In the absence of running water, we've had to get a bit creative. My enterprising husband has taken to hauling up buckets of water from our rain barrel to flush the toilet with, and for brushing our teeth, washing our hands, and cleaning dishes, we've been relying on our emergency stores of water from the basement. I brought up two 2-liter bottles yesterday as soon as it became apparent we were going to be without water for a while, and I used up part of one right away for washing my hands. I assumed I'd have to go down and get at least one more after dinner, so Brian would have enough to wash the dishes with.
Instead, to my astonishment, I looked up from my book to discover that he'd already done them all—and not only was the second bottle of water still full, there was still some left in the first. He'd actually washed the entire dinner's worth in less than a liter of water. And all this without even having a dishpan to soak them in.
I was so impressed by this that I insisted on watching him clean the breakfast dishes this morning so I could observe and document his low-water technique. As you can see here, he started out with a good sinkful of dishes: one big plate, one cereal bowl, the two cat dishes from the previous night, a cocoa cup, a juice glass, the filter cone I use for coffee, and a baking pan we'd used to bake a cake for the Minstrel concert the night before.
And here's the amount of water he poured out for himself to start with: about ten ounces. That's it! He ended up needing just a little bit more to finish rinsing that last pan, but as you'll see, it wasn't very much.
As he worked, he explained to me the basic premises of his low-water washing technique. The most important rule, he said, is to make every bit of water you use do as many jobs as possible. So, when you rinse off a dish, don't just let the rinse water run down the drain; make sure it runs off into another dish, where it can start the process of soaking. It's kind of like the way the family in Little House on the Prairie used to bathe on Saturday nights, letting the children bathe first, then Ma, and finally Pa (the largest member of the family, and thus presumably the one with the most dirt on him), all in the same tub of water, because hauling and heating up a fresh tubful for each of them would have been five times as much work. The point is to avoid wasting any amount of water that could still be useful, no matter how small.
He demonstrated this by taking the little bit of water he'd left in the cats' dishes overnight to soak them and using that to moisten the plates. Then he gave each of them a quick once-over with the dish scrubber wand, using the little bit of water he'd just added to work up a lather. If they had any residue clinging to them that the dish wand couldn't easily remove, he used the green scouring pad for a slightly rougher treatment. Up to this point, he'd actually used no additional water beyond the tiny bit that was in the cat dishes.
Once he had everything soaped up, he began using the water in the measuring cup to rinse the dishes. He started with the smallest dishes and worked his way up to the biggest ones, and as he worked, he let the rinse water from each dish run off into a larger one. Here, for instance, he's rinsing one of the cat dishes and emptying the rinse water into his cereal bowl.
And here's a three-fer: he's emptying the water from the juice glass, pouring it out over my cocoa spoon to rinse that, and letting it empty into the baking pan.
When he got to the biggest dish of the lot, the baking pan, he found he didn't have quite enough water left to rinse it. So he poured out just a little bit more from the bottle into the measuring cup—not more than two ounces—to finish the job.
Counting this and the little bit of water that was left over in the cat dishes, he didn't use more than a pint altogether to clean the whole sinkful of dishes.
As Brian pointed out, doing dishes this way does involve a trade-off: while it uses a lot less water, it also takes more time. So it's not necessarily something he would want to do when water is plentiful. But after demonstrating the technique for me, he started to think that maybe, with a bit of practice, he could work some of these water-saving strategies into his normal daily dish-washing without taking too much extra time. So even when our household water is flowing again, we might be able to use less of it. If that helps us stay in the bottom tier of usage on our quarterly water bill, saving us $18 a pop, then I'm all for it.
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