Our dying dishwasher has a built-in food grinder, so no way to find and clean out a food filter. As one of the current machine’s ‘features’ is that you can make a full meal out of what’s left in the bottom of the drinking glasses at the end of the cycle, this is a problem. Several attempts to have this resolved have only eliminated it briefly.
On the other hand, we would NOT remember to clean out a manual-clean filter.
Anyone have one of the latter and love it or hate it?
What about stainless steel tubs? A salesman once claimed those machines tend to be quieter, because they’ve got better insulation. I suspect it’s hogwash, but the higher-end machines with more nifty features like adjustable racks tend to have them anyway.
Sigh. Sears is usually our go-to for stuff like this but we just spent 3 months trying to get them to fix our clothes washer (they finally seem to have succeeded… at least for a bit) so I’m a bit off on them right now.
Huh. I guess that makes sense. If there’s no oil for the detergent to break down then the ph stays too low. [/bugs bunny voice] Fass-kin-atin’![\bugs bunny voice]
This one made me want to cry. All the time I’ve wasted!!
The insulation on most of the plastic tubs seems to be just a layer of polyester batting. Metal tubs can add a layer of viscous stuff like resin or tar to damp out the metal’s tendency to “ring.”
You won’t regret buying a quiet dishwasher.
I’ve never heard of washing “clean” dishes causing damage, but I have seen it confuse the sensor wash cycles as most of the sensors detect clean by the decrease of the turbidity or cloudiness of the water circulating through the pump. When washing dishes that are already pretty much clean like pulling the Christmas china out from storage, I have to select a light wash as the machine will run seemingly forever on a sensor wash as it’s not able to sense the progressive clarification of the water.
Our Maytag, which is perhaps 10 years old, washes dishes extremely well–but the racks are crap. The plastic coating is too thin, so the racks have rusted; twice I’ve had to treat the rust with neutralizer and touchup the plastic with that plastic goop you buy at the hardware store. Not minor rust, either; in a couple areas the wire is almost completely rusted through.
So: Take a careful look at the quality of the plastic coating on the racks.
QFT. When we replaced our last dishwasher, we vowed to get a quieter one. Research suggested that a Bosch would be quiet, so we got one of those. The difference is like night and day; you can barely even hear the thing running.
The racks are better made, too. It’s about five years old now but the racks still look brand new.
The one drawback: it doesn’t dry the dishes with a heating element, so they tend to stay drippy longer. This hasn’t bothered us much, though.
Some sort of kiddie lock for the controls is the only thing missing from our cheap but effective dish washer. My nearly two year old loves pressing the buttons and making it beep
I came in here to say basically the same thing about the Bosch we had in our old house. Quiet, you bet, and never any trouble with the racks. That lack of a heated drying feature annoyed the heck out of me, though. Glass and porcelain things were dry, but anything plastic would be dripping with water. I had to unload it with a stack of dish towels to hand.
Also, while it used very little detergent, it drank rinse aid like Koolaid, and you couldn’t skip it.
If you want a quiet dishwasher, the ones on display at Lowe’s all seemed to have the decibel rating listed on the info card. They also had a sign indicating what 40 decibels means vs, say, 50 decibels. (I think it used for examples, the noise from a conversation vs the noise of a rainfall.)
We picked up a mid-priced Fridgidaire at Lowe’s last weekend. Can’t hear it run standing next to it. We chose the brand as that was what our last one was. I kept the old one for some parts such as motor, switches, and valves. We also wanted the turbo-wash option to knock off 3-day old pasta sauce from the dishes returned from the bedrooms. It doesn’t have a food grinder as those aren’t the best for septic systems. The length of cycles surprised me. 3 hours +? So far so good except for overloading the racks such that things are stacked atop one another.
We wound up ordering a Bosch based on lots of research. I picked one out online but went to Best Buy to look at it before making the final decision, and ordered it right there. The salesperson said the one I chose was their top selling model by Bosch or anyone else.
I don’t mind heated dry one way or the other since we never use that on our current washer - waste of energy when they’ll drip dry anyway - though this one does have it. We also use rinse aid which I gather the new machine requires.
44 decibels. Their machines go up to several hundred dollars more than this one, with the only obvious benefit (looking at the comparison pages) that it runs at 40 decibels instead of 44. I don’t think I’ll worry too much about that!
PoppaSan: 3+ hours??? Wowsers. I’m seeing 2 hour cycle times listed for the newest machines. Hard to imagine it taking 2 or 3 hours and only using a few gallons of water - what on earth is is it doing all that time if not spraying water? (maybe it recirculates the water?).
Anyway - the new washer arrives tomorrow and we’re looking forward to it - right now we have to be incredibly diligent with unloading the washer to catch any crud it’s left. The kids can’t be bothered with paying attention - and I’ve missed stuff myself. Ewww.
Oh yeah, forgot to add: the one I ordered has controls on the top edge, i.e. not visible. Meh - I don’t see the issue with visible controls, though as lisiate notes, a curious toddler might cause issues there!
A friend had a dishwasher with controls on the top edge. What I don’t understand is how you know the cycle is complete? With the old style knobs, you could see that it was at the end of the cycle.
We have a Frigidaire too, and even on the light cycle it takes a couple of hours, maybe 3. Judging from the last couple of water bills, I tend to think it doesn’t recirculate water.
The super deluxe, every option on says 185 minutes. I’ve never run or timed it. We always chose hottest wash but not sanitize. Always air dry. I’m rarely in the room to time the cycles. Do like our programmable favorites button. All options preselected for the way we run it.
The sanitize cycle was pretty slick when our children were babies and we were cleaning a lot of bottles. I don’t know how handy it really is these days- I tend to run it for sure if I’m washing cutting boards or other things that have been in contact with raw meat, and I tend to run it a lot of the time anyway.
Otherwise, the features are fairly basic- 4 basic wash modes (jet clean, “auto”, quick and normal), and some modifier/add-on cycles- high temp wash, steam, sanitize. There’s also a rinse & hold function.
Mine is a top-controls model, so I have to crack it open to see if it’s done- there’s a ‘finished’ LED that indicates that it has completed the cycles, and a “sanitized” LED that indicates that the sanitizing cycle ran effectively (long enough and hot enough).
Ours has a small red light that shines a red dot on the floor when it is running, and the light turns off when it is done. The inside buttons are nice as there is nothing for our kids to press (and mess up) when the dishwasher is closed.
Yep. Our impending arrival will have that as well. Just over 12 hours, not that I’m counting or nothin’.
A pricier model (seriously, what does a 1200 dollar dishwasher have that an 800 dollar one doesn’t, that I care about??) actually projects not just the light, but a countdown timer on the floor.
OK, it’d almost be worth paying for that just for the cool factor :D. Not to mention if we had cats it would be a fantastic cat toy.
