Do less work and save more water when running
your dishwasher

When it comes to washing dishes, doing less work can save you more money as it helps the environment.

Don't wash dishes by hand. An efficient dishwasher can use less water than washing dishes by hand, no matter how frugal you are at the faucet. If you don' t like leaving dirty dishes around between washing, run the dishwasher' s rinse-and-hold cycle, which uses only about two gallons of water compared with four gallons typical for hand-washing.

Don't prerinse your load. Unnecessary rinsing can waste nearly 20 gallons of water per load. That comes to some 6,500 gallons per household per year if you use your dishwasher almost daily. Our tests have shown that most dishwashers can handle even the dirtiest dishes. So instead of prerinsing your dinnerware, simply scrape off the excess food, load everything into your dishwasher, and let the machine do the rest of the work.

Use rinse aids and enzyme-based detergents. Both tend to yield cleaner results. Rinse aids reduce spotting, while enzyme-based detergents help dissolve food starches and proteins. Great Value powder (Wal-Mart) and Electrosol Dual Action tabs are among the enzyme-based products that were CR Best Buys in our latest tests. But Trader Joe's and Seventh Generation enzyme-based powders also cleaned well in our tests and don' t contain phosphates, which may harm the environment by promoting algae growth in our waterways.

Those are some of the ways in which you can save energy and help the environment. Go to greenerchoices.org for more.