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.
 
Adjusting the software not going to stop the filter from clogging.
Premature pump failure or motot burnout is next in line if it cannot handle heavy soil loads and allowed to run with a blocked filter!
 
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.
 
Right now, our society is in this "make it different just because it's been the same for a long time" trend, failing to educate themselves and see that sometimes, things are as good as they'll be just as they are, unless humans somehow discover a way to change the physics of the natural world. This "water wall" concept has been tried before, as have spray tubes and mechanical gyrating contraptions and the like, and the simple yet perfect rotating spray arm always stays.

You see this trend in a lot of things lately, from computer electronics to cars to appliances. People are being brought up with the misconception that if the advertising and brochures and manuals say a product will do "this, this and this", then by god that's exactly what it does and there's no need to question it. Gone are the days when cars and appliances are considered investments; instead they're just disposable tools to be replaced at the first sign of malfunction. Newer generations are no longer encouraged to learn about the machines they use every day, only to look for the shiniest, most expensive thing they can find, the more gimmicks the better.

I feel that some companies feed on this kind of ignorance. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if one day soon, you'll be expected to put your clothes into a gorgeous, shiny machine with lots of buttons and "gadgets", and behind the closed door all that will happen is some tumbling to give the illusion of operating sounds, and the clothes will get spritzed with glorified Febreze. Those who have this "I don't care how it's done as long as they seem clean" mindset won't know the difference, which sadly is a large percentage of our society today.
 
"…not in real world, everyday use."

I looked at what CR was testing with, and I'd kill that thing in a heartbeat. I don't put whole cakes in the dishwasher, but I pre-rinse nothing and only scrape if it's something--like piles of potatoes or rice--that would clearly wreak havoc in the GE. The dishes that CR showed in the racks looked tame by comparison.

I put the whisk from our KitchenAid, festooned with potato skins wrapped all around every part of it, in the bottom rack, and after one Heavy Wash cycle, the GE had expelled all but a few very clean skins from the machine and right down the drain. The whisk itself gleamed, and had nary a yiblet on it--nor was any of that up in the top rack in or on the glasses. I probably would have caused the Samsung to catch on fire.

I think this is a classic case of inadequate water and the consequence of the new wash system. If they took a page out of Whirlpool's or Frigidaire's playbook and put in a nozzle to help shoo stuff into the sump, it might help. Most wash arm machines these days with this type of sump configuration still seem to have filter-cleaning jets somewhere. I agree with Malcolm--maybe it's loosening too much crap too fast, and there's not enough water flow to sheet everything down into the sump. I think they'll need some wash system redesigns rather than a software patch to allow the machine to soldier on.

I do think this is a very novel system, and agree that I miss the panoply of designs that used to exist before everything became totally homogeneous.

Oh, and sorry for cursing that GE/WCI thing in my other post. ;-)
 
I was in Currys, major appliance retailer here and I opened a fairly fancy looking Samsung dishwasher and the edges of the door area were so sharp they actually felt like they'd almost cut me and it was *MORE* expensive than the Miele next to it.
 
This type of filter, in both residential and commercial dishwashers, is usually under some amount of water during the water circulation periods so that food particles would not be sucked right against it and, in many cases, would have a coarse filter over a finer filter. It would again appear that insufficient water is being used. Soil that heavy should have either had a heavy soil cycle selected which would give a prewash to dispose of some of it or soil buildup on the filter should trigger a drain, flush and refill, but then you have complications with needing additional detergent.

What is the purpose of the stationary jets at the back spraying forward? Maybe they should be redirected to keep the filter clear.
 
murando531 your post is refreshing

Glad to see somebody beside myself questions all this happy horsedung feel good gee whiz it's new so it HAS to be better.

For that matter, one could argue Frigidaire " matic" washing mechanism was definitely different. The differences between then and now is 1. It worked and 2. The goobermint did not force it on anybody.

Which is why this abortion of a dishwasher ties in directly to the eco-sanctioned HE washing machines. No one, not one person I have discussed this with, wants to accept, realize, understand that it takes water to do laundry. Just like it takes expensive gasoline to make your car go. We may not like it, but hey, that's they way it is. And murando531 is spot on with his comment about people not questioning much these days.

If all this eco-crap was so good, then why in the name of heaven, did a manufacturer not come out with this years ago? Think about it......Acme Washer Co introduces a low water use machine that does the job in the same amount of time as a traditional TL but uses lots less water and energy doing it. And it cleans just as well w/o expensive special detergent and does not need "refreshed" periodically.
I would like to think that the market would go ga-ga over that. In other words, it would have to actually WORK before people would buy it. Just like the "matic" Frigidaires of days gone by.

But they don't. Not really anyway. And these eco-smart dishwashers are the latest design abominations that are not a result of a "better mousetrap" but rather the result of ill-conceived laws and regulations. And the sad thing is, no one was asked about it. Just hack out a deal, make it law, and by golly that's it.

Seems odd that every decade we have some sort of "crisis" that requires massive goobermint involvement. First it was the war on poverty, then the war on pollution, then the war on healthcare, education, obesity, no child left behind, war on terror, war on this war on that. Please..........stop before I OD on these declarations of "war" on what seems to ail us.

Now we have climate change (previously knows as Global Warming). Any weather event, no matter how innocuous, gets blown wayyy out of proportion and..........well gee........we need to "blame" it on someone.........uh let's try humanity. Yeah, that's the ticket! So unimaginable amounts of money is wasted on focus groups, opinion polls (most of which are BS), government grants, "awareness" campaigns, print media, and yes of course, adorning a non elected group of pencil pushers to force these horrible machines on us because (see "humanity" above)we're all too dumb, too ignorant, too caught up in our own lives to see the so-called big picture.

And to paraphrase the late, great George Carlin, this is the best we can do folks. These people did not drop in from another planet, they are the same people as the rest of us only now they've grown egos as big as all outdoors. Hubris has taken hold and we simply must trust them to put laws in place to save us from ourselves.
Voter input is not needed nor is it necessary.

And despite all of this, no one questions it. Nobody at all.

How sad.
 
It sounds like the problem was that the dishwasher was programmed to display an error. I would expect a programming change to the cycle could correct the problem. It could start the cycle with less pressure, and once it notices that the water is getting too dirty, immediately change the water before it gets worse. That is basically what my Bosch does.

It starts with a partial fill, and sprays at a reduced strength. If it is really dirty, it will drain and fill again. It is isn't too dirty, after about 5 minutes it will fill the rest of the way and begin the prerinse. Depending on how dirty the water is, it may drain again before the main wash, or simply open the detergent cup and start heating the water for the main wash.
 
<blockquote>What is the purpose of the stationary jets at the back spraying forward? Maybe they should be redirected to keep the filter clear.</blockquote> Tom, the rear jets spraying forward are the water source for the Waterwall mechanism.  The jets are aimed at the moving bar, deflected upwards by it.
 
I mostly agree with Washman's opinions.

However, at the risk of derailing the subject matter, I'll add this:
It takes "just" 0.59 gallons per fill for our DishDrawer to operate, yet it can wash a full load in 60 minutes, 90 if you include the "eco-drying" they use for the machine by default.
Surely, just doubling this water quantity per fill would be enough to fix the problem - but I don't know how effective that would be...

Getting back on topic, I think its disgraceful that Samsung not only builds rubbish dishwashers, but puts "Platinum-Pricing" on every product they release, when they are far inferior to many German/European designs (Miele, Bosch, Asko etc).
It is also disgraceful that a modern filtration system won't self-clean, like so many "manual-clean" designs used by the Europeans
 

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