Power Clean
This is by no means a comprehensive history but a few notes to share...
Early versions had porcelain tubs, later went to plastic. KitchenAid badged machines had SS tanks, and maybe the very upper end Kenmore UltraWash ones did as well.
They pretty much used the same thunderbolt lower wash arm in all models except for the KitchenAid models that got a Hydro-Sweep. The tower fed models had the same thunderbolt middle arm, the direct feed models had a straight non-offset arm. This arm was similar to the one used in the later point voyager tall tubs. The tower fed models had a deflector on the roof that was fed by the middle arm, where the direct feed models had a little sprinkler that was feed from the tube that ran up the back of the tub.
The actual filtration system did receive a makeover at some point in time through its run. The bottom half of the system is the same. The water is pulled through the coarse strainer to the bottom of the pump, then it is pulled through a food disposer, then it is pulled through the impeller. The impeller is situated in the bottom of a column, the water goes up the column and at the top it goes over a wall. The soil laden water is heavier and falls over the wall into a trough, the clean water continues upwards and goes into the spray arms. Where the water travels into after the trough was the difference. Early versions had some kind of a soil separating device, where the soil stayed inside of it and clean water returned to the sump. I'm not sure how it worked because it was a closed device and you couldn't see into it. However the later version was simple enough, it had a screen on top to keep the soil in. The 2nd version had holes on the bottom of the spray arm to keep that screen clean.
I believe all power clean models used the same amount of water per fill, which was just over 2 gallons. Later energy star models just would have to had to settle with less fills and sump purges instead of full rinses.
The last machine depicted is a point voyager based tall tub machine. The power clean was never offered as a tall tub. What made the tall tub possible was using a smaller motor that was mounted sideways. The bottom of the tub then could be moved lower, since the pump module was not as deep.
All power cleans are capable machines. The cycle logic stayed fairly similar, of course older ones tended to have more changes and new ones less changes, though one could change that easily by selecting a heavier cycle should that be what you want to do.
Cam
