My $1200 7 year old Miele dishwasher stopped working a few months ago, with the “Intake/drain” light on red when starting a load. Dishwashers during the pandemic were sort of scare due to massive home remodeling demand, and the professional repair people would have cost $300 just to diagnose, so I went to try to fix it myself.
It turns out the water intake valve solenoid was jammed or gummed up somehow, as applying 120V to it directly had no effect. I went to find an OE replacement online only to find that they are $580, sold by only 2 places, and sold out. You need to be a certified Miele technician to buy them.
Given I knew the specifications from the model number and the printing on the solenoid itself wrt voltage and flow rate, I bought the cheapest replacement I could find on Amazon, spliced the wires into the existing harness and boom, it worked perfectly.
One thing I didn’t understand was why there were so many different inlet valves that all did the same thing. There were 120V AC and 12V DC versions but other than that the only difference was the water connector/dongle/bracket. It seemed absurd there would be so many but the reality is that actual solenoid is super generic and should only cost $20 and should be made to fit them all. Of course nobody really repairs things these days but I think this is the reason why. Even when the part could easily be standardized and replaced/repaired like a light bulb, companies want you to buy a whole new one.
A few weeks ago my Philips coffee machine broke down. It just stopped when I pressed the button for a coffee and went into error mode.
It turned out that despite my google-fu there isn’t a published repair manual to be found, Philips does not offer replacement parts anywhere oh and actually it’s a rebranded machine from Saeco...
So I just started taking it apart as the warranty had expired anyway. Took a bit of doing but ultimately found out that the motor for the bean grinder was broken.
With some luck by typing in some numbers printed on it I managed to find a place that sells them. With that it was a fairly easy fix that cost me 40 euros and an hour or three instead of 300+ for a new machine.
Also there is sweet satisfaction form having fixed a thing
Fair enough but nothing on the machine or labels inside it or the manual mention that.
However later I found out that the parts are Saeco branded which did not help my search for them
I recently replaced the pump in my espresso machine. Turns out a lot (maybe all?) have the same solenoid pump and they are not expensive at about €25. Also found out my "Solis" machine is sold as Breville in the US.
I'm glad you figured that out. I have a Saeco machine (Magic Deluxe) from 2004 that I've kept in working shape. Parts still aren't too hard to come by on ebay - although I'm now replacing the boiler and did end up with the wrong part before finding the correct one. Now I figure if I can get a gasket kit, I can fix the boiler I'm pulling out and have a replacement on hand when it leaks again in 5-10 years.
For the most part, googling part #s and looking at pictures will get you pretty far. These machines share a lot of parts with other Saeco/Gaggia/Philips models.
Side note, but, depending upon where you live your warranty status should have no impact on whether you can safely take your device apart (unless you are unable to properly reassemble it, of course).
The whole "Warranty void if sticker removed" on a sticker over a screw or "Warranty void if panel removed" ... all of those things are scare tactics, and, in fact, not even legal in many places.
Similar experience with a Miele. Inside it's about 4x more complicated than an American model: far more engineering around sensors and actuators and quality, while the American ones are designed with short lifetime and manufacturing costs as goals. Fortunately it came with a circuit diagram which made it easy to find a bad relay which had a generic replacement. Back in business for more years.
ps. Just remembered, that Miele also had a diagnostic/debug mode to tell you what system was faulting. Try that with your shitty builder's grade Whirlpool.
The thing is, all of it is garbage compared to appliances from 20 yrs ago before mfgr's started designing everything to planned obsolescence and IoT. American GE at least has an extensive parts network in country, while if your LG/Samsung breaks at this point you are basically SOL. On top of that the COVID-19 supply shock issues have exacerbated this situation.
The US brands have that. There's several good third party sites that have parts for most of this junk. I've saved a number of appliances with a $5 part. appliancepartspros.com comes to mind.
I have a few LG appliances and while just a few years back finding parts for them would have been a challenge, it no longer is - there are several places online that specialize in them and I find it no harder to find parts for them as I do my few remaining GE appliances (that I have relatively few complaints about - heck my dishwasher is 15 years old at this point).
Love my LG front load washer/dryer though. Doesn't shake the house down on the spin cycle like the Duet HT it replaced and does the best job of rinsing out of any washer I have ever used - even the 1970's top loaders that used 20+ gallons per wash/rinse cycle that I grew up with :p
IoT is the worst. It's only convenient if you turn over your email address, all your device ids, your SSN, and your 1040 AGI. Otherwise you'll need to dismiss 20 nag popups before you can do anything.
Not to mention the very real risk of a company going under (as the article notes) or simply ending support for your product. How many consumer IoT products are going to be bricked in the next decade?
I wouldn't mind IoT that electronically diagnoses and finds the part I need to replace. Maybe notification when was is done, but thats minor. In a small house can hear beep anyway.
Any "shitty" builders grade whirlpool will have a full schematic and repair manual with it. In fact, most have a place inside the bottom front panel where this manual is attached.
They also have diagnostic modes and test cycles. Though not that easy to use. Perhaps the miele is more user friendly when it comes to repairs.
Is lasting twice as long really a convenience if the repair costs ten times as much? I've always preferred simpler appliances that are easy to work on.
Is 10x repair cost right? Parts maybe 2x-5xish? For labor, I think it's the same "appliance repair" network as the others, so whatever that rate is, trip fee plus hourly.
It sounded like it was $580 through unauthorized channels, and an authorized service technician would probably get them at cost.
The fact that the GP was able to find and substitute an equivalent part for cheaper means that the $580 had to be including the price of Something Else, and the fact that it was for sale in two different places means it wasn't just Miele.
Why would an unauthorized channel exist if it was more expensive than the authorized one? If I want a part for my Maytag dryer I just buy it. What kind of cockamamie scheme are they trying to pull by not selling parts?
I noticed my 5 year old dishwasher was a bit dirty inside. Rather than throwing it away and buying a new one, I cleaned it with a cloth and some general kitchen cleaning detergent.
I then cleaned it with the recommended cleaning chemical and cleaning cycle.
It would never occur to me to discard a working dishwasher at 15 years, let alone “after a few years”.
I clean the filter about every other month and that’s largely it. They sell a dishwasher cleaner that you run though a cycle. I’ve bought one but haven’t seen the need to use it yet. Stainless interior looks brand new to me at around 7 years of use.
You can clean them. It's part of expected maintenance like changing your car's oil. This is basically true of all appliances. This is approximately saying who even keeps pants for a 2 years after I wear them a few times they are all dirty.
We used a dishwasher for ~20 years. It wasn't even broken when it was given away (it's still working at someone's home).
When it was leaving home its insides were spotless and odorless. It was still cleaning as good as its first day. Home appliances have long lives with proper yet minimal maintenance.
BSH group's appliances are pretty solid. Miele as various people written here is generally fussy, and they don't live longer than a properly cared Bosch or Siemens, yet their tolerances are lower.
Dad sold these things when I was little. Never sold Miele because he didn't wanted to sell headache to people.
i have a whirlpool washer/dryer i bought in 2006 for our large famliy (2 adults and 3 kids). we have worked that thing to the bone every weekend doing massive loads (everyone overloads it so they dont need to do two runs).
The dishwashers on the other hand (whirlpool, bosch, etc) only last ~5 years before they start going bad (poor quality washing, not draining properly, door not closing, electronic panel not working, etc)
Strange, maybe. Currently I know of two Bosch, one Siemens and one Samsung machine in service. All of them are being used for more than five years and the oldest one only had a water-pump change since the water in the area was extremely hard & it was only used only some parts of the year.
i always see this as a form of stockholm syndrome.
