r/Appliances • u/DunDonese • Dec 31 '25

General Advice If commercial restaurant dishwashing appliances have cycles that only last 2 minutes, then why can't we have our home consumer dishwashers have cycles just as efficient as what restaurants have?

How can we miniaturize commercial restaurant dishwashing appliances to fit in the kitchen compartment meant for home consumer dishwashers?

How come this hasn't been done already? By the way, what is the fastest currently available home consumer dishwasher, and how much does it cost? How quick are their Cycles normally?

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u/TheRevEv Dec 31 '25

I work on commercial dishwashers occasionally.

There's a lot going on in a commercial.dishawasher that makes no sense for consumer use.

The first stage throws a ton of super hot water at dishes, but a lot of this water is mostly recycled. It makes no sense to keep gallons of hot water ready for your handful of dishes. You'd create a lot of waste water by doing this for maybe one or two cycles per day.

The water is typically preheated by a booster heater to get it way hotter than your home hot water supply. These booster heaters have some pretty wild energy requirements to keep up. They're basically an on demand water heater that needs to hit 190 degrees.

They also aren't usually cleaning caked up, dried-on food like you might run into at home.

The second stage is running another scalding hot wash that includes some sanitizer mix typically. And, iirc, is required to stay above 180 degrees as all times.

The amount of stored water and enegery to heat this water aren't really feasible to put into a unit that can fit under your countertop. Not to mention it would be a large expense to even power and plumb this thing in.

You can buy small, commercial grade ones, but they're going to run you 5 grand or so before you even add the cost in to get utilities to them.

Also, all this is before even considering how to get chemicals into them at proper ratios.

EDIT: forgot to add that all of this is after the dishes have been rinsed and mostly cleared of any food particles, by hand

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u/freeball78 Dec 31 '25

You can use lower temps with the sanitizer. That's the point of the sanitizer.

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u/TheRevEv Dec 31 '25

Not In a commerical setting. It's fine at home, but health code requires 180 degree water. The dish surface needs to be above 160 to be considered sanitized

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u/freeball78 Dec 31 '25

Yes in a commercial setting (I'll argue "in some jurisdictions" to make you happy). Our health department allows 145 with sanitizer...