When people share their best life-changing advice, “Stop rinsing your dishes” doesn’t top many lists. But acting on that advice has changed my life, literally, and in ways I never would have imagined.

First, rejecting the rinse has genuinely saved me time, effort, and money. But it’s also taught me something fascinating about human nature and resistance to change.

What made me ditch the habit of rinsing my dishes in the first place

Most people I know rinse off their dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. A good percentage of those people rinse dishes so thoroughly you can’t even tell they’re dirty by glancing at them.

I was never a super meticulous rinser, but I always rinsed. In my mind, dishwashers always kinda sucked at getting food off if the dishes weren’t rinsed fairly well.

Then I saw some viral videos and wrote a couple of articles about how dishwashers actually work. Experts left and right repeated the direction to only scrape food chunks off dirty dishes, but not rinse them.

I resisted this advice until I saw a video of someone explaining the logic in it. Modern dishwashers (basically since the late 1990s) have what’s called a turbidity sensor. During the initial rinse, the turbidity sensor senses how dirty the water is coming off the dishes. The washer then uses the dirtiness of the water to determine how hot and vigorously to wash the dishes.

Very dirty water = a more thorough........

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