Pretty much says it all. Or steer me clear of lemons.
We are redoing the kitchen and that’s one thing that is replaced.
I guess we want quite and efficient. Oh, and the glasses have to go in the top rack. My mom has one where the glasses go in the bottom, and it’s just weird.
We just bought a new dishwasher (the old one gave up and died after twenty years of loyal service) and bought a Bosch. The salescritter, who had dishwashers to sell of every make and model, told us that it was an excellent dishwasher and very quiet (both true). It’s claim to fame, however, is that it doesn’t heat the air during the drying cycle, which saves energy. As a result it also leaves the dishes a little wet when the dishwasher cycle is finished.
It’s an excellent dishwasher, but in retrospect was not the one we should have purchased. The kids have long moved out, it’s just the wife and I, and we only run the dishwasher about once every two days, so the money we save by not having heated air during the drying cycle is minimal. And the damned dishes are still a little wet when the dishwasher’s done!
Thanks for the heads up. It’s just my Wife and I and we run dishes maybe twice a week. And we definately want dry dishes. What an odd feature. Are you sure there isn’t a setting to make it dry them?
That’s odd about your Bosch. I’ve had three (in various houses), and I love them. The dishes are always dry at the end of the cycle - maybe that’s just a feature of the particular model you bought. I highly recommend Bosch. They’re super quiet and clean really well.
I don’t think that the Bosch dishwasher is special in not heating the air during the drying cycle. The cheap Kenmore machine in my apartment has a switch to turn on or off the heated drying cycle. In other words, I think it’s common among many machines.
A friend moved to a new house a few years ago where the dishwasher controls are along the top edge so that the front is entirely covered by a wooden panel to match the cabinets. But what I don’t understand with that sort of design is how you can tell when the machine is done. With my cheap one, I can see the dial from the other room and it’s obvious when it gets to the end. But with his, you’d have to open the door to see the controls.
I should have also mentioned that our new Bosch dishwasher is loaded with buttons yielding all sorts of different options (half wash, power scrub, auto wash, regular wash, quick wash - none of which, unfortunately, is “heat the air during the drying cycle”), of which my wife and I use exactly one = the on/off button.
…but it’s really nice and quiet.
My hubby has sold appliances for a couple of places through the years, and when we replaced the appliances in our home, he chose JennAir for the dishwasher. It is very quiet and has many features, including no-heat dry and a sanitize cycle. It is an excellent dishwasher!
We bought a Bosch for our old house. It is the quietest dishwasher I ever (never?) heard. It was almost silent. But it would never get the dishes dry, even on the heated cycle. I think Jet Dry rinse or equivalent is necessary. We ended up taking it back for that reason. Now I’ll be damned if I can recall what we replaced it with. It wasn’t as quiet, but close. Other than the drying issue, the Bosch was a great dishwasher, albeit a bit pricey. I’ll find out what replaced the Bosch.
Don’t get a Kitchenaid. After hearing people raving about how good they are, we dropped $1K on a mid-level unit, and the damn thing is WAY too finicky about various things. First off, you can’t even think of washing dishes without rinse aid in the stupid thing - it simply doesn’t clean without it. Maybe that’s the new non-phosphate dish soap and not the dishwasher, but for purposes of this thread, I’m blaming the dishwasher.
Secondly, forget packing it to full. The fuller it gets, the worse it cleans.
Third, the top rack is crap. There’s a huge area in the middle of the top rack right above where the spinner is attached that flat out doesn’t clean. I could put a coffee cup with nothing but 3 drops of wet coffee inside in that spot and it will come out dirty, with the same 3 drops of wet coffee there after a heavy-duty cycle. And there’s variations of the same sort in other places on the top rack. I think it has to do with how the bottom rack is packed. I pull out barely-dirty dishes sometimes that have obviously not been touched by water or soap during the whole cycle.
Very disappointing, especially after paying so much for the stupid thing. I use my dishwasher heavily; it runs at least once a day, and if I’m cooking, even more.
My dream kitchen has 2 or 3 dishwashers, none of them Kitchenaid.
This was my experience with the Kitchenaid as well. Worst dishwasher ever and the most expensive. Hated it. I didn’t hate the Bosch we replaced it with, but also had the drying problem. I didn’t have that problem so much if I left the dishes in the washer longer, but if you needed to get them out too soon, yeah they’d be a bit wet still.
My cheaper Frigidaire has not given me any problems at all, but I’ve only had it about 18 months.
We were given a couple of year’s old GE Triton a year ago. Working great so far. We had had many years of good service from a Kitchen Aid before that.
