A Major Hassle

We've just completed a major kitchen renovation which involved a significant upgrade to all our appliances. After just a few weeks, the Miele has proven to be a royal pain.

At install, the unit was discovered to be dead-on-arrival. A new control board had to be ordered and was installed a week later. Things went fine until we got the recommended water softening salt (Miele brand) and added it per the instructions. The next day, a "Salt Container Lid" error message appeared - and there was nothing we could do to get the darn thing working. We checked out everything associated with the salt holder and its lid - nothing worked. And the unit will not function at all as long as this error message is in place.

Miele customer service line is only open 12 hours a day, so we couldn't contact anybody for help right away. The next day we called Miele and they, in turn, contacted the local authorized repair firm. The local guys called us later the same day and set up an appointment to come out - five days later. They came as scheduled and went through the usual diagnostics - nothing worked. So they called the Miele technical support center only to discover that it was closed for a holiday that day. The local guy was furious with Miele for leaving him hanging like that. He downloaded a couple of technical manuals from the Miele service website (using my PC) and he and I both pored over them to see if we could find any clue to what was happening. No luck.

The next day the local repair guy got through to his Miele support person and was told he would have to call them back from our house. So (here we go again) we set up a scheduled service call - four days later. To his credit, the local repair guy couldn't stand this and found a way to sneak by our house earlier than that. It turns out that the control board in the dishwasher (remember, the one that had to be replaced right away?) is used for several different Miele models and there is a mysterious setting buried deep in the service menu that tells the control board which model it is in. I say "mysterious" because text in the menu is cryptic (something like "Unit type") and the choices offered are 0 or 1. Not exactly intuitive. Also, this information is NOT in any of the technical service manuals available online to the repair guy. So once the control board knows it is in "unit type 1" instead of "unit type 0" it starts to work again.

This is preposterous. I really don't care how well the thing works from here on out, I regret having purchased it. A $1,700 dishwasher should work, period. And in the rare case that it doesn't, technical support should be available 24/7 with a ready answer.

We owned an inexpensive KitchenAid dishwasher for over 15 years. It never failed to work. Ever. In four weeks this expensive Miele has caused me more headaches than I had in 15 years with the KitchenAid. Draw your own conclusions.