.
* dishes going into a commercial dishwasher usually were used less than an hour ago and are also pre-rinsed. The food hasn’t had time to fully stick to the dish yet, and can be washed off fairly quickly.
* commercial dishwashers are more powerful at the cost of size and efficiency. Home users would generally rather have a dishwasher that’s cheaper to run than one that cleans stuff faster.
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The dishwasher at a restaurant is a human. No machine can keep up otherwise.
The “other” dishwasher at a restaurant isn’t actually a dish washer, it’s a sanitizer. After the dishes are properly hand washed, they put them in a sanitizer dishwasher. Really quick, really hot. Doesn’t clean dishes at all, but kills whatever germs/bacteria might be left.
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