W hen you're feeling dirty, you jump in the shower.
When your
pots and pans are dirty, they take a shower too—in a magic machine called
a dishwasher. Scrubbing old food off dirty dishes is a tedious chore many
people love to hate. Thanks to an ingenious American called Josephine
Cochran (1839–1913), who invented the first automatic dishwasher in
1886, jobs like this can be a thing of the past. In Cochran's machine, you
simply loaded your dirty crockery into baskets and the machine showered it
clean with jets of hot and soapy water. Dishwashers have changed very
little in the century since then—but how exactly do they work? Have you
ever stopped to think what goes on inside the machine after you close the
door? Let's take a closer look!
How a dishwasher differs from hand washing
When you wash your dishes by hand, the water and soap stays still in the
bowl or sink and you move the dishes around as you scrub them with a
cloth or a brush. In a dishwasher, the opposite happens: the dishes and
cutlery stay still in plastic baskets while pressurized jets of hot water shoot
all around them. That means a dishwasher has to be sealed shut all the time
it's operating or the water would fire off in all directions—all over your
kitchen floor!
A dishwasher starts its cycle by taking in cold water from a hose connected
to the machine. Once a certain amount of water's sitting inside the bottom
of the machine, a heating element starts to warm it up. The element is just a
thick metal bar that gets hot when an electric current passes through it, and
it gradually heats the water during the first part of the wash cycle. An
electric pump takes the warming water and forces it up pipes in the side of
the machine, which are connected to two spinning paddles. There's one
paddle, made of metal, underneath the bottom rack of dishes and another
one, made of plastic, under the top rack.
When water enters the paddles, it makes them spin around much like
garden sprinklers. As the paddles rotate, the water emerges from small holes
in their upper surface. The paddles make lots of hot spinning jets of water
that fire upward onto your dirty plates. (That's why it's best to arrange your
crockery so the dirty surfaces are facing downward.) The bottom rack and
the bottom paddle are nearer to the heating element so the water is much
hotter in the lower part of the machine. (That's why you'll see some crockery
items marked "Top rack dishwasher safe"—which means it's alright to put
them in the upper, cooler part of the machine.) After the water hits your
dishes and plates, it falls back to the bottom of the machine, where it's
heated up once more by the element and pumped round again for another
cycle. Water pumps around the machine for half an hour or so until all the
dishes and plates are clean. A sieve at the bottom of the machine catches
any large bits of debris (to stop the machine jamming up), while smaller bits
(and food remains) simply flush down the drain.
1. Cold water is piped into the machine from your home water supply.
2. The heating element at the bottom of the machine, powered
by electricity, warms the water to a temperature of 30–60°C (86–
140°F). That's far hotter than the water most people would use to
wash by hand, which is one reason why dishwashers are more
hygienic (remove more bacteria) than ordinary hand-washing. The
other reason is that the dishes are washed for much longer.
3. An electric pump at the bottom of the machine pumps the water up
through the side walls.
4. The water squirts up through holes in the bottom, metal paddle,
making it spin around. The bottom paddle is made of metal because it
needs to withstand hotter temperatures at the base of the machine.
5. Slightly cooler water squirts up through holes in the upper, plastic
paddle, making it spin around too. Remember that the top of the
machine is slightly cooler than the bottom so a plastic paddle is
acceptable here.
6. After the water has bounced off your plates, it falls back to the
bottom of the machine, where it is heated and pumped around the
circuit again. (After it flips out of the automatic dispenser on the door,
the dishwasher tablet falls into the bottom of the machine and
dissolves in the hot water there. If your dispenser stops working, you
can usually put the tablet in the bottom of the machine instead.)
In this example, I'm covering dishwashers that connect to the cold water
supply ("cold feed") and heat the water for washing. Some dishwashers are
connected to the hot supply instead (they work faster, because they don't
have to heat the water so much), while others are connected to both the
hot and cold supplies.