We bought a stainless steel GE from Home Depot - spent a tad more to get thicker insulation (cost about $750?*), as our dishwasher is in the same open space (kitchen) that is next to the living room TV.
The difference from our old dishwasher is 100 times better - much, much quieter.
Shortly after getting it, glasses started coming out cloudy and the top drawer was sticking. Then we started tossing in about 1/4 cup of vinegar as a “pre-wash” and - voila - glass now comes out perfectly clean and the sticking drawer moves smoothly. The problem is our crappy water here was calking everything up, and that regular dose of vinegar has saved the day.
We have had this dishwasher for about three years now and have not a single complaint. BTW, even though there are only two of us in the house, we run it every other day, if not more often - so it is getting a workout. Oh, and it is also energy efficient - since buying it, and the newer fridge about a year prior to that, our electric bill has gone down significantly.
There are tons of reviews online. Look before you buy. Bosch and Miele are the highest rated and Kenmore gets high marks. KitchenAid is not rated well.
We had a Miele and loved it. We paid $1100 and it lasted 5 years. It sprung a leak around the motor that was going to cost $700 to repair so we just got rid of it. It was so quiet and did a superb job of cleaning. I would recommend the Miele to anyone just for the quietness.
I would not buy another just because this one didn’t last but 5 years though. Probably just bad luck and hard water on our part.
I’m pitching for the other team.
All the little fancy-pants cycles and doo-dads and whatchamacallits IMHO are completely unnecessary for the typical kitchen. I subscribe to the “off and on” guy in one of the above postings.
I don’t care what the features are on the dishwasher, what kind of detergent or rinse agent you use, I have NEVER seen a dishwasher capable of cleaning the “baked on crud” of commercial lore. My dishes get scraped and rinsed before I put them in. On some plastics, any grease or oil seems to embed into the plastic surface, and I still feel grease when I unload. I’ve started rubbing just a touch of dish soap (like “Dawn”) on those greasy surfaces of the dishes before placing them in the dishwasher, and I have no problem.
I don’t use the drying cycle. I think it is a huge waste of money. If there is a water-heating feature, I WILL use that. And then I catch the machine when it is done, and I open the door and pull the racks out. Any ponding water or flipped dishes are rectified and I get a true air dry.
So, I say put the thousand-plus dollars back in your pocket and go CHEAP. If quiet is important to you, pay for extra insulation around the machine, or check Consumer Reports for the cheapest well-insulated model.
~VOW
Thank you again everyone. Good info. And I sure didn’t know that the Bosche didn’t dry dishes. Looked into it and it’s a special order.
I know this guy Manny who’s very good. I’m also good and work cheap.
Funny about the Kitchenaid. We bought one recently (maybe this one? Not sure - the front’s the same, but there’s a bunch of different models with the same front. We paid about this much, though.). Anyway, I like it - it gets the dishes clean. We’ve got super hard water and no water softener, but doing the vinegar thing (like DMark mentioned) or using LemiShine takes care of that well. It works well, and I do like the third rack it has. It’s a shallow rack, so it won’t take much more than a shallow prep bowl or ramekin, but I like it for wooden spoons or tongs or whatnot.
We’ve had it for, oh, about a year now, and no problems. Reminds me - I should probably check its filter!
They key to dry dishes is letting the steam escape when the load is done. Some washers have an exhaust fan that does this, but I find that dishes dry perfectly if I just open the thing as soon as it stops. The dishes are already nice-n-hot so every bit of water evaporates within a minute or two.
I recommend Fisher & Paykel dish drawer. Very quiet - I can’t hear it unless I’m actually in the kitchen. A single drawer is enough for a 2 person home. If you have more and create lots of dirty dishes, you might want to get one of their double drawers.
Added bonus, all of the moving parts are easily accessible from inside the drawer, for easy lift-out and cleaning.
We’ve had two Kenmore higher-end ones, one at our previous house (we moved a year after we bought it), one at the current house. Don’t love the current one - it leaves bits of crud inside the bottom of the drinking glasses. We need to try to troubleshoot it - but it’s been doing this for years and it is the only dishwasher I’ve ever had that has done this.
That said, it has some useful features that are worth looking for, in whatever model you get. There’s no big “hole” in the bottom for the washer head to come up, so it has more usable space. It’s got a stainless interior which is cosmetically nicer and supposedly comes with a better-insulated tub than the plastic interiors, so it’s a little quieter. The top rack is adjustable height-wise which is useful when washing taller stuff on the top (or on the bottom).