Washing up is a daily job, done with routine either by hand or by using an automatic dishwasher. But how it is really done and what amounts of resources are used in the process is almost unknown. The author has investigated 200 households in four European countries for the period of two weeks using diaries, data-logger, web-cam, and questionnaire to gather their exact washing up behaviour. The research found a lot of interesting new insights and concludes that even households owning an efficient dishwashing machine may still do a lot more to optimise the resource consumption during the course of dishwashing.