Quote:
Originally Posted by chedder
I figure the dishwasher is running for 2 hours. So if it puts a little cold water in at the beginning it won't make much difference in either electricity usage or water temperature over the cycle. And the dishes come out clean. I could be totally out to lunch on this though.
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It's not really going to make that much difference in your electricity or water usage, but generally a dishwasher will work better if you feed it with hot water.
The dishwasher will do an initial pre-rinse, a main wash, and a final rinse. A newer model dishwasher (and by newer I mean, like... anything in the last thirty years or so) generally only uses a sum total of about 3-4 US gallons of water over these three rinses. If you've got your kitchen sink 50 ft from your water heater, the first "slug" of water in the piping will be about 0.5 gallons (assuming a 1/2" pipe) of cool (room temp.) water. Or, you could run the kitchen faucet for about 10-15 seconds, running about a penny's worth of water down the drain, and have piping hot water at the ready.
If your dishwasher is doing just fine without doing this: meh.