Ooohhhkayyy…. So I found the dishwasher, but had to pay full price for it — over $700 after pretend rebates. Unfreakingbelievable.
The Sears Outlet store didn’t have any Bosch washers. But Sears was having one of its three-day-weekend PUHLEEEEZE SOMEONE COME BACK TO OUR STORE sales, so I went over there because I’d found discount coupons on the Web and because I was also interested in the Kenmore.
There I encountered this highly entertaining saleslady, one Amy, a Lebanese woman with more personality than any three humans, an exotic accent, and a real gift for selling. I love to watch people who can sell when they really get on a roll. By golly, she was gonna send one of these contraptions out the door. She was good, she had a sense of humor, and she was very fun to deal with.
As you can imagine, she wanted to sell a Kenmore. She did not want to sell a GE — after the last year’s massive recall when the things were determined to be a fire hazard, she doesn’t trust them, plus she apparently knew someone whose GE in fact did start a fire. So as far as she was concerned, the choices were Kenmore or Bosch, and Bosch or Kenmore. 😀
In fact, the Kenmore is a very nice machine. I much prefer the layout of the racks. The top rack can be moved up and down a little more easily than the Bosch’s, and both racks are far more intelligently designed. You can get A LOT of dishes in there, and you don’t have to fiddle around to get a wine glass to stand up to be washed without breaking off its foot when you push the rack back in.
Problem is, it has this weird, complicated lower spray arm assembly adorning the sprayer on the bottom of the tub. On one end, the thing has a geared attachment that apparently spins around, rotating along a large plastic gear. It cries out to break off. All it would take is one wooden spoon to slip off the top shelf and protrude an inch beneath the bottom rack, and voilà! a whopping repair bill! And after all these years with a Bosch, I find I’m no longer nuts about having an oven-like metal heating element in the bottom, directly below my dishes.
It also has a lot of other moving parts and a bunch of dome-like sprayers on the back wall. IMHO, way, way too many moving parts and sprayers. Asked if the thing had more than one circulating pump with which to drive all that junk, our Amy didn’t even know what I was talking about.
All the low to mid-range Bosch models now have a plastic floor on the bottom of the tub. I said no, the interior has to be ALL stainless steel, not “sorta” stainless steel. Okay, said she; we went to see the lowest-priced model with a full stainless steel interior. Price: almost $700.
Holy sh!t.
So I waffled. Went back to the Kenmore, which was a mere $600. Inspected it again. Decided that yes, it is a repair bill waiting to happen.
The $150 gouge for delivery, installation, and the “installation kit” rip-off jacked the price up to $833. The discounts she had didn’t apply to that model, to her disgust, The annoying mail-in rebate nuisance will theoretically drop the price back down to $708, assuming they honor it and assuming I get around to using it — it comes in the form of an aggravating Visa debit card, which I really don’t want. Seems to me last time I had to screw around with one of those from Sears, I was able to get them to send me a check, which will help some. Assuming, as I say, it actually materializes.
So much for replacing Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner this winter.
Bosch has redesigned its interior. The filter assembly is closer to the front, making it more convenient to see and easier to get at. That’s good. You don’t have to clean the filter in these things often — theoretically it’s self-cleaning — but a service dude once showed me how to take it apart and recommended an occasional manual clean-up. Occasionally cleaning the parts you can get to indeed does help the machine to work better and last longer.
Instead of a small utensil basket toward the front or back, the Bosch now has a very long, very large basket that fits along the right-hand side of the unit. It takes up a lot of space, IMHO — it would be good for a large family, but I just don’t use that many knives, forks, and spoons.
The bottom rack has a lot more prong thingies to prop up plates. Placed very close together, they now align in two directions — left-to-right in the back half of the rack and front-to-back in the front half. If you have relatively small dishware, these will probably accommodate a lot more plates than the old one did. However…I don’t have relatively small dishes. My Heathware is a direct throwback to the 1960s, when people still ate off full-sized dinner plates. They’re stoneware, which makes them fairly thick and heavy. So they may not fit into this rack at all.
However, it dawned on me as I was looking at the thing that the actual shape and size of the tub itself is the same as mine. My racks are in excellent condition — not a nick or a sign of rust anywhere. So I’m going to pull the racks out and stash them in the garage before the installer gets here today. Then if the plates won’t fit in the new one, all I’ll have to do is slide the old one in.
My utensil basket may fit in the basket space along the side — probably not, though — I think mine is wider than the long thing they’re using now. But if it will go in there and my plates will fit in the bottom rack, that will free up a lot of space in the bottom rack. A frying pan could easily fit in the space Bosch has dedicated to the silverware.
