POD 9/25/2017

[brucelucenta]

This was the day of Kitchenaid Dishwashers. It went from the time they introduced in home dishwashers until around the early 70's. They always made a very heavily well built machine that was like a tank and it cleaned quite well, if properly loaded. It did require at least a little care not to completely block the lower spray arm, so it could still spray through the lower plates and dishes to reach the top rack, since there was no upper spray arm and only a small water spinner on the very top. This was however easier to load than the models that had an impeller on the bottom and had to be loaded in a circular pattern. You could get away without pre rinsing also. By the early 70's Maytag's RR dishwashers in my opinion far surpassed Kitchenaid in cleaning and in the mid 70's Maytag started using a forced air drying system like Kitchenaid too. In my opinion, the day of Kitchenaid being king of dishwashers was over. The prestige of having a Kitchenaid dishwasher did not really end until about 1980 though. As time went on, there were many other machines that washed and dried your dishes as well or in many cases, better than Kitchenaid. [this post was last edited: 9/25/2017-13:37]

 

[kd12]

I've always wondered why KitchenAid took so long to add an upper spray arm to their dishwashers. Sears at least had a very good spray tower for their Roto Rack line since it's introduction. Seems like it would have been an obvious next step.

 

[brucelucenta]

I absolutely agree, D & M used to make the dishwashers for Kenmore among others. They even had the Roto Rack sprayer under the top rack on the models right before switching from an impeller to a spray arm in the early 60's. Many of the other dishwasher manufacturers had either upper spray arms or shower towers for the top rack before Kitchenaid did anything.