dishwashers

Factual Questions
1

(not the kid in the back of the kitchen in the restaurant)

Our second dishwasher is on it’s last legs. You can tell because you have to pre-wash all dishes to within an inch of their life, run them through the dishwasher, then wash them AGAIN when you discover a desiccated gunge of dried on food on them after washing.

The house came with your typical cheapest-ge-they-make loud nasty dishwasher. They’re $70 in the quantities the home builder buys, noisy, irreparable, and crap.

We replaced it with a stainless-steel interior Kitchen-aid that was quiet, and awesome, but only last about 6 years (compared to the 4 years the crap dishwasher lasted.

So is there a ‘you get what you pay for’ level of dishwasher? You can go from $250 to sell over a kilobuck for one, but I can’t tell if the extra money actually BUYS you anything in longevity. Is it too much to ask for a decade-living dishwasher?

(and family’s experiences on uber Euro dishwashers don’t seem to bear out any differences in brand, either)

2

What I remember of our dishwasher history

1977 bought house with 7 year old HotPoint.

Replaced it with a Roper in a year or 2

Replaced with a used good brand mid 90’s Used it until last summer. The racks were falling apart, it was tripping the GFCI, and I had done a very creative repair to the plastic housing for the controls.

Offered a free GE only a couple of years old. My brother in law does construction. He was redoing somebody’s kitchen and they told him to get rid of it.

Even if the I could remember the brand of the one that with a little work lasted most of 20 years, what they are building now could be China junk.

3

Our newly built house came with a GE dishwasher that last something like 8-10 years before the electronics went TU. Too expensive to replace it on a dishwasher that old, but it still washed dishes just fine.

IME the difference in price has more to do with features than longevity. Your Kitchen Aid should have last much longer than 6 years.

(This probably belongs in IMHO)

4

Down here in the antipodes the brand that last forever is Meile. Very solid German engineering. At very solid German prices. All my siblings and I have them. The longevity and service backup is remarkable. They actually do a significantly better job of washing dished too. All IMHO.

5

Before you decide that it’s the dishwasher, check out what you’re using for detergent. I found that switching to the tablets improved my dishwasher’s cleaning ability tremendously.

6

Each year these products get more cheaply made. So evidence about a machine now 10 years old says little about how well today’s version of the same brand would last.

With that caveat, my midline Kitchen Aid is now ~5 years old and shows no sign it won’t last another 5. I think yours had an early death.

ETA: Seconding NinetyWt’s point. The new environmental regs on detergent formulations have really knocked the cleaning power down. The chemists will get it figured out eventually, but not yet. Also, if you’ve got real hard water you get poor cleaning. Or if you’ve got weak wiring which causes a big voltage drop at the unit. Which I mention because you mentioned electrical problems.

7

Which tablets are those? Because our nearly-new dishwasher (I think we bought it last fall) is cleaning for crap.

Really annoying, since we bought a mid-level machine (instead of the cheapo ones) with the understanding that it would actually, you know, clean the dishes without having to wash them first. And researched the models, etc.

8

Things to check to ensure your dishwasher is operating at its best:

  1. Get some “clean out” tablets - they remove the gunk, the lime and the soap residue from your dishwasher. Use one about every 200-300 loads, more often if your water has a lot of lime build up.

  2. Pre rinse your dishes… you don’t need to wash them, but scraping or rinsing the worst of the gunk off the dishes keeps it out of the system, and lets your machine do its work more easily.

  3. Tasbvlets are the way to go, they really do work better. Also, use water softener liquid (jet dry, etc ) to avoid spotting - they also help remove/avoid build up in your machines inner parts.

I sold appliances for 6 years, and now work in a place that sells repair parts to repair techs. on my next dishwasher here are the things I will look for and look out for:

Expensive is not usually better, although Meille makes VERY nice machines.
Avoid the bells and whistles. The circuit boards that control them are generally about 3/4 the price of a new machine, and that ratio gets worse as the machine ages.

If you do get a feature laden machine, consider getting a surge protector like you would for a computer, or other “sensitive” electronics. We used to sell a LOT of control boards after every major lightening storm. Same goes for your frigde and stove if they have lots of bells and whistles.

Mt favorite brands for quality, selection of options, and after market service, parts availibilty and price is GE, for north america, and Meille for Import. I do not like maytag (my experience was bad after service, poor parts availibity, some real serious quality issues - would not sell them back when I was in sales. ) Sears /Kenmore is a crap shoot - they do not actually manufacture their own machines, but simply relable. You might get a machine from a really good manufacturer or one from the Hoo Flung Dung Machine Co in some odd country- depends who wone the contract from sears.

White/Westinghouse used to make great machines, but they can be hard to find. Mclary, good, but same issues as white/westinghouse.

right now I have an elcheapo GE, with a mechanical timer and no features. Why? It cost $200, it can be fixed with a screw driver, all the parts are off the shelf, and readily availible (cheap top get).

When selecting your dishwasher, ask your self how many times a week it will be used. Then multiply that by 300 (most dishwahers now last 6-10 years). Take that number and divide it by the cost. 5 times a weekX300= 1500/$200=7.5 cents per load. If the cost is closer to $1000, you can see that the cost per load approaches 40 cents.