My excesivly expensive and needlessly complex appliance is better then your cheaper and more common model becaues of a bunch of features no one cares about?
Can anyone access the Miele diagnostic board, or does it need some special Miele only tech to buy and use? Does the average consumer care that it has this function, espeiclaly when it is also so much more expensive to repair?
You can get a new base-model dishwasher for what the OP priced the replacement part at??
calling another brand "shitty" is just bad, no one said your clearly superior miele is shit, but you did to another brand for no reason?
I view dishwashers as disposable, after 4-5 years i throw them out and get a new one....
Funny...my way over-complicated LG clothes washer started leaking water all over the floor a week or two ago. A little poking around revealed that there's a water steering assembly, a modestly complicated bit of plastic with 3 solenoids attached. Searching Amazon, the OEM part is $70, but a half dozen places sell nearly identical units for $20, next day shipping. I noted there seemed to be 2 different versions of the knockoff replacement, differing in the angle of the wiring attachments.
Works perfectly.
Of course nobody really repairs things these days
While I'm sure the OEM would prefer you buy a whole new item, and a 'certified repairman' is likely to spend the extra for the OEM part, the existence of an aftermarket where someone has gone to the trouble to produce a nearly identical replacement part (and perhaps 2 different manufacturers have) tells me that people are in fact fixing these things.
Ha - I have a new LG front loader and took the covers off to have a look around. It has at least half as many if not 2/3 less parts than the Whirlpool Duet HT it replaced. And the motherboard is tucked up at the top of the washer, not down below like my Duet.
I mean the Duet HT lasted me 15 years (and may last someone else another 15 if I get around to selling it) but the LG bests it in every way. Most impressively it's whisper quiet, barely makes any noise on all but the highest spin speed and even then doesn't shake my whole house like the Duet did. And it does a fantastic job cleaning my laundry. My towels have never been fluffier or more absorbent. It's almost as if someone replaced them mid-wash.
If it's half as reliable as my Duet I'll be ecstatic, and if it breaks I'll fix it. There aren't that many parts and diagnosing these things is pretty easy if you have at least minimum problem solving/deduction/critical thinking skills.
They are. For many, a new appliance is a significant investment. Even when it's not, I'd rather pay 200€ for a used washer than 700€ for a new one. There has to be a network of repairmen who refurbish and resell machines for that to happen.
I also repair my appliances because it's quick. I can usually fix it in a day or two without interacting with another human, for very little money.
I've been able to keep my Fisher & Paykel dish drawers operating since 2004. Besides supplying parts, they also offer retrofits as they've made design improvements over the years. Ditto for a Fisher & Paykel double oven.
I'm recently annoyed by my Honda lawn mower which requires a complete transmission replacement ($220) due to a worn out key slot in the drive shaft. Annoying since the transmission itself is well built, but you can't buy just the drive shaft:
A local machine shop could probably build up the steel in the worn keyway in the shaft with a welder and cut a new keyway for a good deal less than the new part cost.
Good idea. The lawnmower is of course built around the transmission, so removing it is a bit of a hassle.
What I'll probably do is replace the easily replaceable parts (key, spring, clamps, washers, gear), give it a good lubrication, and sell it (disclosing the worn part) and replace it with a battery-powered mower. I'm tired of dealing with gas machines. I'm under no illusion that a battery-powered mower will be as durable, but I'm just done with the noise and pollution of gas.
Might not work for you but I enjoy using a push mower. I have an electric mower that I have to use if the grass gets too tall but the cord gets in the way.
My electric cuts 19" and the push mower is about the same, maybe a little wider. Cheap battery mowers are 16", maybe even 14". 22" ones are available for $450 on up. I'd consider buying one of those if the batteries would last for 5 years. My experience so far with cordless tools is not positive.
That’s a good plan. I’ve been using a battery mower for a couple years now and don’t miss gas at all. It’s nice having a mower that just works. I hardly mind mowing at all now.
Small engine repair shops may have a used shaft - or look for the same/similar mower on Craigslist with a dead engine - how my friend repaired a rototiller.
I honestly 100000% believe that people use this term incorrectly almost all the time. Planned obsolescence is when something is deliberately made to break quickly so that you buy another one.
What is happening here is different - it's a question of "how do we make it as cheap as possible and last as long as the warranty".
They sound the same but they really aren't. No one is designing these devices to break deliberately. But companies absolutely are swapping metal cogs for plastic ones because a plastic cog won't break during the warranty period and that's what matters.
Sometimes there is a good reason to use a more breakable plastic part. Baratza coffee grinders are sturdy and well-designed, but there is a plastic gear in the power chain between the motor and the burrs.
That gear isn't plastic because it's cheaper than a metal gear, it is a sacrificial part.
Suppose you get some coffee beans with a rock in them. The burrs seize up because they can't grind the rock, and you don't notice it in time to cut the power.
Imagine that every part in the power chain is as sturdy as the motor and the burrs. The motor may burn out, or else it manages to force the burrs to turn, ruining them.
Now you have to replace either the expensive motor or the expensive burrs.
Instead, the plastic gear fails, saving the motor and burrs. This gear is cheap and easy to replace. (Baratza may send you one for free, even if the machine is out of warranty. Their customer service is second to none.)
So there are some cases where a breakable plastic part can avoid damaging or ruining the more expensive parts.
Of course one could imagine other ways of solving the "grinding a rock" problem. Maybe some kind of sensor to turn off the motor if it seizes up? But that would increase the cost of the grinder, and who knows if it may have other failure modes. Since this is such a rare situation, the sacrificial plastic gear is a simple and effective solution.
When I was a kid, our family went to a drive-in theater in the family station wagon. I decided to watch by sticking my head out the back window. My dad decided to close the window; thankfully he realized my head was there before he finished. I'm glad I never got to find out if there was a plastic gear in the mechanism.
Not true, those things are deliberately designed to blow as soon as possible after warranty expires. Open any device, look for the capacitors near the energy supply.
Those do not like heat, and if you model the heat correctly, you fit the bell curve of expiration exactly after the 2-3 years after the warranty expires.
If you improve the cooling of the area, most devices lifetime can be doubled.
I always wondered why no repair shop takes advantage of this, by offering a doubled warranty, for defusing planned obsolescence ahead of time.
It can be hard to move the capacitors without having to redesign the entire power supply, as increasing the distance will increase the inductance. Increased inductance will make most power supplies less stable. One thing I have done in the past when I haven't seen any ceramic capacitors on the output side, on switching power supplies, is to solder a surface mount ceramic capacitor under the electrolytic output capacitor to reduce the ripple it sees, which will reduce the amount of heat generated internally.
An easier thing to do is remove the heat better. This can be done by making sure that the intake air first cools the capacitors (outside air->caps->transistors). Since most power supplies these days are shoved into a plastic box with no venting, it can be easy to add a few vent holes and a small fan. If you do this, make sure that all of the capacitors are discharged before handling as not all power supplies have bleeder resistors to make sure the capacitors self-discharge in a reasonable time period.
What really is the difference? If you know a plastic cog has a 90% chance of breaking after 6 months you're effectively planning on it breaking. You're basically arguing that intent matters more than the effect of creating disposable products.
