I think it's a pretty common experience to take home appliances for granted—as long as they continue working. Such was the case with my dishwasher.
I am now on the fourth dishwasher, and the first brand new one, since I moved into my house eleven years ago. There was a decrepit Kenmore from probably the late '70s or early '80s in place when I bought the house, but it was incredibly noisy and didn't drain very well, so I picked up a second-hand Whirlpool Quiet Partner II to replace it, which gave good service, but looked awful. The white plastic was badly discolored and didn't fit in aesthetically next to the black and stainless stove.
A few years later, I helped a friend's mother by installing a new dishwasher in a house she was moving into. The old dishwasher, a black, contractor grade GE Nautilus worked fine, but didn't have all of the modern features she wanted. After I installed the new one, she gave me the old one. I stuck it in my storage building for several years, until another friend needed a dishwasher, I gave her the white Whirlpool and installed the black GE in my kitchen. I came to regret that decision, but decided to roll with it.
This was a challenging installation, with a stubborn leak on the coupling for the water supply line, but I got it sorted, and the GE dishwasher served me well, albeit noisily, for about three years, but it eventually got to where it wasn't getting the dishes clean and wouldn't fully drain, leaving murky, smelly gray water in the bottom.
I tried cleaning the water inlet and outlet, but the net result was somewhat cleaner dishes and clearer, less odoriferous water standing in the bottom. Realizing it was only a matter of time before it got gross again, I decided it was time to shop for a new dishwasher.
My first, and as it turns out only, stop was a Lowe's Outlet near my house. This store sells mainly returned and scratch-and-dent appliances at steep discounts off of suggested retail. I lucked up and found a black Whirlpool dishwasher that had been returned, but was undamaged. I considered checking other retailers, but I decided the price was good enough that I might regret it if I came back later and it was gone, so I pulled the proverbial trigger.
Having installed four dishwashers at this point, I felt reasonably confident in my skills and abilities, and with the help of a friend, who has a small SUV (There's no way it would have fit into my sedan), I took it home the next day and began the installation process, naively thinking it might take me about three hours. Boy, was I ever wrong!
The old dishwasher fought me coming out, and in looking at the new one, I discovered I was unprepared for the installation. Whereas previous dishwashers I had installed made electrical connections by twisting leads together with wire nuts, this one was fitted with a cord, and thus requiring an electrical outlet under the counter. Also the water inlet had a different fitting, more like those used on washing machines, requiring an adapter from the existing 3/8-inch copper line.
I briefly considered removing the cord and making the electrical connections the old fashioned way with wire nuts, but I concluded that installing an outlet wasn't all that complicated, so I got the pieces, along with the water line adapter, and modernized things under the counter.
The outlet was the easy part. The water line adapter gave me trouble. I got it into place without too much difficulty, but it continuously dripped water where the 3/8-inch copper line attached to the adapter. After multiple attempts to fix it, I raised the proverbial white flag of surrender and called in a professional.
Arriving the next day, his initial assessment was that the water line needed to be soldered to the adapter, but when he came back two days later, he had a different, and slightly more expensive, plan to replace the 3/8-inch line with a modern, flexible one. This solved the leak easily, but he couldn't get the adapter to connect to the dishwasher. Since he was tired and getting toward suppertime, he came back the next morning with a helper, who had a better idea. He pulled the dishwasher completely out from under the counter, double-checked the electrical and drain line connections, and attached the water line, all in about ten minutes.
So, a week after purchasing the dishwasher and six days after bringing it home and starting the installation process, I was finally able to load it up and run it for the first time. After becoming accustomed to the noisy GE dishwasher, the new Whirlpool was surprisingly quiet. Standing in the kitchen, I could hardly hear it run. Even better, upon checking the dishes this morning, they were super clean, even those that had sat out on the counter for a week without being rinsed, and there was no water standing in the bottom.
Although I am very pleased with the new dishwasher, the one thing I don't understand about it is the logic of hiding the controls on the top of the door so they're obscured by the countertop. This makes no sense. To me, it would be more logical to have the controls on the front. Had I not had a clearance issue with an adjacent cabinet door, I would have left it out an inch to make the controls more accessible, but that would have prevented one of the cabinet doors under the sink from opening. That feature notwithstanding, I'm quite satisfied with the dishwasher and am hopeful it will last a long time, although I am fully aware that these days, "durable goods" is often a contradiction in terms.
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