Following the thread "Dish-Drawer Performance, Part 2," (Link below), I got some lovely comments (not naming names!) suggesting that the DD was under-loaded, and that 114 minutes was unreasonable, given some newer dishwashers can do the same in under 1 hour.
In response to: "But all in all you are using a lot of water and electricity and time to wash little loads that would only 1/4 fill one of my WPs or KA DWs"
Well, here is my attempt to be more frugal. By the way, DD uses just 134KW/h per year when using Normal Eco, which wouldn't be much more with Normal, especially when connected to Solar heated water!!! Remember also that this machine uses just 6.7L/1.77 US Gal in all cycles (except rinse), so you don't feel so guilty, especially when compared to BOL Asko's, which use around 15-18L of water to wash
Below, you see a picture of the dish-drawer, this time loaded with dinner plates where they normally go, but with small bowls and toast plates on the angled left rack. This allows around 2-3 days worth of general bowl/toast plate use, and 2 days worth of dinner plates on the right (3-4 people in house, 8 dinner plates). This means, we can use the DishDrawer (top or bottom) just once every 2 days! So, on average that would be 182.5 days per year, saving (roughly) 1222.75L/323 US Gal per year, if we used the dish-drawer every day.
Another comment stated, "my dishwasher is able to shift such dirt in the quick 45 minutes 38°C cycle."
Here's my response to that. See the photo below:
*** Note that the bowl above the cutlery basket had around 4-5 bits of oat's nibble in it, because of it's placement above the cutlery basket, the other 2 bowls came spotlessly clean! I moved that dirty bowl to the bottom drawer, which was being used at the time to clean some pots and pans.
I used the "Fast" cycle, which is 49 minutes, and uses a temp of around 45ºC/120ºF to wash. Main-wash is around 20 minutes, has a fast post wash rinse, then a longer, hotter final rinse.
See the results below :)
By the way, please feel welcome to post your wash loads (in drawers or not) on here, with the cycle name, water usage and time taken to complete.
Remember before and after :D
Post# 597394 , Reply# 2   5/18/2012 at 19:17 (4,354 days old) by washer111 ()  
Before we begin though, I will direct you to follow the link at the end of the post, which will take you to the Instruction booklet for the new series of DishDrawer. Mine is the DD60DCX6, the progression being DD60DCX7. This model uses the same amount of water, except in heavy, where there is an extra rinse, but the wash times have been EXTENDED! That should help solve the "Those don't wash dishes" claims :) But the Normal Eco is now at 159 minutes or so, obviously being reduced by around 10 minutes with a hot water tap (ours often counts down quicker than normal, or jumps in 5 minute increments). These times are based on 20ºC incoming water though.
Anyway, we survived around 2.5 days without using the DishDrawer, all thanks to my new "Bob-load" method! This time around, we had some stuck on peanut buttery stuff from cake making, Satay Chicken dinners (fairly thick sauce, not runny!), bowls with Weeties on them and a plastic container with Mac n cheese. Yummy. The Plastic container flipped over, and is not present in the final photo
I used a Heavy Eco cycle, after washing my hands with cold water from the hot tap, to try and draw some hotter water. Heavy Eco is 4 minutes faster, but thanks to the warmer water, we lost at least another 5 minutes (I saw the display advance 5 minutes).