Yes that's the entire point of `planned` obsolescence. The word itself quite clearly signifies a requirement for intent to be there. If you make your product as cheaply as possible and because of this it does not last long does not mean it's planned obsolescence. It's just a cheap product.
Not really. You can buy a hammer made out of metal, or a plastic one for half price. The plastic one will break long before the metal one would. Is the manufacturer "planning" for breakage? Or it is just a side effect of the product being cheaper?
Real planned obscolescence is making software that requires online authentication and then switching off the auth servers 3 years in so that the customers have to buy a new version. That's a deliberate action.
> Is the manufacturer "planning" for breakage? Or it is just a side effect of the product being cheaper?
It can be both.
I was in a hardware store looking at painter ladders and noticed many of them had the two sturdy metal ladders kept together by a piece of plastic. Pretty much everyone would think they were extremely durable, while actually the weak link would soon wear to make the entire product useless. Was it incompetence or planned obsolescence? I have no idea, still I wonder why I spotted the problem in 5 seconds straight although I am no engineer.
>> What is happening here is different - it's a question of "how do we make it as cheap as possible and last as long as the warranty".
They are choosing to ask this question.
But it's possible to ask other questions.
Let's take the example of the Gigabyte "Ultra Durable" mothers.
It's a motherboard series with some improved parts with a focus on reliability. And they are relatively cheap parts. And supposedly the really increase the reliability of this motherboard.
Using inferior parts that don't represent a substantial savings in hopes of having the device last just barely as long as the warranty so the user will have to buy a new one IS planned obsolescence.
I think even if the motivations can have different origins, they can lead to the exact same thought process and product.
So yes, strictly speaking they are not the same and they can lead to different outcomes, but I am not sure how much of a difference it makes in terms of real world results. Sure, it depends on the cost structure of the product and a few other factors, but in the end many products will just break right after the warranty period.
When my first electric razor stopped working, I decided to open it up and figure out why. It turns out the connection from power to the motor rotor was by graphite rods, similar to pencil leads. It's certain that the graphite was designed with a specific lifetime in mind, and once it ground down to nothing you got metal-on-metal grinding that destroyed the motor.
This assumes that you've noticed the problem before irreparable damage occurs, and you're familiar enough with motors to know what to look for and where to find parts. Neither was true in my case.
> No one is designing these devices to break deliberately.
Except if you design something to break right after the warranty (or as close to it as you can get using the cheapest materials possible), that is what you are doing.
1. They don't want consumers, or third party repairs, seeing Factory Repair Information. (They pick, and choose which appliance repair shops get the information, and it's tied to sales. Try finding a independant repair shop these days?)
2. They usually don't sell parts out side of warranty. When they do, they are marked up very high. (If enough models were sold, the part might have a genetic equivelant.)
3. It seems like they make repair just difficult enough, so people just buy new again? I have a family member who admits Bosh appliances are overpriced, and have short lives. She still buys the brand? I believe Bosh psychologists know why?
4. Right now I have two Bosh appliances on life support. I fool around with electronic repairs so I have them kinda working. If you get an E13 error on a Bush Washer, it's usually the drain pump. In order to open the door, you need to shopvac the water from the drain hose.
5. I've noticed the weak spot on Bosh appliances is the computer, and I get it. It's not the best enviornment for electronics. Make the computer boards similar to vechicle boards. It's pretty rare for a vechicle's computer to fail. Meaning they are built for a nasty environment.
I don't know why you have so much trouble with Bosh, they're up there with other well known brands such as Sorny, Panasomnic and Magnetbox.
On the other hand I have a cordless Bosch drill/driver set I bought refurb, they've held up to years of neglect and (not pro) use. Maybe give them a try next time?
Edit: jokes aside, that's good information. Fwiw I had to babysit a little tube for an hour+ to drain a Samsung washer to get at the drain filter. I wish I could have used a shop vac to speed that up.
There's a bit of survivorship bias going on here though. The only appliances still working from more than (X number of years) ago are going to by definition be those that were built to last for more than (X number of years).
So your only reference point is seeing that all the older appliances seem to be built to last. You'd need to do research on all the options that haven't lasted to today to find out if modern stuff really does break faster, and that's much harder to do.
If the coil itself hasn't burned out (easy to check with a multimeter), a bit of cleaning could be sufficient to fix it.
Indeed a lot of the mechanical parts like valves, pumps, etc. will be available online from various places, and I bet you'd be able to find the same thing on AliExpress cheaper than Amazon.
As for why there are so many variations, it could be a form of vendor lock-in (like laptop AC adapters, where the number of different output voltages is far greater than the tolerance itself), or different companies just chose different OEMs.
Thats why I keep my more then 15 year old espresso machine and resist the urge to get me something fancier. If somethings brakes i can got to the local hardware store and buy stuff from plumbing supply.
Its also a generic clone of the E61 machine so a lot of parts are interchangable and the inner workings are straight forward so said i don't even need a manual for the specific machine.
The hard part of fixing it can be that the manufacturer used a range of sources for each part. The parts are available, but it can be difficult to tell which easily available part is the right one. This is only a problem for fixing a single device - if you fix many, then you likely have multiple parts anyway.
That's the same sort of thinking I go through when walking down the plumbing fittings aisle of home depot. Slip fit threaded mpt fpt barbed 1/2", 3/4", 1", garden hose, pex, ...
yep, most home appliances are surprisingly easy to repair, the intimidating part is that you never did such repair and have no idea how to go about it. But there's the Internet and you can find instructions on Youtube to fix almost anything. Water pump in dishwasher, bearings in a washing machine, heaters, sensors - almost everything is replaceable. And many parts are reused between models and brands so with some searching they can be had cheaply. Usually it's not worth it to pay a service guy to fix your 15 year old device as it's probably nearing its end of life anyway, but why not give it a chance and try to fix it before throwing away..
Actual news about hacking! It is interesting that this is in the UK ... i'm fairly sure most rents come with a full-sized dishwaster when furnished and all properties have the plumbing for one. I'm not sure what the market is. Especially that one of the main value adds was "no mess" when our dishwashers all accept pre-form tablets for detergent.
Anyway, I adore these kinds of blog posts. Tinkering, naughtiness and a big dollop of technical knowhow.
In Western/South West Europe (Portugal, Spain, France), full-sized dishwashers are a bit more uncommon I think, especially in single/double room flats in bigger metropolitan areas where flat sizes tend to be in the smaller range. As an anecdote, I've lived in maybe ~20 places and only two of them had come with a dishwasher, only one of them was an apartment.
This is the first time I hear about "Bob" and my current place couldn't fit a full-size dishwater but in order to save time and water, I might actually get this. The price is a bit high for what it is though.
Presumably from £ being the primary currency in the readme. I think GP means the hacking is from UK, (and contributors) rather than the manufacturer of this mental device, which is surprising because who in the UK would have one of these when 'normal' dishwashers are basically ubiquitous.
I've rented in the UK for decades and I've never had a dishwasher or space for one. Friends haven't bothered with dishwashers until they had kids, and then they needed to create a space and add some plumbing.
Dishwashers in the UK seem like the opposite of ubiquitous. Maybe I live in a strange bubble.
These counter-top ones? Not that I'm aware of. I have a normal (though half-width, but that just makes sense for a 1 bed place really) one in London.
Maybe older builds that haven't been updated wouldn't have any space for one as you say, without re-jigging cupboards, so maybe people do. But then you're losing work surface for it..
I lived in Paris for a while. Large appartement have dishwasher, but in single units, it’s uncommon.
