Consumer Reports: Samsung Waterwall Dishwasher Flunks Test

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yeah, well golly gee

I've been accused of wanting to live under a rock. Perhaps that is true on some things. But this really does take the cake!

I mean come on now, 4 figures for a dishwasher? Does it unload itself and put away the dishes too?

Notice the made in Thailand tag. Wonderful. Cheap labor and they STILL manage to convince the sheeple this is a good thing to buy! I guess advertising really does work!

And, like the HE machines that I detest, we now have.....you guessed it........error codes to deal with! Imagine that! Like laundry, manufacturers have lost the plot when it comes to performing what should be a simple task. I suppose now users should keep the manual handy so as to decipher the error codes? Just to do a load of dishes?
Does it make you wonder? It sure as heck makes me wonder.

Thanks, but no thanks. Dad's 11 year old KA does fine without all the fancy software patches. Even though I am not enamored with my slumlord supplied GE, at least it has simple buttons that clearly indicate the cycle chosen. And no error codes. No software to piss around with. Load it, put in my costly Cascade all in one pak, push start, wait 3 hours, and its done. No drama, no reboots or hard resets or any nonsense like that. Other than struggling with scrambled eggs from the pan and 4 day old Aunt Jemima syrup, it does ok. Provided I use Cascade paks.

Yeeeeeesh.....................................I'll stay under my rock.
 
Seems there are no jets to clean underneath the WaterWall and all the stuff just layers up on the filter instead of being sweeped down into the sump and drained away. Sheesh...
 
Perhaps...

The water wall works too well. Removing all the caked on soil early in the wash, resulting in an error before it even reaches the first drain cycle.

Seriously, it is sad to see an idea go down in flames...

Malcolm
 
I can imagine even if the dishwasher did make it through the cycle the filter laden with all that food debris would start to stink. And we all know how Mr. & Mrs. America are about cleaning filters.

Those water jets don't even look very powerful to me at all. It would be the equivalent of running the dishes under the faucet for a few minutes. And a 1.6 gal per minute faucet at that!

I predict in two years the "Wall of Water" will be history. Too bad, after such hype from Samsung about how revolutionary it is!
 
And order is restored...

For once, Consumer Reports came through with something useful. These companies get too big for their britches and try to reinvent the wheel instead of focusing on what actually needs improvement. I'm ready to see this crash and burn and be forgotten. It's just a pity for the sheeple that dish out that much money to have filthy dishes as their payoff, but then again maybe they should learn not to buy something just because it's shiny.

“this only seems to appear under Consumer Reports’ testing conditions and not in real world, everyday use.”

Not sure what focus group they're interviewing to get this info, but where I come from dishwashers are meant to wash DIRTY dishes and keep itself clean in the process. The spray coming from that bar looks to be no better than the hand sprayer on my kitchen sink.
 
They didn't even redesigned the filter unit. Guess with some other filter unit and a jet cleaning it (like any other dishwasher), the idea would ben interesting.
 
I'm not going to count out the Waterwall quite yet. This is a filtering issue, not necessarily one of wash system performance.  

I'd love to know how the machine performed once the filter was cleaned.  Maybe it did a great job in cleaning performance.  A fix for the filtering problem can't be terribly difficult.  The narrator in the CR video said it was the only machine of over 150 tested to exhibit the problem.  The debris obviously needs a little more convincing to get it into the sump.  

 

Being far from a diligent dish scraper, the big filter on the floor of the 10-month old GE in my kitchen has never required cleaning. The ultra-fine cylindrical filter gets a barely-needed spray-off about once every two weeks.  

 

I'm with Malcolm on this one:  I'm glad manufacturers try different/unique wash systems!  

 

Appliances have lost so much differentiation since the mid-1970s when White Consolidated Industries bought--and neutered--interesting/unique systems from Westinghouse, Kelvinator and Frigidaire.  Similarly, Maytags and KitchenAids are Whirlpool clones for all intents and purposes.  Soon GE will morph into rebadged Electrolux/Frigidaires.

 

Perhaps this kick-in-the-ass from CR will encourage Samsung to solve the problem quickly.

 

On the other hand...if the Waterwall wash system doesn't clean well and the format is quickly abandoned, future collectors will be overjoyed at finding a rarity!

[this post was last edited: 9/7/2014-09:25]
 
Hmm...

Samsung said in a statement, “this only seems to appear under Consumer Reports’ testing conditions and not in real world, everyday use.”

The problem with CR is their 'simulated use' approach. Would it be so hard to place the unit in a home or two and follow the experience of the user over an extended time frame? Most appliances don't change consequentially from year to year. The mfg's have learned to game their simulations with flimsy crap that sometimes doesn't last a year. It was my own investigation which found you cannot buy a common replacement wear part (brush roll) for the extremely popular Shark vacuum. Rather the complete bottom have of the vacuum must be replaced a a prohibitively high cost.

The "Water Wall" appeals to me because i like as fast a load as possible (within reason) because i hand wash all baked on or difficult material. So on the Bosch 500 series i use the 30 minute setting and am a happy camper.

