Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Residential Dishwashers

[Douglas G. Larson (ddhle]

>  1. If you have residential dishwashers, how many?
> 
>  2. How many people do you usually cook for? And how many people are too
many >  to get all the dishes in your washers?
>
>> People are afraid of having to come back later in the evening to empty
the 
>>  dishwasher or people will put dishes in the washer when it has clean
dishes in it. 
>> We often have people having small meals in the CH and leaving dishes
around 
>>  since we want them sanitized and not hand washed. 
>>


Here at Songaia Cohousing, we have 3 residential dishwashers. All 3 are
KitchenAid. 
We don't have any commercial dishwashers. 

Our community is about 45 people and we cook 5 meals each week with dinner
Mon to Thur and Sat breakfast. 


The dishwashers are used, almost exclusively, for diner's dishes, i.e.
plates, cups, bowls, and flatware. All cooking pots and baking dishes as
well as all preparation bowls are hand washed. 


On a normal night, we can usually clean the entire meal's dishes with a
single run of the 3 dishwashers with the pots, pans and prep bowls being
hand washed. On occasion, we have more dishes than usual and most of the
time the cleaning crew still handles it. But occasionally there are dirty
dishes left for the next day. The same clean up crew is still responsible
for those.

And, of course, on big event days, like Thanksgiving, we have 2, 3 or even 4
runs of all 3 dishwashers. Since each run takes 90 to 120 minutes, that is a
lot of time. 


We also have people who eat in the common house and they tend to leave their
dishes in the sink near two of the dishwashers. If the dishwashers are open
to being loaded, they can and often do, put their dishes in there. 

We don't have any policy about hand washing since its part of our system. 

We are in year 16 of our community and all 3 of the dishwashers have been
replaced once in that time with the most recent about 3 years ago. They do
have a moderate amount of repair and our repair person complains that they
have poor design elements that contribute to that.



Douglas G Larson,
Songaia Cohousing,
Bothell, Washington