I remember looking for solution like that for a renter in a small place without proper plumbing to accommodate a dishwasher.
I also see a market for the so called tiny house folks or full time RVer.
I don’t find that particular product appealing too much, but I would like to see more like that. And I know folks around me that would buy one if it’s was more open and fixable.
I've rented.....8 houses so far, all in North East(Newcastle) and every single one of them had a dishwasher. I suppose maybe part of it is that I simply wouldn't rent a place without a dishwasher ;-)
Well in a lot of places, the fact it is a self standing property means the owner can do whatever they want with it without having to consult a "building committee".
Like rearranging plumbing/electrical however you want.
Whether landlords use this advantage for tenants quality of life is a whole other story.
I've rented flats outside london for years, always come with a dishwasher. I'm on a high salary though, so it may skew my world view of what is "standard"
Anecdata: I've rented 2 flats in London over the last 30 years (and been a frequent visitor to 4 more); none had a dishwasher. Rented one house in Newcastle; also no dishwasher.
If your flat is so small that you can't have a dishwasher, do you really want to occupy some (probably significant) fraction of your countertop with this thing? It looks like it could wash maybe a few plates and cups at a time. That would take maybe 2 min to wash by hand in the sink. The entire premise of this device seems ridiculous to me.
I live in a UK flat without a 'full-size' dishwasher. Did you see OP though? This isn't about that, my half-width one still goes under the counter and takes normal tablets.
Yes I agree. Never heard of these, seems totally bizarre, but I suppose I get the appeal (if you didn't know/think about the proprietary connection/protocol) if your kitchen/scullery wasn't designed with space for a dishwasher. But how many properties in the UK can be like that? Not very many, I'm sure an estate agent would tell you you'd have a hard time selling without 'updating'.
I don’t know about the UK, but Paris provide a large number of incredibly tiny apartment without dishwasher and the landlord is not open to make the plumbing accommodation to setup one. If even possible.
I had to pay it myself once in 2013. It was a sunken cost I was ok with given how cutthroat the real estate market is and how much I hate to do dishes.
"Bob" is not the only countertop dishwasher that exists; this is a solid market segment. It's also worth noting that the median price of these things is less than Bob, even before you add in the cost of buying a dishwasher with an extra corporate revenue stream embedded in it.
Do you have some suggestions for other brands? I have had my fingers on the order button for some weeks but and haven't found good reviews of other products yet.
Even in the United States where dishwashers are common, older buildings sometimes don't have them. I lived in a reasonably large apartment from the 1930s that was never upgraded to support a dishwasher. I would have loved a model like this.
Here's the 2019 data on dishwasher ownership in the UK [0]. More than 50% of two-adult households have them, rising to 64% for two-adult-two-children households. Retired single adult households have the lowest percentage (28%)
Really great post indeed ! As a small data point, I'm renting a 40-50 m² flat in the UK and only have a washer/dryer. No dishwasher and no additional plumbing for one.
Loved the obsessiveness! FWIW the entire beer-brewing industry runs on NaOH for cleaning and sanitising. Disposing of it is not quite as environmentally-friendly as the dishwasher manufacturer seems to want you to believe -- in most places you'd be in serious trouble if you poured any significant quantity down the drain.
eta: I've just looked up the constituents of the dishwasher tablets we've been using, and yes, indeed, they're mostly NaOH, an inert carrier (Na2SO4) and a variety of water-softeners, packaging films to keep everything in tablet form (but soluble) and a small number of helper enzymes, perfumes and whiteners. Looks like a teaspoon of NaOH might work justabout as well. :D
For my own dishwasher I’m using a mix of Potassium hydroxide (Potash), Sodium hypochlorite (Bleach) and Sodium tripolyphosphate (Phosphates).
This is strong stuff, so make sure hoses/tubes, seals and connections are compatible if anyone wants to try this.
Instead of rinse aid I’m using a 50% citric acid/water solution. The final rinse is at 85c or 185f. The stuff dries instantly. A built in fan/condensation system prevents moisture inside and outside the machine.
I’m using two commercial grade peristaltic pumps for the chemicals.
I have also considered an enzyme pre-wash; Protease and Amylase.
The diswasher is commercial grade, but the racks and operation is just like a normal household dishwasher.
Drinking glasses come out spotless. Rinse Aid is not necessary.
I hold them up to the sunlight for inspection and I see nothing.
I will try to make a video or write about this sometime :)
The feedback would be helpful and I care about people having an ideal dishwashing machine that operates with the least cognitive load.
Yes please share what country you’re in and what equipment you use? This is very interesting.
I’ve come to the conclusion that buying “consumer” or even “prosumer” appliances is a lost cause, all the brands use the same 3 white label Chinese manufacturers and you get the same quality no matter what you buy, you can expect to be shopping for a new appliance in <5 years time.
I’m hopeful that commercial appliances aren’t yet at that stage, you end up paying a significant premium but you save in time and lost effort when you don’t have to deal with buying a new one so soon.
> I’ve come to the conclusion that buying “consumer” or even “prosumer” appliances is a lost cause, all the brands use the same 3 white label Chinese manufacturers and you get the same quality no matter what you buy, you can expect to be shopping for a new appliance in <5 years time.
In general that's very true across industry now. For more information on this white labeling phenomenon this documentary is great:
Norway.
Asko DWC5926 (DWC5926W).
Seko PR-4 and PR-1.
This is the short version. There are some issues and fixes you should be aware of. Like how to fix a design fault at a circulation pump wire. There is also an easier way to rewire the machine from 3 phase to single phase if you’re doing that.
Generally the Asko machine is a unicorn.
You can also look at the Miele professional dishwashers that come with automatic dosing systems and sanitizing rinse.
I'd drop the bleach if your dishwasher has stainless steel interior walls. Chlorine is hostile to stainless steel, causing pits in the oxidised surface of the metal, resulting in corrosion.
>bleach and stainless steel
Thank you for pointing that out. I was worried about Bleach corroding stainless steel inside and outside the dishwasher. Bleach has serious issues related to being used in a dishwasher and in general. I can’t find good information about Bleach in my digitized dishwasher notes. I know that I paused until I had resolved these issues. Corrosion of stainless steel worried me the most. If I can’t find better notes or remember why I was convinced; then I will have to stop using Bleach.
Sodium hydroxide is only dangerous if concentrated. Diluted, and especially if it is mixed with wastewater, it'll just react with the various organics to form soap-like chemicals.
If anything, it'll help clean your sewage pipes!
PS: Most draincleaners are just a concentrated NaOH mixture. Consumers pour them down their drain all the time and nobody worries about this either...
Devil's advocate: the back of those drain cleaner solutions make a point that the solution should never sit or pool in any surface or pipe. You have to run water and chase it down so it doesn't corrode the pipes. I know where I live some of the pipes have "flow issues" because of bad design, and if there was already a partial blockage I can see drain cleaner corroding the pipes...
We just mechanically clean them out ourselves, anyway.
If you ask them why they say its because it'll often dissolve the pipes before the blockage. Most of the trades people I talk to aren't looking to maximize their work. I've had them turn down jobs for being too gross and I don't blame them.
They'll generally use a snake/auger. Home Depot sells a basic one for $15. The beefier, further reaching ones cost more. Or, for smaller jobs, there are single-use plastic snakes.
