Drying racks are for lonely people – or rather for people who live alone.
Drying racks are for procrastination and self-indulgence. When you put a dish in a drying rack you are asking “who might finish my work for me later?”
If you live alone then you can be sure that answer is “I will finish this work later” and that's all perfectly fine.
If you live with others then using the drying rack is pushing a small easy task onto your friends, partner, children, or parents.
(Or perhaps wishfully an industrious poltergeist.)
Use the dishwasher. Run it frequently.1 Towel off that mug and put it back, shake the colander dry and hang the pasta pot right back on the rack.
Don’t defer a twenty-second task for hours or days.
Drying racks are for lonely people wanting a buddy to appear.
In San Francisco it costs me approximately $18 per month when run daily. That's $0.60 per load, of which $0.12 is the cost of water and the remainder is energy. An EnergyStar dishwasher uses about 3.2 gallons of water and 1.12 kWh of energy.2 The average household in the United States would pay $0.18 for electricity and $0.06 for water.3,4 My dishwasher serves seven people and compared to energy usage for heating, transportation, lighting, and other uses the cost is marginal.5 ↩︎
Purchasing Energy-efficient Residential Dishwashers, U.S. Department of Energy ↩︎
I’m allowing price to stand in for “cost to society” even though there are externalities which drive these apart, such as water being drawn from aquifers without complete accounting for the importance of that resource and the difficulty of restoring it. One improvement would be to substitute the cost of clean energy and the cost of clean energy-powered desalniated water. ↩︎