Oh, jeez... I'm glad y'all like it, it just goes to show that water conditions vary from place to place and not everything that works/fails in one home will do the same in another.
For the record: I've *left* one behind (rental apartment, landlord was a friend and when the old dishwasher in the apartment broke I got one of those -- only difference it was black) and I do not regret leaving it behind one bit. I never liked that machine, it was better than doing dishes by hand but that was it.
To begin with, it etched all our dishes on the first month. Apparently, to save water/energy, it had only one rinse or, to be more precise, the model I had would go thru all the pre-washes/washes, then do *one* "purge" and then one rinse on the Normal cycle. That was it. Then straight to dry. So, if we used enough dishwasher detergent to clean the load, it wasn't rinsed enough and it would etch the dishes. If we used less detergent, it didn't clean at all. We were told that our water was "too soft" and we should use less detergent, even though the water was naturally soft (4 grains/gallon or less) and using less detergent wasn't getting the dishes clean.
So, after replacing glasses and other dishes a couple of times, we took to using (the proper cycle sequences escape me right now) either the Heavy or Pots-n-Pans cycle(s) to force two rinses. Of course, doing so used more water right off the bat and took the machine from "energy star" to a regular non-energy star machine, which is not what we were promised. On the other hand, it improved the cleaning for the silverware.
Oh, yes, the silverware baskets on the door thing. What a pain. If you didn't load it just so, the silverware would not get clean. Just try to convince lazy-ass/distracted room mates to load the plates next to the silverware and pay attention to how they loaded the silverware in it (instead of their usual just drop handfuls of silverware in each compartment). Good luck with that. Of course, performance would improve if you clipped the silverware basket to the front of the lower rack -- until said distracted room mates would come and handle the racks with all of the gentleness of a gorilla, so the basket would fall off the rack and send silverware all over the machine. And putting the basket inside the rack would of course take up lots of space, which is precisely the opposite of the selling point ("silverware on the door gives you more space in the racks"). Before I had that machine I often wondered if the designers of household appliances ever even *use* them, some have some weird design problems that one would have expected would surface on the very first few times they'd *use* the things. But no, in fact I've met plenty of people (including in-laws) that had similar appliances and just loved them, particularly the silverware basket in the door thing. Of course, all of those people live in areas with hard water and do not own a water softener, so that might explain why it worked so well for them.
You could say that, at least back then, the DoE did not have the kind of people that could test machines for performance and/or energy use, I hope they improved. Among the clueless things the "Energy Star" people did were running the dishwashers without dirty dishes in (they loaded the machines with clean dishes), which gave some machine with sensors an abnormal leg up all the others, and also they did not test machines in very hard, hard, medium and soft water (neither does Consumers Report, BTW, if I recall correctly they only test the machines in hard water, never in soft/softened water), so machines that fail to rinse well never got penalized for it. I wouldn't hold my breath though, rumor has it that in the last year or so the "energy star" people awarded energy star status to a few french-door bottom freezer fridges, but did not run them with the water/ice dispenser on -- when people started calling the DoE about it, they simply removed the energy star status but did not even apologize for it nor, as far as I can tell, change their tests to account for stuff like that.
I wonder what it would take to get folks like us to work for the testing places like DoE and Consumer Reports. My impression is that they are bored to tears with their jobs and want to get it over with instead of seeing it as a way to help improve the state of the art and defend the consumers.
