Re: common house dishwashers
From: Kay Argyle (argylemines.utah.edu)
Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2002 12:17:01 -0600 (MDT)
I wish our kitchen was closed off from the dining room.*  A view into a
deserted dining room doesn't make you feel less isolated than a wall of
cupboards would, and the pass-thru isn't useful enough** to compensate for
the noise transmission.  The utility-vs.-noise misbalance could be changed
by cabinets underneath opening to both sides, or two-way drawers like I've
heard one community has, plus shutters that pulled closed, to cut noise --
vinyl accordion shutters, sliding windows, or sliding wooden doors.

(*Rather than putting the kitchen open to the dining room, I'd put it open
to the mailroom -- that's where people are at six o'clock!)

(**It's too wide.  There's a sink counter on the kitchen side, then a
barstool counter on the dining room side.  That might be useful for some
sorts of entertaining, but it's all wrong for us.  It's easier/safer to
carry a hot dish around the corner than stretch off-balance to put it on the
upper counter.)

The Hobart dishwasher is mildly noisy, no worse than most dishwashers I've
known (and I'd say I'm a harsh critic, I get uptight about noise), but the
acoustics of our dining room mean you can't have noise from the kitchen if
you've got any sort of after-dinner program.  Having to wait until 11 p.m.
to start cleaning is the pits.

The undercounter Hobart is about the same size as a home dishwasher. It has
a simple fold-over lip as the handle, and a plain stainless steel front.  It
takes four racks and two people to keep up with it -- one rack being loaded,
one rack in the machine, one rack drying/cooling, and one being unloaded and
the dishes put away.  By the time the dishes are cool enough to handle,
they're dry except for a few scattered drops.

Definitely, the racks are heavy when loaded -- this is why you want Corelle
instead of stoneware.  On the other hand, since the time bottleneck is in
unloading the racks, doing smaller loads doesn't take much longer, and we've
found the dishes get cleaner if we load the racks lightly, anyway -- 90
seconds isn't much time for the water to get between closely packed dishes.

Kay
Wasatch Commons
argyle [at] mines.utah.edu
*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*

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