Who Designed This? Our Dishwasher Saga

This January our dishwasher died. We had been noticing an occasional whiff of hot plastic, off and on, but didn't locate it until the dishwasher fell into a coma in mid-cycle and wouldn't wake up again. It was time for one of our (least) favorite activities, appliance shopping. At least it wasn't Thanksgiving!

The unit, a Bosch, had already had two repairs in its 8½ years, so our first impulse was to cross Bosch off our list of candidates; however, Consumer Reports gives them an excellent rating on dishwasher repairs. Shopping at hhgregg, where we had a good experience a few years ago buying a washer/dryer, we narrowed our choices down to a Bosch or a KitchenAid. We went with the Bosch, and it was installed the next day.

The rubbery toe plate, not a part of the showroom display, looked odd. It stuck out a quarter-inch so along the whole length of the door. As Joan noted, it would funnel any drips or splashes (I am not a tidy cook) behind the kick plate, to linger and ferment. Ick.

It looks peculiar from the side as well, even if the gap exists to accommodate the rotation of the door. The slot on either end of the horizontal portion (not the metal kick plate with the screw) is a mystery.

Joan wrote an email to Bosch technical support asking why the plate stuck out further than the door. To its credit, Bosch responded within a day, asking for photos. We sent the two you see above, and Bosch's response was, "It's installed wrong."

hhgreg was swift when we contacted them, and sent an installer out on a Sunday. His first reaction was, "I've installed a hundred of them this way." We shared our Bosch correspondence with him, and he agreed that if it was an issue, it was an issue with more than just our one unit. He took our documentation back with him to hhgregg, reassuring us that if we weren't satisfied at any point, we could choose a different dishwasher.

Next, hhgregg notified us that a technician from Capital City, an independent service company, would be coming out to fix our unit. Two days later, he arrived and carefully disassembled the rubber and metal plates, and reassembled them, demonstrating that things only went one way.

Joan sent another email to Bosch, explaining the turn of events and asking for clarification. To this day we haven't heard from them. The design gods were silent.

We tried using the Bosch for a few days and found more design problems, at least for the way we use it. The tines on the bottom rack are held higher than the floor of the rack, shown in this photo:

The added height meant that our 11" dinner plates stood high enough to interfere with the rotating washer arm in all but a few positions. We later learned from Evan Coleman, our hhgregg sales rep, that Bosch claims this is to improve the water coverage of items in the lower rack. Perhaps the design gods are also coping with the unintended consequences of their hidden heating element (more vertical space consumed in the bottom of the unit)?

Another problem with the lower rack was that the tines were all tilted. This may help fit more plates in the available space, just as italic fonts fit more words in the same line, (holds 14 place settings!) but it frustrates someone who wishes to put pots, large mixing bowls, or food processor bowls -- anything with straight sides -- into the unit. It can be done, but it requires stubbornness. On your part, the tines are already so.

Designs change in waves of fashion or marketing, even among prosaic objects such as dishwashers. The design gods of every dishwasher we saw had decided to avoid complaints about wet stemware (think wine glasses); the geologic thrust fault you see below, adjacent to the side of the top rack, forces your stemware to tilt, from left to right, at least 30° off vertical to avoid the pooling of water.

Also, there's not much space left between the flip-down shelf and the crest of the ridge: perhaps 3¾" if I had held the tape measure completely vertical. Demitasse size at best.

Frustrated, we decided to go back to hhgregg and swap for something else. We were soon struggling to choose between two KitchenAid models, both of which were 2" deeper (holds 15 place settings!) than the Bosch, perhaps explaining why the Bosch was rated 2 decibels quieter. The more expensive of the two had a stainless steel facade instead of black (don't care, but it adds to the cost) and top-of-door controls instead of front-of-door (I suppose we could live with it), but it had the fold-down shelves for the top rack, and the less expensive unit did not.

Evan worked diligently with us. He researched whether the costlier model was available in black (no, not through hhgregg), whether we could separately order the upper rack (no), whether the shelf was available as a separate or replacement part (no, too new). He did bring the news that hhgregg would sell us that model for $100 off the floor price, and there would be an additional $60 MGR SAT (Manager Satisfaction?) discount. Plus, because there was a KitchenAid (mail-in) rebate on installation, we could switch to any KitchenAid without that expense. Our net cost to swap the Bosch for the higher KitchenAid would be $150. (We had an extended warranty, which we normally eschew, but because of our experience with the previous Bosch, we had purchased one. Part of the expense for the higher KitchenAid was a bump in the extended warranty.)

We went for it, and hhgregg made the swap the next day. (We do feel that we were treated very well at hhgregg and will shop there again.)

Here is the bottom rack of our new new dishwasher, with straight tines and enough vertical room for dinner plates.

You can't run away from the stemware fad,  also present on the KitchenAid models.

Although the height of the top shelf appears to be within 1/16 of an inch of the Bosch, our mugs and small glasses fit beneath the shelf! Perhaps because it's missing the scalloping on the underside, or, perhaps, the design gods deigned to smile on us just this once.

The new dishwasher isn't perfect; none could be, for that would leave the design gods with nothing more to do. It gulps Rinse-Aid like the desert in a rainstorm, and the instructions (p. 6) state, "Avoid overlapping items like bowls or plates that may trap food." But after our adventures, we're happy with the KitchenAid. Even the stainless steel front, an orphan design in our house, works, calmly reflecting the blues and whites of the kitchen floor.

And the rubber toe plate doesn't stick out. In fact, there isn't one.

Update 07/19/2011
Starting in early June, the new dishwasher started misbehaving. 4 times out of 5, when 'normal cycle' was selected, the unit would turn itself off partway through the job. If we selected '1 hour wash,' it would finish OK. It was still covered by KitchenAid's 1-year warranty, not even considering the extended warranty by hhgregg. 

The washer did not misbehave for the repairman last week, but my description -- even the status lights turning themselves off -- convinced him that there was a poor connection in the master controller to the power supply, one that would disconnect when it got hot. He installed a new master controller yesterday, so as soon as we have a load of dirty dishes, we'll see if that fixed it!