The green dishwasher

Of course it's you, using much less water and detergent. I'm just fed up with dish waters. It's very good for the dishes, but if you have a wok, a pot and a pan to wash on average each day, it's a pain. My dish washer is of standard size. It can hold dishes for about 100 people but not enough pots and pans for a day's work. Unless I wash the dishes twice everyday, I have to hand wash the pots and pans. Pity that you can wash only the dishes once every two days or more.

I found out that you don't need any detergent if you use microfiber cloth, the best version being one soft side and one hard scrubbing cloth, with a sponge enclosed inside. You don't even need detergent if you stir fry something using lots of oil.

Detergent is pretty useless anyway. If your utensils are not messy, like using non-stick surfaces, grease just rinse away, and the rest wiped away with microfiber cloth. Ordinary cloth works but since they accumulate grease and dirt, they don't last a few minutes. For average quality ceramics, using detergent do not make any difference. For messy pots, it's really the food sticking onto the pots, and detergent do not help a bit. Try detergent on anything dirty like the extration fan above hood. It doesn't make a dent on the accumulated grease.

Household cleaners contain too main ingredients - degreaser and acid(or safer alternatives). Hand wash detergent contain almost none and so useless to clean anything else. Whereas washing machine detergent contains pretty strong stuff, enough to remove sticky dried food from pots and pans. You only need strong stuff because you let the situation get worse in the first place. Dried sticky food are best soaked away with water. Keep the dishes wet until you have time to clean them.

Using warm to hot water, oil will rinse away from most surface, except for your hands and natural fiber cloths. Detergent is really useful only for keeping your hands feeling clean and the natural fiber cloth clean. Because oil and dirt don't accumulate on microfiber cloth, residue oil on any surface can be simply swipe away depending on the amount of water you use. Of course you can use a drop or two when you want to.

For the gemophobic, bacteria and virus need air and water. Oil is a pretty good food preservative if the food is covered thoroughly with oil on the surface. A lot of traditional cooking do not need refrigeration for left overs. Residue oil on the dishes is no worse than residue water.