People most certainly don't eat sodium hydroxide on their pretzels anymore than they eat raw egg in their cakes. Coating pretzels with lye before baking causes a chemical reaction that consumes the lye. You really, really shouldn't ingest any amount of lye, lest it react with the inside of your squishy organic matter like the surface of pretzel dough...
In German, I think their full name is Laugenbrezel. The full name may not be much used[1] colloquially, because it's implied -- but bread rolls made the same way are definitely called Laugenbrötchen.
"Lauge" is German for "lye". They're called that because they're made with it.
[1]: Though when I switched my phone keyboard to German just now to test it out, the predictive spelling corrector suggested "Laugenbrezel", not "-brötchen", when I'd got as far as "Laugenb".
Nope, pretzels are made with lye (NaOH). That's how you get the tasty brown Maillard reaction coating - boil the dough in lye water, then bake, then salt it.
Proprietary cassettes for dishwashing machines? That's next level. Also I don't get the advantage that you don't need to measure the detergent level, I have always used standard "all-in-one" tabs (1 tab = 1 wash) for my dishwasher, they cost around 0.15 Euro per wash and they only thing I need to add ever few weeks is salt (due to hard water). You can buy the tabs in large packs like 100 in one plastic bag and they are not individually packed (the packaging dissolves during the wash). No need for shipping back the cassette to refill or complicated recycling. We are reinventing the wheel again.
> Proprietary cassettes for dishwashing machines? That's next level.
Although it is proprietary, to be fair on two points: there wasn't really any "DRM", it was literally just a one byte counter on an EEPROM so that a cartridge could digitally record the number of washes remaining, and the machine made no attempt to prevent this being changed. The manufacturer also did not prohibit the cartridges from being refilled by owners, this is in stark contrast to printer manufacturers.
I agree they could have done way more to make it easy for users to refill, although it's not prohibited it's completely impractical without some EE knowledge, and as the author says sending cartridges around the world is not a very efficient way of getting detergent back into these things. To be honest a better design would be no cartridges and a couple of reservoirs with level sensors (As you essentially suggested regarding measuring detergent level), since the machine already seems to be capable of pumping an accurate amount of liquid out of the cartridges they wouldn't even need to measure, just fill... I suspect the reason they didn't do this was for a more "consumer friendly" design where users have to do the least possible work, as it is more of a luxury product than a utility.
I'm not entirely convinced they are trying to make a serious margin on the cartridges, they work out about 3x the cost of the most expensive dishwasher tablet, but they have to send the thing back to france to be reprocessed and programmed... probably not at a scale to be very cost effective.
I do love the article though, it's great to be able to hack on stuff like this when the manufacturer made poor decisions.
Is is exactly DRM: it's a digital method intended to restrict the user from undesirable usage (from the manufacturer's point of view).
Early restrictions on printer cartridges in the 1990s were simple: they could be bypassed with a bit of tape, or pressing a combination of buttons on the printer. Later, the chips could be reset, probably in a way similar to this. Now, there are encryption keys etc.
> suspect the reason they didn't do this was for a more "consumer friendly" design
>> suspect the reason they didn't do this was for a more "consumer friendly" design
> That is naïve.
We are supposed to avoid this kind of retort on HN, but I'll try to read underneath the surface.
I am more likely than most to infer exploitative and manipulative intent behind the choices of large corporations. However I am also very much a realist.
Consider that this company (whom I never herd of before this post) is not some multinational behemoth like Samsung. This product is coming from a very new, small manufacturer of luxury, miniature home appliances in France (so far a manufacturer of 1 appliance it seems). Given their niche target market, it seems far more likely to me that their choice to use cartridges is an attempt to fit that market, than an attempt to milk people for huge margins at scale on a consumable. Yes it's far from economical, but nether is their product.
The cartridge system certainly doesn't seem inconvenient, but given that they designed the system to hold at least 2-3L of water in a user refillable compartment, it slightly baffles the mind that holding 130mL of detergent and 35mL of rinse aid in a similar fashion was deemed impossible (or impractical).
From manufacturer's perspective, to make a user-refillable detergent/rinse container is against own interests all round:
- Give up on additional revenue;
- Costly to make machine more robust/tolerant to variations in composition/pH/viscosity/etc. of 3rd-party detergent;
- No good way to enforce rinse/calcite removal inside machine - without DRM, user can just pour water as "rinse" liquid, and then lie when RMAing the washer that eventually clogged up and broke.
Have you ever noticed at the pump that the nozzle for diesel doesn't fit in your car if it uses a gasoline engine? Try it some time. This is to prevent people who aren't paying enough attention from ruining their day by putting diesel in their car. It would be trivial to sell large commerical-grade detergent containers with similar protections to provide an affordable, fool-proof mechanism to refill their own cannisters. The best thing about this approach is that you could still provide the subscription based model to anyone who truly values the model (instead of being simply forced to use that model due to lack of a suitable alternative), giving your customers the best of all worlds. Obviously, that doesn't quite rake in the money the way that the "razor and blades" approach to gouging your customers in the name of convenience does.
Obviously anything that means you rake in less money is against the short-term interests of the sales department, but not necessarily the long-term interests of the company.
> This is to prevent people who aren't paying enough attention from ruining their day by putting diesel in their car.
FWIW this also protects against ignorant drivers who through no fault of their own have never filled up gas. Many countries are full service, as I believe are some US states?
Beats me why filling up gas is made out to be such a difficult task...
>Credit where credit's due, Daan Tech didn't completely lock down the machine with Bob cassettes. Once empty, you can leave it there and add detergents manually.
If that was the true concern they'd have locked that up as well. They want you to pay for convenience, not for the warranty's sake.
I think noucermane is correct. Your point that there wasn't any software DRM does not mean that they did not intend it as DRM. I expect that they did a cost benefit analysis of additional electronics for SW DRM vs revenue lost due to hackers like this one for this version of their product, and found the tradeoff acceptable. This does not mean that if this hack became easily available and widely used, that they would not implement SW DRM on a later revision. Who knows, maybe the current version is already ready for SW DRM, it's just that they haven't felt the need to release the DRM version of the cartridge yet.
Given that they went out of their way to build an auto-renewal system in the device (a pretty sophisticated endeavor for a kitchen appliance manufacturer) it seems blatantly obvious that this lock-in was meant to prevent refills. Otherwise why not offer a manual override?
I have air filters that notify you when the filters should be checked or changed, I have coffee machines that tell you when you should descale them but they all let you override or ignore the issue if you so desire. And they're a lot less sophisticated than this device.
I'm not a fan of ad-hominem but I do agree with Symbiote that your take in a bit naive. You don't need to be a behemoth to embrace a crappy business model. Remember Juicero?
> You don't need to be a behemoth to embrace a crappy business model.
It's also the almost cliche case study in undergraduate business school. Known as the "Kodak" model or the "Gillette" model: "Give away the camera, sell the film" or "Give away the shaver, sell the blades" and while it's not an exact fit (I doubt they're selling the washer at cost) it's in the same vein.
I personally do think it their actions are deliberately exploitative. I don't inherently have a problem with offering users a 'more convenient' experience for a higher price, but there's absolutely no reason they couldn't sell their prefilled cartridges and also offer a refillable cartridge with a reset button, which can still tell you how many washes it has left. They also could absolutely sell the detergent directly to consumers, rather than implying it's some kind of secret sauce. Ultimately, this would cost almost nothing to engineer, and you wouldn't have to change the machine at all.
Their deceit is made more egregious by their supposed care for the environment.
