Last night I spent the entire evening studying dishwashers on the Internet. Couldn’t get into Consumer Reports, but decided not to pony up the toll to get past the paywall because in the past I’ve found some of their reviews for big-ticket items to be not altogether reliable. However, I was able to break into a few CR reviews by googling [dishwasher name] and [reviews]. Good Housekeeping, however, has what appears to be a good set of appliance reviews, and I’ve found Amazon reviews usually give one a fair clue if there are a decent number of three-, four-, or five-star reviews (indicating the product’s manufacturer hasn’t salted the reviews with raves, or if so, enough real people are reporting to give you some facts).
Here’s what I came up with:
GE Profile
• DWT480RSS: among top-rated by Good Housekeeping
• Amazon: Interior racks are widely disliked. The top-of-the-line model, which seems to be discontinued, was liked by one consumer who said to avoid lower-end models.
• Elsewhere, complaints of bad customer service.
• High cost; people say they had to replace within a couple of years.
• Consumer Reports likes, but the price is out of sight: over $1200!
Asko DO NOT BUY
• D5122xx1 among top-rated by Good Housekeeping
• No reviews at Amazon – caution!
• New corporate ownership in 2012 – caution!
• Three hour run time! Holy sh!t. No way to cancel & switch cycles; no low rinse aid indicator.
Kenmore Elite PROBABLY NOT
• Ultra Wash 665.1394 among top-rated by Good Housekeeping
• Extremely poor customer service reported
• MANY bad reviews at Amazon, including motors falling out!! Leaking, not cleaning, flooring destroyed, need for repairs on new machines, bad customer service.
KitchenAid Superba DO NOT BUY
• KUDS30IVSS among top-rated by Good Housekeeping
• Poor customer service reported
• MANY very bad reviews at Amazon!
• KUDS30FXSS well reviewed at Reviewed.com: excels at cleaning; however, commenters complain about it.
• CAUTION: Kitchenaid is now made by Maytag/Whirlpool.
• To avoid: “The other, more recent KitchenAid is the KDFE454CSS. It costs $50 more than the Bosch, but actually does a worse job at cleaning.”
• Can’t be flush-mounted to cabinets because of heated drying system
Miele: DO NOT BUY
• Not enough reviews on Amazon to tell, but the Crystal Series does not score well.
• Consumer Reports calls it “middling” and prefers the Bosch Ascenta SHX3AR7[5]UC,
Bosch
• Has an A- with Good Housekeeping; in general Americans dislike the no-drying feature
• Has pretty good reviews at Amazon but not many reviewers. The SHX98M09UC 800 is NOT well-liked. Complaints about odors. Complaints about customer service. One reviewer appears to be stupid, but others seem sane.
• Elsewhere, other complaints about odors (possibly from mold resulting from people leaving dishes sitting in closed washer for several days after running cycle — obviously, if you leave wet dishes in the closed, unvented machine, they’re going to stink). One commenter felt the newer model has dropped so much in quality they would have been better off repairing the old washer.
• Caution: A new feature is a stainless steel tub with a plastic floor!
Looks like the Bosch is the least bad of a mediocre bunch. Planned obsolescence – sometimes leading to breakdowns after just a couple of years – and poor customer service are pretty much universal. The Kenmore may be pretty good when parts aren’t falling out, but customer service is universally reviled. Lowe’s service is also disliked, by employees as well as consumers. Spencer’s has large numbers of positive reviews but these may be fake, and the nearest store is too far away.
For its astronomical price tag, the Asko brings you a three-hour wash cycle — to my mind the Bosch’s 100-plus-minute cycle is quite long enough.
Sadly, the once-grand KitchenAid seems to have dropped drastically in quality — consumer comments record rant after rant after enraged rant about shoddy construction and shoddy service — probably because it’s now made by Maytag/Whirlpool. I will not buy a Maytag (Whirlpool) product.
The Kenmore, which also used to be a great machine, will bring you Sears’s famously bad customer service, something I really don’t want to deal with. Plus it, too, apparently is suffering with some quality control issues. They recalled a recent model because its motor was falling out onto the floor, flooding the owner’s home — in many cases destroying expensive flooring or leaking through to the basement and wrecking the ceiling there. Unfortunately, they failed to tell the customers about the recall, so many people registering bitter complaints here, there, and everywhere on the Internet were NOT TOLD of the recall! In some cases, people’s insurance would not cover the damage — one consumer is filing a lawsuit against Sears and his home insurance carrier. In other precincts, even those with intact motors leak.
So this leaves us with the Bosch or the GE Profile.
Consumer reviews indicate that the lower-end GE washers are to be avoided, and even the high-end models ($1200+!!) evidently are engineered to crap out quickly. A number of reviewers spoke of major repairs within a couple of years.
The Bosch also may have fallen off some in quality. One consumer remarked that he wished they’d paid to fix their old Bosch, which was a better machine than the one they bought to replace it. This year Bosch has introduced a model with stainless-steel walls but a plastic floor, something to be avoided. If this is a characteristic of the $700-and-less models, it may actually be better to just get the present machine fixed.
Or…not. It makes a perfectly fine, gigantic drying rack for hand-washed dishes.
Dishwashers retain a small pool of water at the bottom to keep a gasket lubricated. But if repairing the thing is not cost-effective and new ones are outrageously expensive and engineered to crap out, then it may be better to shop-vac the mosquito nest out of the Bosch and just resign myself to washing dishes by hand. Or pony up $350 to fix it and hope it runs another year or so.
I really do need to buy a new pool cleaner — Harvey’s hoses are sucking air, never having been replaced during the entire eight or nine years I’ve lived here. A new set of Hayward hoses costs almost as much as the entire unit, so I might as well get a new one: $325 plus almost 10% tax. I can’t afford that on top of a $500 to $800 hit for a dishwasher.
