Why isn't two washing machines a "thing" like two dishwashers is becoming?

[Fluffycloudland77]

No multiple appliance owners worried about their carbon footprint?

My sister has a dishwasher which has two separate shelves/compartments. It's really useful. It just means you can fill one half say with breakfast and lunch plates and switch on when full but the other half is still empty so you can fill that while the first half is washing! And then when the second half is full you have all the clean stuff ready from th earlier wash. It's great. And only slightly bigger than my dishwasher.

Or what Wilting and KickAss said

I'd be happy with just one dishwasher to be honest. A tumble dryer would be nice too but short of a lottery win, it's never going to happen, space is a thing we just don't have. I was mostly ok with it until I read this thread, never ever considered two dishwashers was a thing people had, I feel pretty crappy about my life now.

If you have two dishwashers you probably won't use them anything like twice as much as you would a single one Molly, it's just that your stuff is sitting neatly stacked inside it waiting to be turned on, rather than sitting messily on the side. And if it stops you doing extra bits and pieces by hand it may save you some water and energy (though there's embedded cost in the appliance itself of course).

Bear in mind that unlikely as it sounds, an affordable acceptable quality dishwasher costs about as much as a posh kitchen unit so if you're doing a poncy kitchen refurb the only additional cost of replacing cupboard with dishwasher/washing machine may be the plumbing and electric socket for the new dishwasher. Obviously if you're getting value for money units from IKEA or wherever that won't be the case.

Molly re carbon footprint, as PP said 2 dishwashers doesn't mean using it twice as much. As I said, we inherited the utility one in what was the kitchen and put one in the new kitchen when we built extension. We only use it when we have a houseful. (With DC & DGC we are 14 and counting.) I have a tumble drier which is rarely used due to the pulley drier and outside line. We are approaching retirement age, when we had little ones we also lived in a 2 up 2 down and through a series of house renovations and living on building sites have ended up in a larger house in a rural hence cheaper location too.

Molly I suddenly thought maybe you meant worried about having 5 children from
a carbon footprint point of view. Well when we had ours in late 70s early 80s I can assure you virtually no one had heard of a carbon footprint!

I can't see how 2 dishwashers would work in practice. Say one's full of dirty dishes and you switch it on. You then take some clean plates from the other and use them. Where do they go when dirty? Can't go back in the clean dishwasher, can't go in the one that's on. You'd end up handwashing them. The horror!

Even 2 washers? Why?! Maybe different if you have a large family but even though mine is constantly on for a family of four, I still don't need two.

Oh blingy. I Sooo need to live in the states, with a wash room like that.

Back in my long ago childhood we only had one oven. Most people now have 2, that's just the way things go we always want more/bigger/better if we can afford it

I only ever heard of this once - a well off family with 4 kids. She couldn't get all dishes and pans for 1 day in 1 dishwasher so got 2.

Just buy a washing machine with a decent 'speed wash' setting. Mine does a really good job on a 40 C cotton wash in an hour.

There's a carbon cost to manufacturing and binning appliances - we don't need two of everything!

We have one dishwasher but it has two drawers. It is handy but not to store dishes in , more because when the dishwasher is on, you can still put dirty things straight into the other drawer of the dishwasher.

Two dishwashers is weird. I know lots of people with enormous luxury kitchens but nobody with two dishwashers. My DSis has two kitchens but that's because she bought her house from a Jewish family who had two for kosher reasons.

I recently got a dishwasher with a cutlery tray and am finding it spatially more efficient. You can fit quite a lot more in the gap where the cutlery basket would have been.

My kitchen is a reasonable size but no way could it fit two dishwashers.

One washer and dryer is plenty for our family - 3 and a small dog - but I wish we had an upstairs laundry room. We lived in the us for a couple of years, the washer and tumble dryer were in what was essentially a large cupboard on the landing, iirc with room for the ironing board, shelves above for detergent, laundry baskets etc. Obv it was designed for the job. Very sensible if (a) you don't use a washing line and (b) have top loading rather than front loading washer ... I'm not sure I'd want to risk a leaky frontloader upstairs.

Of course it's not normal in USA, either!
And won't be for a long time if ever.
1/3 of American homes aren't owner-occupied.
1 in every 1500 homes gets repossessed each year, so that's a risk of 1 in 75 over a 20 yr period.
I wish people would get over the idea that affluence is standard in American homes.
Plus the appliances are huge, much bigger than the ones you get in European homes, so why would you need 2? Where would you PUT 2 of them?

Of course its not normal in the US but perhaps it isn't abnormal - some US homes are enormous, much larger square footage for many suburban middleclass homes than you'd get in europe, many have basements.

We have a laundry room (similar to the one i linked) which is downstairs. If it was upstairs, Inwould never relax with the constant fear of a disaster with a massive over leaking washing machine!

I agree it's not the norm to have an enormous house but amongst some of the middle classes in a lot of states in the US it's not abnormal either.

Lugging heavy appliances down to the basement isn't a much fun prospect. Fair enough if the basement is the garage level anyway (that is common enough). But still, who needs 2 machines when your machine takes 7 kg as standard?

Plus you could need pumps to lift the waste water back up to the sewage pipe drainage level.

I am American, btw :). I can wax at length about the inefficiency of space in American houses. They are reverse tardises... big on outside, small on inside (like the cars).

dollybird

Exactly what I was trying to educate DH on this weekend. Lovely that he did ALL the washing whilst I worked, but there's now wet washing everywhere and we've run out of hangers ... maybe the 2nd washer was a mistake after all! Pace yourself dear!

It's not a quantity thing for us (they're both 9kg machines) ... more that we mainly wash at weekends as too busy in the week and it's nice not thinking about being home every 3 hours to put the next load on.

And one is designated the "old" machine so that's going to be the one doing stuff like sail covers and dingy bags, muddy stuff from cycling etc.

Not heard of the two dishwasher thing, but my mum did say "the best thing us that's it's like a cupboard for dirty dishes" when she first got one. We considered one of those two drawer dishwashers for a bit on that basis.

lljkk one of my friends with the 4 machines has her laundry room in the basement like some homes in the US. She waxes lyrical about it

We used to have a US top loader machine that the previous owners of our old house had shipped over. When it went kaput, I could have wept as we couldn't easily find the same machine here.

2 dishwashers seems massively over-entitled for anything but religious/enormous family reasons! And how are people only putting their dishwasher on once a day? If we're at home it can easily go on three times a day, and there's only 4 of us. By the time the breakfast bowls/plates/cups/glasses/porridge saucepan go in, there's just about room for lunch plates, so on it goes. Or do people not put sauce pans in dishwashers?

DH is trying to use a second washing machine to lure me to moving the utility room into the cellar. I'm not convinced and it would be expensive.

As for using a dishwasher as a cupboard for clean dishes. I don't see the appeal. We are a family of 6, the dishwasher goes on once in the evening. DH or one of the DC empty it in the morning. I don't put glasses or small pans used at breakfast or lunch in it though.