I'd be interested in seeing the company's pitch deck. I wouldn't be surprised if they used the word "subscription" somewhere in their list of what makes them different from the competition.
I think investors are looking for the next Keurig. Sustainability be damned.
Look at the lengths Juicero went to create a subscription model for juice. Clearly there is a desire for that business model to be applied more broadly than just inkjet printers.
Absent any indications to the contrary, my default assumption is that we're seeing the same business model applied here.
I have beginner-level lockpicking skills. I can rake open the door locks from companies like Schlage and Kwikset used on most houses in the US in a few seconds. That they're easily defeated by someone with basic knowledge of tools for manipulating them does not mean they aren't locks.
This DRM will prevent the average consumer from refilling the cartridges even if it's easily defeated by those with a working knowledge of embedded electronics.
Pretty irrelevant "argumentum ad verecundiam", but for the sake of argument, you are not "average" anymore. Being able to pick Schlage and Kwikset already puts you in the probably 0.1%.
Anyhow, back on track, the average customer does not refill their cartridges. I doubt the idea of doing so has even sparked in their head. (and yes, the average consumer is dumb).
> Being able to pick Schlage and Kwikset already puts you in the probably 0.1%.
What percentage of the general population knows how to dump an I2C EEPROM, do some reverse engineering to find the counter, and update the counter value? It seems easy to us because we're on HN, and many of us are EEs or other embedded systems people, but it's pretty specialized knowledge in the population at large.
This is absolutely DRM. Not effective DRM when squared off against an embedded systems engineer, but DRM nonetheless. Yes, they could have used a hardened encrypted EEPROM specifically built for these kinds of applications (for example, the ATSHA204A from Atmel/Microchip), but that would have cost more and in applications like this COGS for the disposable element is king. They probably assumed that a simple unencrypted I2C EEPROM would be good enough, and quite honestly they're probably right: unless somebody goes and starts selling a little dongle to reset these cartridges to consumers, it's only going to be a handful of technically-inclined power users resetting them.
> the average customer does not refill their cartridges
Yes, and this is why this rudimentary hardware DRM is sufficient for the current market. If the marketplace changes and the hack becomes easily attainable and widely used, SW DRM may emerge.
You're right for the wrong reasons. DRM doesn't have to involve encryption; but it does have to involve copyright.
A right-click blocker script or those domain locks on old Flash games is a form of DRM as long as it keeps you from copying something. Doesn't have to be elaborate, doesn't have to involve crypto. It just has to have the effect of stopping you from copying something that copyright law protects. Once you have that, then it's unlawful to remove the DRM unless it's for a lawful purpose; and it's unlawful to tell anyone how to remove it for any purpose.
I'm confused. Yes, normal consumers can probably figure out how to put detergent and rinse liquid in. But what percentage of customers is going to be able to overwrite an i2c EEPROM? It is DRM for almost everyone.
In the days of HP Deskjet 500C/510/550C trio, HP sold official black cartridge refill kits. It was a bit clunky, but you inserted your cartridge to a contraption, pulled some levers in order presented on the device and you'd have an officially refilled cartridge.
The black cartridges on these printers were transparent, held really liquid ink to the brim and the refill device had aluminum, HP branded ink bottles. Oh, the cartridges had air-pillows inside to maintain a positive pressure at all times.
I have both laser and inkjet printers.
Inkjet is for color, photos, and its scanning capabilities. Got a laser for printing papers during master and Ph.D.
Mine has split drum and toner. Its life is very long, but I need to find a new drum for it soonish, and it's a bit hard to find. Also Samsung's transfer to HP isn't helping.
Don't want to throw it away because it's a small business printer and a flawless machine from my point of view.
I have a laser for b/w. It’s a entry level brother printer. The toner cartridges they come with are only partially filled and replacements are expensive. My starting toner cartridge died after a couple reams of paper. Nice thing of about laser is the toner doesn’t dry up like inkjets but they also moved toward razor handle and blade model.
Some home lasers have this problem unfortunately. I think I learnt my lesson and started to buy home office equipment.
They're more serviceable, longer lasting and they're generally faster and higher quality overall. When used in light duty, they run as long as you can find refills for it.
I always buy original refills BTW. Yes, they're expensive but, they last for a long time and I sleep better at night.
I've got one of those entry level Brother laser printers. If you don't mind voiding your warranty, you can buy third party refilled cartridges for less than $20 on Amazon. They work just as well as the OEM ones.
On the other hand, one could argue that if the dishwasher manufacturer's intention was indeed to prevent user refills, they would have known to already implement their own strict "DRM-style" technological limitations, drawing from the history of printer cartridges. The fact that they haven't may well be a sign of good faith.
You might be right, time will tell. Or they might never develove into that position due to slightly better consumer protection laws since the HP thing.
I'm a fan of the channel, and watched the video, but also haven't had issues with my Bosch not having a pre-rinse compartment. It washes far better than any dishwasher I've had before, including ones that had a pre-rinse compartment.
Your dishwasher was designed to be used without a pre-rinse and is good dishwasher. I’ve had not-so-great dishwashers with pre-rinse slots that were essentially required.
Since we are talking dishwasher life hacks: I always add washing soda (sodium carbonate) along with the detergent, for hard water. It's one of the main ingredients in dry detergent, but it's super cheap. It boosts pH and increases the ratio of sodium to detergent, reducing soap scum.
My brand new Kitchenaid dishwasher has the prewash compartment on top of the normal compartment - effectively making it a measuring cup throwing its contents into the tub once you close the door.
I watched the same Technology Connections video and started adding a squirt (I use inexpensive liquid detergent) just directly on the inside of the door.
It has remarkably increased the “crud busting” power of my Bosch. I used to be fastidious about pre-rinsing before going in the dishwasher. Not I’m more confident to just go from table to washer (with a super quick rinse)
Even if you use tablets, buy a bit of liquid or powder and put about a teaspoon into the initial rinse.
On a tangent, the dishwasher is such a wonderful improvement on hand washing. My parents generation still sees the dishwasher as some kind of cheat or lazy way out.
They are so much more efficient and environmentally friendly than hand washing.
If you have more than one or two pots, you’ll easily use more than the couple of liters of water your dishwasher uses (and the heat for that water has to come from somewhere).
I'm not so sure about the environmental friendlyness. Our dishwasher runs for one and a half hour in eco mode. I'd need to measure how much energy it uses in the process. It feels so inefficient and slow. I'd spend about 20 minutes washing and drying the dishes on my own using cold water...
We still use it because with kids, every minute saved is a small win.
It does seem odd, but it is _far_ better than doing it manually. The reason it's so much more efficient is because it takes so long - it can do a great job despite using very little energy and water because it just keeps going at it gradually
The eco modes (or just generally, modes on newer dishwashers) take longer because to balance out the small amount of water, they need to spray the dishes more times. The energy use is low.
How much water and energy does it take to manufacture the machine? Mining the raw materials, transporting everything from different countries, etc, Sure it's convenient, but I'm not sold on the environment friendliness compared to hand washing. Of course, if you already have one it doesn't make sense to not use it, but much of our collective energy use comes from consumption and making new things we don't need.
Yeah just don't use too much. It was long ago but my then-roommate once used liquid dish detergent in the dishwasher because we had run out of dishwasher detergent. The seemingly endless gallons of foam flowing out onto the floor was quite memorable.
Same! Using normal dish soap that's sitting next to the sink anyways; if you only add a squirt, it doesn't start making foam like crazy as it pretty much gets "used up" by all the grease, and the result is so much better.
