How can I not burn my hands in hot water when doing dishes?

Question

Every time I do the dishes by hand, I scald my hands, but if I use cold water, the dishes don't get clean. This is extremely inconvenient, especially when I need to clean them fast, rather than soaking them. Is there another way to clean my dishes?

Answer 1

Lots of people have mentioned rubber gloves. I agree, but I found while doing dishes in restaurant quantity, (EG, for way longer than you may be doing dishes at home), It would get a lot easier if I filled the gloves with cold/tepid water after putting my hands in, then put a hair tie around my wrists to hold most of it in. It feels a bit weird at first, and you'll splash some out the top necessitating a refill if you're doing it for long enough, but it lets you work with fresh from the tap hot water without any real concern for burning yourself.

Answer 2

The dishes will get clean if you use water that's the hottest you can handle. Eventually your heat tolerance will improve also.

One thing you can do is put the dishes into a sink full of super-hot water, with some grease-cutting soap, and let them soak until the water is cool enough to handle. This will break down whatever's stuck on, and make it easy to wipe off. The whole thing usually takes 20 minutes max, for me. Not a slow process.

Wearing rubber gloves isn't the best temperature control, but can help keep the hot water directly off your hands, which will minimize absorption, which causes 'raisin fingers'.

Answer 3

Although it's not much of a hack, rubber gloves usually do the trick for me.

If you really want to crank the water temperature you can get extra thick ones, or wear two pairs. That's what I used to do when I was working as a dishpig in a restaurant. If you have an old pair that has a hole in it this is a good way to give it a second life as the inner pair.

Answer 4

Where I live we use a dishwashing brush. The trick I use is filling the sink with hot water and dishwashing liquid and while it's filling up I put in the dishes one by one.

Then I use the dishwashing brush to lift up the top dish till one side is above the water. I then grab that side of the dish with my free hand and use the brush to clean the dish, not forgetting to also clean the part you initially grabbed.

I continue with the stack of dishes and by the time I'm done with the dishes the temperature of the water has decreased enough that I can safely put my hands into the water and do the rest.

I never put in an entire stack of dishes, always one by one because otherwise they may stick.

Answer 5

A bit off topic, but you will eliminate this problem, and the risk of scalds from too hot water in the shower, if you simply set your water heater temperature to a level that is not painfully hot. You will also save quite a bit of energy and money by doing so.

Answer 6

This is really more of a general water-, detergent- and space-saving solution for doing dishes by hand in a single-tub sink, but it solves this particular problem too as a side effect:

Get a spray bottle and a sponge. Fill the spray bottle with water and mix in a small amount of detergent. (Most dishwashing detergents sold today are labeled as "concentrated". You really don't need much.) Follow this workflow:

1. If the dishes have a lot of leftover food or other gunk stuck on them, rinse most of it off first. Use a brush for this. For really difficult cases (say, burnt and dried oatmeal stuck in a kettle), try soaking. If you're just washing coffee cups or something like that, you can skip this step.

2. Pick up the dishes one at a time. Spray some detergent mix onto the item you're washing (you can do this in advance to let it soak a bit) and rub it on with the sponge. This will take off most food stains, including some (like old coffee stains) that are difficult to remove otherwise. Make sure to wash the whole surface, including the outside of the lip for cups and glasses, and clean the sponge under running water if it gets too dirty.

3. Rinse the detergent and rubbed-off dirt off the dishes. You can do this one at a time, immediately after washing, or you can stack them up and do a bunch at once. This is also the step where, if you like, you can use hot water to kill off any remaining germs (although detergent is really a pretty fair germicide all on its own).

The trick here is that you don't really need to use any water, hot or cold, for the main washing step, except for what's in the detergent mix. (Well, you do need some for cleaning the sponge, but not much, and it doesn't need to be hot.) If you're used to washing your dishes in a big tub of hot water, it may not sound like this method could possibly work, but give it a try — it really does.

The main weakness is that the spray-and-sponge method deals well with things like grease, coffee and lip stains on cups, but not so well with things like thick coatings of starchy sauce. For those, you really need the initial pre-rinse step.

If you insist on using hot water for the final rinse (which might make sense, if you're, say, doing this in a shared kitchen, and there's a stomach bug going around), one way to avoid getting your hands in it is to put the dishes in the sink, pour the hot water over them, and then drain it by pulling the plug. Or just use rubber gloves.

Answer 7

Got a bowl or a plastic container among your dirty dishes?

Use it to make a soap solution that lathers up. Use the hottest water that feels comfortable. Don't let the tap run. Scrub a couple of dishes, pile soapy ones together, then turn the tap on to rinse them. I find this way more comfortable (and water-wise) than constantly moving my hands in a stream of hot water.

The same approach, but filling the sink, is also done in commercial kitchens that don't have industrial dishwashers, with the extra step of a diluted bleach rinse.

Answer 8

Take some ice and put it in a pair of plastic gloves or disposable kitchen gloves, then put another pair of gloves over the first to keep the cold in the plastic glove.