Roommate ran dishwasher with no detergent instead of handwashing shared dishes

Sorry if the title doesn’t make much sense but i wasn’t sure how to phrase it, i’ll just jump right into what happened.

I have two other roommates currently, one guy, lets call him Dave, moved in a few days after I did. The second dude, I’ll call him Charlie, moved in a few months after us. We are all college students around the same age, I’m 20. Since I moved in first I purchased most of the cleaning/household supplies, figuring we would all share and pitch in financially when things ran out.

Unfortunately I pretty quickly realized that neither Dave or Charlie do any cleaning in the shared spaces (kitchen and living room) and I was stuck cleaning up after them and was responsible for deep cleaning these spaces every week. A few times when I was too busy to do so they really let the place go. I’m pretty non-confrontational so I haven’t said anything about their lack of cleaning, but I have asked them to buy replacement cleaning products when stuff runs out, which has gone well except for the fact that i always have to be the one to nag them to buy whatever we need. I pitch in as well, but I try to rotate who buys stuff. Like if I bought dish soap last time, then one of them needs to next time, and so on and so forth.

This past Friday evening one of them started the dishwasher, using the last of the detergent pods that I had purchased. I was honestly tired of sending reminder texts about buying more so I decided to not say anything and figured one of them would notice pretty soon as someone always ends up running the dishwasher daily. On Saturday I hand washed all of my dishes knowing that we were out of pods, but Dave and Charlie continued to load the dishwasher like normal, including with our **shared** silverware. This silverware is mine, and I never agreed to it being shared since I did not bring a full set, but that’s another story.

I woke up this morning, Sunday, to see that someone had run the dishwasher overnight since the “clean” indicator light was on. I checked under the sink where the detergent pods used to be as well as the storage closet where the cleaning supplies are kept and there were no new pods to be found. I was confused, so I sent a text to our group chat asking if someone had bought new pods and if so, where were they? Dave replied saying he planned to go to the store later to get some. I asked if the dishes in the dishwasher were still dirty, and emphasized that I would rather not use the shared silverware unless it’s been washed with detergent. Dave said, verbatim, “Yea probably still dirty I ran it as usual but just no detergent.”

I told him to please not put away the silverware until it has been properly washed and he hasn’t replied yet, but I’m so annoyed and baffled. Why would you waste water “washing” dishes without detergent, especially when they’re shared? He can do whatever he wants with his own plates and bowls, I don’t have to eat off of them, but washing shared silverware with no soap is disgusting. If I hadn’t been aware of the fact that we were out of detergent I probably would have assumed the load of dishes was clean and used the silverware which is so gross. Now the silverware is either going to have to be hand washed (which I can almost guarantee he won’t do) or it will be washed again in the dishwasher and waste all that water.

Posted Mar 8, 2026, 8:01 PM UTC

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