You know what drives me nuts? People that prewash dishes before they put them in the dishwasher. I don’t get it, come on it’s a Dish Washer that is what it was designed to do, wash dishes. It is not a dish sterilizer where it does some magic to already cleaned dishes. If your dishwasher is not washing your dishes then it’s broken and should be replaced.
Let’s look at the whole process:
Most machine dish washing soap is actually designed to attach to food partials without food on your dishes the soap actually does not work properly.
Since dish washers are designed to wash dishes you are not going to get them any cleaner by pre-washing them.
Also pre-washing dishes is a major waste of water. I read that up to 6000 gallons of water is wasted in each home just by pre-washing dishes. When you multiply this by all the homes pre-washing we are wasting far too much water unnecessarily. Imagine the average dishwasher uses just 3 to 5 gallons of water per load and does the whole job no need to pre-wash.
Then you are wasting your time pre-washing you could be doing anything else.
So save some water, give yourself some more time, just scrape off the big stuff and let your dishwasher do it’s job of washing dishes.
Note: some older dishwashers or those builder grade models really should be replaced. Also I think one of the most important things to consider when buying a dishwasher is how loud is it. Good dishwashers purr quietly and you can have a conversation next to one, cheap dishwashers sound like a jet plane and you can hear them in the whole house.