Cleaning the pool manually is one hell of a lot more work than washing a few dishes two or three times a day — and it hurts the spavined back a hell of a lot more than standing in front of the sink long enough to rinse off a few plates and glasses. Given a choice…maybe I’d rather get the pool equipment running right than have an overpriced dishwasher calculated to need replacement in less than seven years.
For what it’s worth, I have a Kitchenaid brand dishwasher (model KUDS50FV) that was purchased and installed in 2009 and has been working great. I’m not sure what sort of bad experiences you had with Maytag/Whirlpool, but so far so good here!
Maytag was acquired a few years ago by Whirlpool, and Whirlpool has a pretty bad reputation. Friends who were loyal Maytag customers bought all new appliances after the corporate acquisition and might as well have built a room over the garage for the repairman to live in.
Online consumer reviews for the Kitchenaid are excoriating. I figure where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
Hi Funny….Did a quick search on the net and if you have a Sears Outlet where you live there appears to be some bargains. As you seem to prefer Bosch and you had a positive experience, I found a Bosch Ascenta model#SHX3AR55UC for …like $487. Seems to have some nice features and is Energy Star rated so you may get money back/rebate from your utility for “upgrading”. It claims to save 20% in energy. …always nice.
With ya on just hand washing the dishes BUT MAN…the new DW’s use 4 to 5 gallons of water…to do a full load of dishes for a FULL cycle. IMHO that’s not a lot of water. Fill up a 5 gallon bucket about 3/4 of the way full and take a look…if the claims are to be believed this is fantastic. I’ve used this much water cleaning out a paint brush!
Yup. I’m goin’ on up to the Outlet this morning, soon’s I finish swilling the present cup of coffee. Forgot I’d decided not to transfer teaching income to savings. This week the District deposited its largest check of the semester, and another one like it should come in by the end of the month. Those will cover the cost of a new dishwasher. 🙂
The old Bosch seemed to use a TINY amount of water, and it got the dishes very clean until my recent spate of complaints about dirty dishes — which I’ll bet were a function of the faltering circulation pump as much as anything.
Hand washing dishes uses more water than even an old-fashioned dishwasher. You end up pouring a lot more water down the drain than you think, especially if you rinse before you put the dishes into the sink and if, after soaping & scrubbing, you rinse in running water. Dipping the scrubbed dishes into a sinkful of standing, clear water will get the soap off the first few, but if you have more than about a half-dozen pieces, you’ll need to drain and refill the rinse water.
Personally, I think hand-washing dishes is wasteful, and it doesn’t get the stuff clean enough for my taste. I always end up having to rewash several pieces after they’ve drained dry.
My Maytag dishwasher is going on 20 years of use – not a single problem so far. Why wasn’t Maytag reviewed?
Because within the last four or five years, Maytag was acquired by Whirlpool. Its quality control swiftly declined to the lowest common denominator. Maytag is no longer the old Maytag we knew and loved!
I have a low priced Bosch that quietly does its job and does not have a drying cycle. I’m okay with that. I usually wash in the evening and the dishes are dry in the morning. The thing I HATE about the Bosch is the top rack. Glasses will not stand up at all. If you load 3 glasses on the top rack, slowly roll it in, maybe they won’t fall over but most likely the domino effect occurs. Ugh! When I called to complain the guy that sold me the dishwasher said, “Oh, I have the same one. I just fill it up completely each time and don’t have any problems with it.” That was not helpful. Good luck on your purchase. Take a bag of glassware with you to try it out! 🙂
Yes!!!! Argh! Stemmed glasses in particular don’t fit on the top rack! Or on the bottom rack, since there’s no structure that will hold them there.
On mine, you can lower the rack…but then you don’t have enough room for an old-fashioned full-sized dinner plate in the bottom rack.
I’ve learned to tilt the glass slightly and prop it up with that little hinged rack thingie on the right-hand side, which was pitched to me by a Sears salesman as a mini-rack to hold kitchen gadgets. Its highest and best use seems to be to hold a wine glass at just enough of an angle to allow it to slide into the washer.
No question the Kenmore’s racks are far, far superior. However…more about that in a later post. 🙄
Ours is a Bosch ~3 years old. It was a contender on the consumer reports at the time (we paid $5 for a 1 month subscription, you just need to remember to cancel), and was in the $400 range. Maybe over $500 MSRP? But we did the whole stacking sale + coupon + addl rebate through our credit card, which knocked a good chunk off as I recall.
So far, so good. Cycle takes forever, but I like that cleaning it is pretty straightforward. (There’s a little cone that has a filter on it that I take out and rinse out every once in a while.) Ours has a drying mode, but it doesn’t work all that well. But really, do any of them get the puddles of water that are inevitably left on the tops of glasses or inverted tupperware?
My only complaint is the placement of the silverware tray. It’s all the way in the back of the bottom shelf and there’s no way to rotate the shelf to move it to the front. So to put silverware in you need to completely open the dishwasher and pull the bottom tray out. #firstworldproblems, amiright? Anywho… Mr PoP’s parents bought one almost identical to ours a year ago and their silverware tray runs along the side of the bottom, so this might be something they have fixed.
{sigh} Yes, it’s hard to complain about the dishwasher when one contemplates the way people in Haiti are living.
Mine has its silverware basket front and center, which is extremely convenient. The one I saw today (and purchased, more about which later) has a much larger tray running along the right-hand side of the bottom rack.
Appliance manufacturers must feel like they’re under siege at all times, what with the capacity of the Internet to publish every whine and grutch anyone can think of. They probably tabulate complaints and every few years try to adjust their product to accommodate.