Apparently you've been washing up wrong your whole life

This handy cleaning hack may surprise you.

Cleaning up after dinner is a fairly dull but habitual routine for us all, and we all have our own way of getting through it.

But, if you're lucky enough to have a dishwasher, you might be surprised to learn that something most of us do, to give this clever device a helping hand, is actually stopping it from doing its job properly.

Apparently, you shouldn't be rinsing your dishes before putting them in the dishwasher,

Yes, that's right.

Although it's okay to scrape off food scraps before you load your plate into the dishwasher, Carolyn Forte, the director of the Cleaning Lab at the Good Housekeeping Institute, has revealed that rinsing them can prevent your dishwasher from cleaning them effectively

As it turns out, your bowls, plates and cutlery need to be dirty in order for the dishwasher detergent to do it's job correctly.

Dishwasher detergent manufacturers such as Cascade have been on a mission to discourage customers from rinsing their dishes before placing them in the dishwasher.

They explained: 'Enzymes in Cascade detergent are designed to attach themselves to food particles. Without food, the enzymes have nothing to latch onto.'

So basically if your dishes are too clean, then that detergent isn't going to work.

If you're conscious of being as environmentally friendly as possible, then you may also want to stop rinsing now, because a consumer report has revealed that pre-rinsing can actually waste up to 6,000 gallons of water per year - eek!

The energy efficient dishwashers that we use today save far more water than hand washing does, so maybe we should just leave it up to them.

This might all seem like a lot of information to take in, because it was a shock for us too, but there is one occasion where pre-rinsing is still acceptable. This is when you're not going to run the dishwasher immediately after loading, because the longer the dishes sit there the harder it will be for the detergent to work its magic on them.

Also just one more fact to let it all sink in for you - using an energy efficient dishwasher instead of scrubbing by hand can save you 230 hours per year.

Can you believe it, we've never heard so many good excuses to stop cleaning up?!

If you want to save the environment and free up some of your own time, stop pre-rinsing now!