Dishwashers

I went to Sears yesterday to complain about our dishwasher. It hasn’t been cleaning our dishes and doesn’t compare at all in quality to the same brand and similar price model from 7 years ago. I have a big list, but I wont go into it here. I ranted enough yesterday with Stan the sales guy at Sears. I almost went ahead and “exchanged” the dishwasher for a cheaper model, which would have cost us another delivery fee and a 15% restocking fee. So, in an effort to have them not charge us the restocking fee and delivery charge, they suggested to send a 2nd tech out here to actually run a cycle to see what was wrong.

That happened this afternoon. He was a nice enough guy. He said that the unit was running properly. He also said that the quality has gone down since my 7 year old dishwasher. Our biggest concern was that it wasn’t drying the dishes. Well, it seems that our water wasn’t getting hot enough. That was it. He also said that this unit will try three times for 30 minutes to get the water hot enough. Then it will give up. That also makes sense. It seemed to take forever for the dishwasher to run its cycle. It can take up to three hours to run rather than the optimum 92 minutes. Then he gave us a bunch of tips:

• Run the hot water in the sink before running the dishwasher.
• Use 1 teaspoon to 1 Tablespoon of dishwasher detergent only, and to put each amount in both slots.
• Use the rinse aid and when we run out of it, you can use vinegar instead.
• About 20 minutes after the cycle finishes, open the door a crack and it will continue to let out the moisture to dry the dishes better.

It seems that the manufacturers use the priority of quiet action over venting. The vents are waaay smaller than they used to be. And even though our vent looks like it is at least a couple inches… it isn’t. It is only about quarter inch with a dampener that moves in and out (aka quiet action). That is why the steel ones work better, it heats up and makes the hot water into vapor better than the plastic ones. (We don’t have a steel one.) The plastic ones depend more on the heating of the dish themselves to help dry it, if that makes sense. (It did when he was explaining it to me.) That is why our plastic cups are always still wet.

So, it is only mildly annoying now that it took two techs to actually tell us that something really was wrong (the hot water). I have now given up my wrath and fury and be okay with lower quality dishwashers of the new millenium. Evan? I think he still has fury.

In other news, we found our printer cable! “We” means Evan did…. YAY! I am getting annoyed at not being able to find things. The schools have midwinter break in another week. I plan on doing a lot of organizing during that time.

A wonderful thing has happened, too. We ordered a special order of a case of rice milk from the neighboorhood Thriftway. They are soooo nice there! It came a week later and she gave us a bunch of free samples, too! One was this big bag of scone mix from Bob’s Red Mill. Yummy! I went back to thank the woman who ordered it for us, and all she said was “Oh, Thank You for shopping at Thriftway!” Wow, it is so nice to have personal customer service. A far cry from Sears.