So, I’m not thrilled. There’s a lot to complain about here:
• A machine that should last a good eighteen to twenty years engineered to crap out after eight or nine years
• Nuisancey mail-in rebates instead of a single fair and reasonable price for the product (Gawd how I hate those!!)
• An uninvited and unwelcome debit card instead of a real discount
• Extra “installation kits” that you have to buy, when they should be included as part of the unit
• A redesign that may not fit my dishes
• Cheeseying-up of models that fall into the “almost affordable” price range
• Prices that are simply way, way too high to make sense at all
When this one gives out, seriously: I’ll probably just go back to washing dishes by hand. That’s a chore I profoundly dislike and don’t do very well…but it’s ridiculous to pay this much for a few clean plates and forks.
Yipes! We’ve been cursed with our dws. The one in our house broke shortly after we moved in. We replaced with a top-rated one which broke within a few years and was not worth fixing. Now we buy cheap ones–not sure if we’ve bought one or two since the top-rated one broke.
Mr FS’s dad liked Bosch for its all-stainless interior–he had many break within a few years and the dishes were not all that well-washed. But he kept replacing with the same type since he liked the interior!
Mr FS handwashes dishes now. He says it takes too long for two people to fill up the dw and he hates the appliance on principle.
Good luck with your new one!
Yup. SDXB is a hand-wash man, too. And really…when it’s only one or two people and you haven’t cooked a big, messy, greasy meal, it prob’ly makes more sense to wash by hand.
Since I cook mostly on the grill now (moral objection to cleaning the stove…), there’s something about buying an expensive washer (that’s not even top of the line!!!) that makes me feel a little foolish. On the other hand, I sure do hate washing dishes.
The Dear Deceased Bosch washed all the dishes quite well, except toward the end of its life — you’ll recall my bellyaching about the glasses. Dollars to donuts, its infirmity was caused by a failing pump. If this happens again, I think I’ll replace the pump and see what happens. Consider: if there are — what? two pumps in the thing and one control board, if you replaced one a year at the rate of $350/service attack…uhm, call, then over three years you WOULD spend more than the cost of a new machine, BUT you wouldn’t be hit upside the head with a single gigantic bill like this. If I’d replaced the pump, I might still be able to afford a new pool cleaner; now I can’t.
Quality of life might be better if you weren’t enjoined from making needed (or wanted) purchases by the fact of a single massive expense.
We really have come to depend, psychologically and culturally, on an awful lot of things we don’t need. The clothes dryer: glad I never bought a new one. Most things come out just fine either hung to dry on clothes hangers or run through on “air dry” without heat — the truth is, in a place where a set of sheets dries on the line in 20 minutes flat, there’s not much reason to own a dryer. Still…when I considered simply not buying another unit, it occurred to me that if I ever put the house on the market, prospective home buyers will expect to see a dishwasher in there — and a decent one, not a piece of junk from B&B Used Appliances.
And in the absence of a large family, does anyone really need a dishwasher to rinse the dregs of the bourbon and water out of her favorite crystal glass?
LOL! I do love the washer, though, when people come over for dinner or when, as a week or so ago, I lose my mind and cook up a rich braised short rib concoction (what a mess!).
Everything that can be removed from the washer — both racks, both sprayers, the filter assembly — now resides in my garage. If they fit in the new unit, then I’ll have a set of back-up parts. If not, though, M’hijito’s washer is the same model as mine — and he’s begun to complain of rust on his racks. So if they won’t fit in the new beast, he can replace his with mine, which are in like-new condition.
Hmmm….these could make good Christmas presents, eh? 😉
Congrats on the new dishwasher….I swear from what you describe I believe I’d rather “set my hair on fire” than go dishwasher shopping. ..LOL…If you REALLY want to go nuts…just sit down and figure out how much it costs to run your DW each time just in the cost of the unit. So say you just run it 3 times a week …that’s like 150 times a year….times 8 years….So 1200 washes into like $800 (the new Bosch)…That’s 67 cents per wash without counting detergent….electric….water….stuff to keep spots off the glasses…and that’s assuming NO repairs. Pretty sure this comes in at over $1 a wash….Paper plates looking better all the time!!! Maybe this is why SDXB “hand washes”…..starting to see the logic….
ohhhhhh i like that. This strategy will curl my hair so exquisitely that I will never need a permanent and prob’ly will never need another expensive haircut designed to make the coifs curl on their own!
Paper plates? Sooooo wasteful! What if we simply placed the food on plastic cutting boards from WalMart? Easy to wipe off.
Or on the tabletop itself? A melamine tabletop (like those bright yellow kitchen tables we had in our mercifully forgotten childhoods) would lend itself to this….
Hahaha we have that ken more and it was a too big cookie tray, not a wooden spoon. It was still under warranty and they replaced the whole thing.