In the discourse on global warming and other man-made environmental defects, the energy consumption of household appliances is under close scrutiny. Dishwashers, however, are used to substitute or supplement manual dish-washing, so that the question arises about the environmental effects not only of automatic but also of manual dish-washing. To investigate this question, a test was performed covering seven European countries/regions for which the consumption and performance of manual dish-washing was compared with the equivalent data for dish-washing machines, following standardised conditions (EN 50242). As result out of the investigation of 113 persons it is found that the average consumption to clean 12 place settings of dishes was measured to 103 litres of water, 2,5 kWh of energy and 79 minutes time. When these data are compared with values of a new A/A/A dishwashing machine (best machines according to European Energy Labelling scheme taking about 15 litre of water and 1,05 kWh of energy for a full load), possible savings get evident. For a full load this results in 88l water per cycle or about 32 000 litre a year saved when the dishwasher is used once per day fully loaded. As a bath tub takes about 160 litres this van be translated in 200 filled tubs which may be saved per year by changing to a dishwasher! Also time saving may be a big argument, as it takes only about 15 minutes to load and unload a dishwasher. Therefore a time bonus of 64 minutes per day may be accounted for spare time. 64 minutes saved per day are about 400 hours per year or equivalent to 16 full days as additional time for doing something better than washing dishes per hand! Additionally, average cleaning results were significant better for washing dishes by machine rather than by hand.