WOW!
I've never seen a GE machine like that before!
Fascinating!
Why on earth did they ever abandon the middle wash arm like that???
The towers were pretty good, but I have no idea why they didn't at least offer both for all these decades.
At least not until their Triton line.
And I just don't know what to say about all the whining about new energy efficient machines.
There's a lot of ignorance in this arena, both unintentional and chosen.
There's A LOT of truth behind EU vs US and our electrical ratings.
There's also a lot to say about EU machines heating their water with actual flow-through heaters which are more efficient. US machines mainly rely on heating water in a random fashion with an exposed coil, compounded by lower voltage. So of course our US machines won't be good at heating water.
Also, importantly, EU nations have very hard water and so all their dishwashers have built in water softeners. Soft water, I've learned the hard way (giggity!) is a HUGE performance variable.
If you're saddled with hard water, the best of the best dishwashers won't do squat.
Many many US locations also have hard to very hard water, yet we're not accustomed to always softening our water, NOR do ANY of our appliances have built in water softening characteristics. So we're screwed right off the bat.
With that said, I hope there are plenty of posts by now in the Blue section to disprove a lot of these myths.
We now have plenty of discussion, testing and video evidence to show that modern machines are not nearly as horrible as people think.
Sure, they were pretty bad in mid-2000's, but I think a lot of the kinks have been worked out.
Not to mention, the relatively speaking, torrent of water that a certain Whirlpool is able to throw around with what looks like a pond pump. Albeit with separate rack washing.
I too am not thrilled with the demise of hard food disposers. But it IS partly consumers' faults.
Disposers require larger pumps and power, which are louder. And people when they're standing in Menard's with a pimple-faced sales dude, will look, and only really look at price, and db levels of the machines.
When the price and db levels align to the lowest amounts, that's usually what people will pick. And they'll only complain about wash-ability later. Yet further complain if the machine is "too loud" despite it washing well.
It's a no-win.
Pertaining to energy. It's incredibly counter-intuitive, especially in our society where basic science knowledge is panned and ridiculed.
But when you split the wash action between racks, reduce the water fill, and further reduce the water flow paths and jets, you can create still a forceful spray with a small efficient DC magnetic pump with a higher RPM to build up your pressure force. These little motors can often run twice as long or more and still use the same or often LESS electricity than their older induction motor ancestors.
YES, I have sporadic washability issues in my modern GE Profile machine, mainly on the top rack. But the bottom rack has been flawless since inception. I've NEVER dealt with a machine, vintage or modern, that's actually performed 100% flawless, 100% of the time.
Maybe I'm just unlucky.
But as it was mentioned up-thread, it really comes down to design. There's verifiable evidence that Whirlpool has simply better designed certain aspects of their machine, over my GE, such as better top rack coverage, and filter soil management.
They're both great machines in my opinion though.
With all those combined, these modern machines really do use less resources, even combined with the odd reject, or some brief filter rinsing.
And I'm thankful for that.
The only caveat I see today is time, with longer cycles. And that too, just simply isn't an issue unless you need to do back to back dishwashing, which really is only an issue upon heavy holiday time.
Just my 5 cents. (Inflation sucks)
