A small dishwasher for the worktop. You don't need any space in your kitchen units for it.
Dishes in, press the button, and you do something else. The daily washing-up by hand is gone; only big pots and pans you still wash yourself. It suits small kitchens and rented flats above all, where there's no room for a normal dishwasher.
A few simple steps make a big difference:
The machines I would recommend, the Bomann TSG 7405 with a water connection and the Bomann TSG 5702 with a tank, are not available on amazon.co.uk at the moment. As soon as a machine I can recommend is available there, you'll find it here. Until then, the calculator and the questions below help you choose.
Set it to how you live. Everything recalculates instantly.
If you have a free connection under the sink, take a machine with a connection. Then six place settings fit inside and you never have to fill in water. If there's no connection or you don't want to connect anything, take a machine with a tank. It's smaller and louder, and you fill in water before every wash. In return it can stand anywhere there's a socket and the drain hose reaches the sink.
The inlet hose goes onto a cold-water connection with a 3/4-inch thread, usually a valve under the sink. If it's already taken, for example by a washing machine, a double valve helps. You connect the drain hose to the waste pipe under the sink; there are adapter pieces with a connection for this. The hoses are included; on the machines here they are about 1.5 metres long. If you don't have a suitable connection, call a plumber.
Big pots, pans and baking trays usually don't, so you still wash those by hand. Before buying, measure your biggest plate and compare it with the manual: large dinner plates don't always fit into the small machines with a tank.
Compared with the average, yes, especially water. In a study by the University of Bonn, participants used an average of 103 litres of water and 2.5 kWh of energy for twelve place settings by hand, mostly for the hot water. According to the manufacturers, the machines here use the equivalent of 13 to 20 litres and 1.0 to 1.3 kWh for twelve place settings in the eco programme. If you wash up very sparingly by hand, though, you use less. The most economical is a big, full dishwasher: according to its data sheet, it needs only around 8 litres and 0.5 kWh for twelve place settings.
Fill the tank before every wash, easiest with a jug or a measuring cup. Put the drain hose into the sink and secure it so it doesn't slip out. Otherwise the waste water runs onto the worktop or the floor. You can still connect many tank machines to a water supply later; the Bomann TSG 5702 comes with the hoses for this.
Because there are hardly any tests. Stiftung Warentest, Germany's best-known consumer tester, hasn't tested countertop dishwashers in recent years; its current tests only include big machines. I haven't found any other independent tests of the machines here either. So I compare the manufacturers' figures for you, meaning energy class, water, noise and size, and tell you honestly where small dishwashers fall short.
The machines here are made for Germany and have a German plug. It doesn't fit Swiss sockets. That's why I don't have a suitable offer for Switzerland right now, but I'm looking for one.