I went on a service call for a three-year old Miele dishwasher; the complaint was that water wouldn’t enter the basin. Miele coded the call as warranty unless the problem was customer-induced or caused by external factors. After some preliminary troubleshooting, I found that the water inlet hose had been attacked by a rat! (Click the picture for the larger view.) Naturally, this job was re-coded to COD since Miele is not responsible for rat attacks.

BTW, this is typical of service calls on Miele dishwashers– most problems with these dishwashers are customer-induced.

The other unique aspect of this call, which is typical for Miele but no one else, is that the manufacturer was willing to cover this under warranty *if* it was an internal part failure even though the official warranty had expired two years ago. That’s pretty cool. Of course, this excellent engineering, construction, and support all come with a price– expect to pay at least $2,000 for a Miele dishwasher. Now, let’s zoom out to the more general case of all appliances and brands…

Y’see, Hoss, the deal today with all major appliances is that you can either pay more up front for really good stuff or you can buy your wannabe Bosch, Sub-(standard)-Zero, mediocre Kitchenaid, cheesy Frigidaire or whatever, and then pay-as-you go for repairs. The appliance industry average for the “big brands” is that you’ll be doing some type of repair every two to four years; the only real variable there is how big the repair’s gonna be. For example, will you be replacing the compressor in your Frigidaire refrigerator in two years (this is common) vs. replacing the compressor start relay in a Whirlpool refrigerator (again, common). The difference is hundreds of dollars in parts and labor costs and, in the latter case, is a repair that most do-it-yourselfers can easily do themselves… if they can figure out what the problem is in the first place. But, lucky for you, that’s where I come in… and may even be why you’re reading this right now.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 30th, 2006 at 8:56 am and is filed under Dishwasher Repair. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.