That said CR's rating did influence my choice to go with a Samsung Refrigerator. However The GE Cafe Series was by far the most impressive with cost not a factor. I noticed the Refrigerators.reviewed.com liked it too, see link.

http://refrigerators.reviewed.com/content/ge-cafe-cfe29tsdss-refrigerator-review
 
Revolutionary design?

Didn't we recently have a post about this same machine comparing it to the Ling-Temco-Vought countertop d/w which used a wall of water design as well?

Again, if it was really that good a design it would have been carried over to a full sized unit and maybe would have become the standard by which all others would have been judged!

I can't see anything Samsung makes as being a standard bearer.
 
Those dishes must have been pretty darned dirty to make that kind of mess in the filter. I don't have to clean my filter very often and all on my WP and all I do is scrape and give a quick rinse.
 
I am no fan of Consumers reports testing.  That said none of the other DW had this problem with the filter.  What does this mean?

 

The other DW handled this mess without stopping the problem yet cleaned?

The other DW handled this mess without stopping the problem but didn't clean so well?

 

Regardless the other brands handled this messy filter and continued with the cycle.
 
What other dishwashers (certainly the Bosch and other ones I've used here in Ireland) do is this:

1) Start wash with cold water... dislodge all the loose food from the dishes.

a) If there's a lot of soil detected by the machine it treats the first few mins of the cycle as a prewash and empties. All of the finer bits big enough to go through the drain pump get pumped away. If the dishes were scraped, there shouldn't be any issue. The refills with fresh water and continues on to the wash cycle.

or

b) If the dishes are very lightly soiled, it heats the water and adds detergent without any prewash.

2) The filters are designed so that they're constantly flushed with water. Smaller items i.e. anything that would be on a scraped dish / plate will pass into the fine filter area and be pumped away on emptying.
Very large items like say a big lump of food will sit on top of the filter and can be just lifted off when the cycle's finished. I rarely encounter this unless I leave something pretty seriously big on the plates.

...

I suspect spray arms do a better job of causing water to fall from pretty much every direction so the base of the machine is going to get washed down into the filter area rather than spraying water in a very uniform way where you might just splatter the dirt at the bottom and move it around.

Also, I wonder if there's enough water and enough flow down the filter drain area when the machine's washing?

Something's really not right about that setup.

Reinventing the wheel, or the dishwasher which is a pretty much perfected system at this stage is a bit pointless.

Also WHY is it that price!? seems nuts. Samsung is not a premium brand and you're certainly not getting Miele type build quality and components from them.
 
Wash cycle

Wonder if a different wash cycle would have handled things better. Just can't fathom that the filter is any finer than a Bosch one Miele.

Malcolm
 
I think the statement about the other 150 machines isn't referring to 150 other Samsung WaterWalls. Pretty sure it means the other makes/models as a whole. They used 2 of these Samsungs from what the article states. One that failed, and another to be sure that it was a design fail rather than a lemon machine.
 
other makes and models

Yes I agree.  My statement was also talking about CR testing other makes and models using this same testing method.  These other machines did not have the problem in the filter area so what is wrong with this one?

 

I think a different cycle might have helped but I kind of doubt it.  I mean the dirt is going to get down on this filter and sit there no matter what, unless the other cycles use more water.  On the other hand doesn't CR use the energy star recommended cycle, the one they use to test every DW?  CR seems to put extremely soiled loads into a DW then test with a normal cycle which leaves one scratching their heads because most of us would not do this we would choose heavy soil or something like that.

 

Whatever the issue is something in this 1000+ DW is not correct and for this price needs to get fixed.  I still don't get this concept, as if a rotating arm on a good DW has not been getting dishes clean.  My arms on my 8 year old machine work well, in fact very well, so I don't get this "make it different" just to do it especially if it is not going to work better.  In this case they didn't say the dishes didn't get clean just that the thing can't complete a cycle because of the filter issue.  Perhaps the recirculation motor is not strong enough to pull the water through the dirt

 

I am not defending CR because I have been critical of them in the past and still not crazy about them, but if they ran this DW through the same labeled cycle, and used the same amount of soil, and others passed this test and this one didn't then.......

 

 
 
Is It Really Surprising That This DW Does Not Work Well ?

The Koreans, Japanese, Chinese and several other Asian countries are not know for great innovations, Yes they have built some great products, but most of what they built was a copy of things that were conceived elsewhere.

This CRs report comes out at a great time, just last week I was at our appliance wholesaler and the owner was out in the warehouse talking to this cute young salesman who was the Samsung rep. He asked me if I had seen the new Water-Wall DW and what I thought of it, I told him that I had not had any direct experience with it , but was very skeptical as Samsung DWs had a terrible reputation out in the field for reliability and being difficult to impossible to repair. He was very surprised and I suggested we take a walk over to the scrap side of the WH and see the 3 SS DWs that I had just seen on the scrap pile a few minutes earlier. He was very surprised that 3 out of about 12 total DWs on the scrap pile were SSs, none older than about 5 years.

Hopefully I will run into him again, LOL.
 

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