When you're waiting for a pan to finish washing so you can make dinner, the dry cycle on your dishwasher can seem like it lasts an eternity. The smart man move is to just crack open the door and grab your pan and just manually dry it off with a towel, but CNET notes this week that opening your dishwasher door can actually dry your dishes faster than that whole dry cycle and save you some time and some electricity.

The best thing to do when the dishwasher has finished running is to take out all the clean dishes and put them away. The worst thing to do is to take out just a few clean dishes, and then have someone else come along, get confused, and start mixing dirty dishes in with the clean ones. Then the dishes need to be re-washed and everyone will blame everyone else for it.

If you regularly use a dishwasher in your kitchen and you run out of dishwasher liquid, tablets or powder, you've likely pondered if just normal detergent will work in the machine. Tempting though it may be, you'll be better off washing your dishes by hand. Here's why.