Other than that, but a machine that is energy star rated, as they use less electricity, water and actually tend to last longer.

best of luck

9

I was reminded of acmehowto.com and will be futzing around to see if I can’t troubleshoot our existing unit.

(specifically Dishwasher Diagnosis & Repair Guide: How To Fix a Dishwasher - ACME HOW TO.com )

We use tablets, our water is relatively soft, but the gunge on the glasses makes me thing the fine particle filter might need attention.

10

First thing to check, is if water is being sprayed all around the interior. Put a couple of bowls upright (so they hold the water), and run a cycle. If they are full (or nearly so) when complete, it’s not a pump, or a clog in the sprayers issue.

If the above is ok, and you’re left with bits on the food, one or more of the following could be your problem:

  1. The fine material filter is clogged.
  2. The chopping blades that run in front of the fine material filter have jammed, and are not chopping things small enough to get through the filter.
  3. Your check valve is faulty.

I had a machine that seemed to be getting water to the dishes, but I was left with a film on the dishes. I couldn’t figure out how to get to the filter, and none of the manuals seemed to show me how to clean this filter area out.

Once I did find the information, I found toothpicks, straws, and small bones clogging the filter, and one of the plastic bits that turns the blade had cracked. I replaced the filter/chopper blade (a single assembly), and the check valve (right next to it) for <$30 shipped, and an hour or so total of my time (checking the first time, ordering the parts, then actually replacing). I needed a screwdriver, and a torx bit to get the parts out. A “housewife” tool kit from the local hardware store should have all the bits you need, and parts are available online for most major brands.

In my washing machine, which is a Kenmore (made by Whirlpool), it is in the bottom left, and it was not an intuitive thing to find or remove.

Now my machine runs like brand new. This is apparently often the fix, and it’s much less expensive than a replacement.

If you let us know what the model number is, we might be able to find instructions on how to access the filter… if you can’t find it online yourself. The key for me finding it online was to use the first part of the model number, not the entire number.

11

Thanks Butler, sounds like a plan.

12

Describe the “gunge” on the glasses. If you’re talking about plain clear glassware that seem to become slowly foggy, what you may have is etching, rather than failure to clean. OTOH, if you’re talking coffee cups with chunks of dry grounds stuck inside, or baked on cocoa mud from hot chocolate, then etching is not your problem.

Etching happens when you use too much soap. If you do have soft water, filling only the main soap container barely 1/3rd full is plenty of soap. Even if you use the prewash cycle, do NOT put soap in the prewash cup.

With excess soap, the chemistry in there forms a caustic which erodes tiny pits in the surface of the glass. And once those pits are there, that glass will never appear clean.

The pitting is mosly hidden when a glass is full of water. So if a sample dirty-looking glass suddenly appears clean when you fill it with clear water, consider the possibility that etching is your problem. It affects everything you run through the dishwaser, but the relatively soft clear glass used in typical drinkware suffers the most, & most visible, damage.

13

Nope, it’s not etching, it’s small, very fine, particulates…almost like a fine sand, which washes out with a little but of water…post wash. (grrr.)

14

I bought all new appliances - fridge, dishwasher, microwave and range a couple years ago.

Fridge: works well, but the crisper drawers are so flimsy that both have broken handles

Dishwasher: the start button doesn’t work properly; to get the regular wash cycle to run I have to tap the cycle selector knob a bunch of times and press the start button again. It will work after tapping-and-pressing a couple times

Microwave: stopped working the day before Christmas. The light lights up and the timer works but it doesn’t cook

Range: the broiler element burned out just a couple months ago.

This stuff is fucking garbage! Don’t ever EVER buy Whirlpool. Ever!

Fucking rubbish.

15

:: goes to look ::

These are called Finish Powerball Tabs. I started using them after reading a couple of threads about the problem LSLGuy mentions upthread.

I was ready to get a new dishwasher until I tried these. I’m not easily impressed, but the difference is amazing. Coffee cups are clean on the inside now.

16

For years now, I have been making my own dishwasher powder: a 50/50 mix of sodium bicarbonate and borax. Both of these are available in the supermarket.

Works perfectly, and costs next to nothing.

17

I actually managed to find a service manual for my dishwasher…and it looks like the stuff in question is (relatively) easy to get to fromt the top. It’ll have to wait a day or two before I can look at it in depth, but I appreciate the feedback from y’all!

18

As far as surge protectors go, I have a whole house one installed in my breaker box. It mostly only promises to protect the individual surge protectors on stuff.

It is getting hard to find appliances that don’t have vulnerable, expensive to repair digital controls. Even the furnace I installed in 1995 had to have a $300 board. That was before the whole house surge protector.

19

Whelp, the dishwasher failed the…uh…ability to wash dishes test. A new motor is $115, a seal is $115, but the assembly that includes that plus ALL of the other water handling parts of the dishwasher is $20 more. I think I’ll splurge. :slight_smile:

20

I’m also really surprised your Kitchen-Aid dishwasher failed that quickly. I have one, stainless like yours, and its 15 years old. I had to replace a fuse for the circuit board once.