One thing I have been doing since watching this video was to add a small scoop of Oxyclean to the dishwasher (in addition to the tab). The difference in cleanliness has been noticeable.
Yeah, this video was interesting but didn’t at all support the conclusion he made. He stopped the cycle half way through and basically compared washing with soap and without. Shocker,with soap was better. More surprising is how close without soap was.
I assume he skipped comparing full cycle because showing that there isn’t a difference doesn’t result in a catchy title and an interesting video.
> Proprietary cassettes for dishwashing machines? That's next level.
Sony had proprietary cassettes for all kinds of products over the years, even when there were standards available (Betamax is the most famous but only one example)
I have 4 handheld voice recorders from the 1970s from my father. Philips, Norelco, Sony, and one other brand. All use the same size microcassette except the Sony. Fuck you, Sony.
Betamax wasn’t any more proprietary than VHS which was developed by JVC. It has a fairly large number of manufacturers that produced VCRs including NEC, Toshiba, Aiwa and Pioneer the issue was mainly cost and the fact that Betamax cam recorders could not be miniaturized as efficiently and as cheaply as VHS so you ended up with a two stage solution still for home movies and amateur movie production (porn played a big role here).
Furthermore, that's not how home video worked. VHS and Beta were sold on their TV recording capabilities, not their home video libraries. Home video was supposed to be handled by disc formats (Laserdisc, CED, VHD, etc); selling movies on $100-ish tapes was prohibitively expensive compared to ~$15 discs.
Eventually this was worked around with video rental shops and falling prices of VHS tape, but a consequence of this is that neither Sony nor JVC were licensing content for distribution on their tapes. Remember, you could record whatever you wanted on the tape; that was the point.
By home movies I mean replacing the super 8 format.
The design behind VHS made camcorders cheaper to make as well as enabled them to be used to play video. Betamax at the time had a more complicated solution where a separate player was needed and also initially a two stage solution where different tapes had to be used.
I don't think Beta really counts here. Probably the best example of Sony doing this is their Memory Stick, despite compact flash, sd and usb storage being readily available.
Yep. Also mini disc and DAT and a dozen others. I don’t know why people focused on my Betamax comment when the portable dictation device is more to the point.
Sure, but for 0.15-0.20 Euro per tab you can get quality tabs. I buy "Jar Platinum" tabs in bulk and I have never had any issues with the quality of the wash and I have been using them for like 10 years daily.
The tabs are ridiculously ineffective! I had issues for a year with my dishwasher until one of the handymen looking at it suggested to use the powder detergent for the compartments instead. Tried it once and it made a night-and-day difference. Never going back to those shitty tabs if I end up with a full-sized dishwasher in the future.
Interesting - we have a Bosch Dishwasher, always used Finish (the brand) tablets and everything comes out perfectly clean, every time. I joke that the multiple modes on the machine are just for show because it literally makes no difference if I pick the 50C eco wash or 70C intensive wash - everything comes out super clean anyway.
New Bosch here too. We stopped using the 30-minute quick cycle which blasts the dishes with a lot of water but doesn’t seem to get them clean, plus leaves a bitter soapy residue, bleh, and all the plastic is wet.
I couldn’t believe the eco cycle would take 3 hours, but it does a fantastic job. Also never thought I’d care about rinse aid, but now I’m obsessive about never running a cycle without it or having a spare bottle on hand.
This was an excellent post, and zero surprise the secret sauce can be replaced for pence/pennies on the pound/dollar.
Remember the ridiculous “fresh squeezed” juice bags? What’s next? DRM petrol/gasoline for hyper-performance (eco + power + range) auto fuel... but it’s regular gas with a couple drops of stuff added? Music player + headphone combo but you can only listen to Neil Young?
To all the European Bosch dishwasher users: does yours clean starch properly?
All my stainless steel pots and pans have a starch layer after cooking potatoes or rice. I've tried all kinds of detergents and am using Alec's "use some detergent for pre-wash" method.
If UK still counts as "European" - yeah. I put all my pans and pots in the dishwasher after cooking and they come out clean. The specific dishwasher is SMS67MW00G(Series 6 basically) + I use the Finish 0% tabs(I'm very sensitive to strong chemical smells, and those tabs don't leave any fregrance when you open the dishwasher).
BTW being from India and new to using dishwasher I got into the habit of rising the dishes before placing them in dishwasher. I recommend it. It’s a little extra work but the dishes come out sparkling clean every single time.
The whole point of a dishwasher though, is that you /don't/ need to do that. Strongly recommend watching Technology Connection's video on the subject; the takeaway is to put powder/tab in free for the first cycle, and powder/tab in the compartment for the main wash - first cycle takes away way more dirt that way.
We have a Miele dishwasher, and there's a difference for some things. The most recent example is some burnt on porridge after a bain-marie double pot had gotten forgotten about on the hob. The 55° wash didn't get that clean but a separate 70° wash did.
The last time I took an interest, "Quantum Finish with Powerball" seemed to be the sweet spot for performance vs. cost. That's decade old information, though.
We have a Bosch dishwasher and switched over to tablets (Finish brand) when I installed it after using the sample packs.
It’s hands-down the most effective dishwasher I’ve ever used; I never imagined I’d have feelings about or brand allegiance to a dishwasher, but Bosch earned it (and Finish is part of it, I guess).
Beware of their bottom end models. My house came with a Bosch and it does a decent job cleaning but it's very cheaply made. There's a weld that failed that used to hold the upper spray hose in place, the bottom rack falls out of the track most of the time... My Whirlpool at my previous home was far better built.
The cleanest wash I have even gotten in a dishwashing machine is using a small dab of liquid dish soap (like you would use to wash by hand) instead of "real" dishwasher soap. I don't use it regularly because others either think it is nuts or would use too much on the few nights I don't load the machine. I have up trying to justify it and just use tabs for political reasons but the fact is I got a great wash for way less product. Something to note: commercial dishwasher machines (food service) use liquid soap (automatically dispensed, of course).
Dishwashing fluids contain bleach and other harsh chemicals that can e.g. remove caked on tea residue from cups, something soap will not do without a lot of direct mechanical action.
As a tea drinker, unless you are very fastidious, handwashing generally doesn't remove everything and a layer can build up in cups which needs standing in bleach every so often to clear out.
If you're in the US, the Ultra Shine brand available at Dollar Tree works great for me and is the best price I could find. $.10 a pod. I don't have hard water and I run my dishwasher on the normal wash cycle. Normally don't load dishes with heavily caked on food particles.
> Proprietary cassettes for dishwashing machines? That's next level.
I was in the market for a new washing machine and noticed the Miele W1 machines now have something similar called "TwinDos". You can still add detergent the old-fashioned way but it had me wondering if this is a lead-up to the same business practices we see with Nespresso and inkjet cartridges.
I haven't done any actual research, but I got a feeling that Miele might have been bought up or some external entity got a say in how to optimize their business?
A 70yo family friend loves Miele. Never bought anything else for a dish washer, washing machine or drier. When his dish washer broke down two years ago - he proudly mentioned that it lasted him 22 years - he obviously bought Miele again.
Just half a year later it broke, he called a Miele technician, who said that this wouldn't be covered by warranty: You see, the manual explicitly states that you must run the machine with a higher-temperature program every so-and-so-ishth time, since the ECO program, which is selected by default every time you turn that goddamn thing on, doesn't heat the up the water enough, and all the gunk will add up in the machine's pipes over time, damaging it.
