Experts say don’t rinse your dishes. We put that advice to the test.

Perhaps we’ve just had shitty dishwashers over the years, but if we don’t rinse the dishes beforehand most of them will be dirty after the dishwasher does its thing.

It probably matters that there are only two of us and we don’t run the dishwasher often — on average, once a week. That’s a lot of time for food to get really encrusted on things. If it’s a larger family situation where the dishwasher gets run once a day it’ll probably do an ok job. Also, we do rentals which (as nodded to above) tend to have substandard and/or abused dishwashers.

Given the average family size these days the “don’t pre-rinse” advice, though, is probably wrong for a lot of people.