Now that's all fine and logical and I would have shrugged it off if this was an Ikea or no name brand from the local store, but a goddamn Miele that costs premium and is supposed to be a quality product? It's designed by German engineers which probably qualify as rocket scientists in every other country on this planet. And they cannot figure out how to add a counter to that thing so it would warn you if you used ECO mode too many times, or even better yet, make it just raise the temperature automatically even though you selected ECO?
Traditional German companies complain about not being able to compete with competition from eastern Europe and China, but then go ahead and pretty much offer the same quality by going to alibaba.com and ordering from there, with a Miele logo slapped on, while keeping the price the same as before. I can only see this being a short term solution, thanks to those old folks who have your brand image burned into their heads from thirty years ago, and will keep buying your stuff. The family friend from above? He got a discount of 50€ for buying a new Miele, which he happily accepted. qed.
Their washing machines and vacuum cleaners tend to last 30+ years in the experience of my parents, and my vacuum cleaner is over 15 years old at this point as well. Still more silent than most new ones, with great suction, and ergonomic.
That said... the thing about Eco mode is quite horrible indeed. There should be a self-cleaning program that runs as often as necessary and a corresponding reminder on the display.
This is not for you since you mention prices in Euros... I am always surprised when I read about bad experience with their products in the US. Especially the service seems to be some overpriced BS. Miele service is what regular electricians do in Germany.
My non-Miele clothes washing machine has the same stipulation, and you obviously wouldn't want it suddenly ruining your clothes or dishes with a higher temperature. But it does come with a counter and indicator light for the hot wash.
I don't think you can blame acquisition- it is the eternal cycle of brands that at some point they start frittering away their value instead of building it up.
With clothes I see the issue, but even the "auto/normal" program would've been fine according to the manual. I've never seen anything that said it's for the dishwasher but cannot do more than 40C, or whatever ECO does.
> it is the eternal cycle of brands that at some point they start frittering away their value instead of building it up.
Yeah, maybe I'm reading a bit too much in there, sometimes you just need the wrong guy in charge.
Funny, when our Miele dish washer broke the Miele repair person said it was because our water was too hot. It wasn't, our heating company confirmed the temp.
I would never have noticed if not for the bad rap of some products in the US, but yeah. I can well imagine how it goes: Oh, so the product is designed for service every X interval. So we can assume Y and optimize further for (price, comfort, weight, looks, power, mileage)...
> I don't get the advantage that you don't need to measure the detergent level, I have always used standard "all-in-one" tabs
Yeah this kind of "convenience" makes my BS meter beep. It's a non-problem, and I'm always suspicious of things like this because it's usually a sign they're trying to sneak something past you. (Or marketing to "the new generation" of domestic chores deficient people)
I mean, sure, I get that a dishwasher that needs no plumbing is a good idea, but at the same time, it's too few dishes (in my case) to be a big chore.
Ha, I thought that was going to be about a VHS head cleaner tape. Mine came with super-special head cleaning fluid in a tiny bottle. The bottle doesn't last long, and you then have to buy another bottle of super-special cleaning fluid at a super-expensive price.
One whiff of the cleaning fluid - hmm, this smells like alcohol! Alcohol works great in it.
It also reminds me of back in college in the 70s where there were many audiophiles in the dorm. They'd buy super-special vinyl record cleaning fluid, because nothing but the best for their vinyl records. I just used liquid dish detergent, which works perfectly.
I wonder what sort of new user features they'd deliver with a firmware update. It's a dishwasher!
Well I suppose they could add useless gimmicks like "Version 1.2 can now talk directly to Philips Hue bulbs so the dishwasher can blink a lightbulb to notify you"...
While it comes across as an obvious cash grab, the cassette is a compelling feature if you consider that it does 30 washes and has its own memory of how many each has left. While it is 2x-3x the cost of traditional dishwasher pods, they are focusing on convenience — all the way down to automatic delivery and return — which deserves to be recognized as innovation in end-to-end product design, service, fulfillment, and product lifecycle.
Does someone come into the house and change it out?
I spend a lot more time (still not much) loading and unloading the dishes than I spend acquiring and pouring powder, so I'm not sure what value I'm supposed to think this would provide.
You can have about the same experience with standard tablets though and none of the wasteful shipping and plastic cartridges. The dishwasher can be online (for those who want it) and report back the amount of washes (the backend can calculate the amount of washes per week to predict when you're going to run out) so that the manufacturer can send a new box in advance.
Make it last something like half year and I'm keen. Packaging in regular shops isn't particular great either. Hand soap and tooth paste being worst. The amount of packaging we throw with food is completely crazy.
Nicely done! Instead of a device to rewind/reset the counter in the EEPROM periodically, I wonder how hard it would be to modify or replace the EEPROM with something that simply ignores any modification to the data (essentially making it read-only). That way, the machine thinks it's decrementing the counter each time, but it always remains full. There'd be no need for a software reset.
I wonder how well it would work if someone bypassed the cartridge and just hooked the dishwasher directly to the two giant external jugs, like one of those external CMYK ink tank systems for fancy printers.
That's true. I suppose keeping track another way might offset the added annoyance of the "rewind" routine (attaching another device, connecting USB for power) when refilling the reservoirs. Personal preference I guess.
Replace PCB with your own one having MCU with buit-in EEPROM. Add a tiny push button (or just two copper pads), pressing/closing which will dischage a capacitor indicating "need to rewind" to an MCU. When counter is zero, you take off the cartridge, pour in all necessary chemicals, hold the button for a while and put it back into the machine.
In the ink cartridge industry those are known as "autoreset chips", and they do count down, but reset once removed from the printer (and presumably because that means you have noticed and now refilled the cartridge.)
Did you know you can just put detergent in the main compartiment? Why do you need such cassettes? Normally diswashers have something that dispenses it at a particular point in the cycle though. It's a simple mechanism, no complex electronics involved in that either.
You don't really want that though, because the water from the first cycle is washed away relatively quickly.
For good results, there's two releases of detergent, one for the pre wash and one for the main cycle. Detergent pods have kind of ruined the general dual compartment dishwashing ecosystem, though.
Pretty much lost me on the presentation; finally lost me on 'these things completely fly in the face of the way most dishwashers are designed to work'.
Uh, what? Must be a US thing, whatever the alternative is, because that's (those detergent, salt, perfume, whatever else tablets in a water-soluble wrapper are) all I've ever known. (UK.)
Yeah I'm in the UK and the tablets are all I've seen too. But it seems that e.g. a tablet plus a small amount of pre-wash power or similar may perform much better.
I suspect we're just much further along in this cycle compared to the US - where manufacturers have accepted that people like the tablets and that's that. There's still the opportunity to get better cleaning with this knowledge though.
It's worth noting there's no need for a pre-wash compartment. They do the exact same thing as if you just put the detergent into the "tub"
Worth checking your dishwasher though. Ditto, that's all I knew in UK (although I mostly hand-washed).
But even here in Aus now, there's a little compartment for pre-wash/rinse detergent... but nobody is aware of it that I've come across. That youtube video was revelationary!
I don't think UK dishwashers typically have such a compartment, but no need for it anyway - same result achieved by putting the equivalent detergent directly in the tub, though you lose the convenient dosing
Rinse aid? Yeah that goes next to the tablet under a little flap. Supermarkets sell it, usually blue.
Is that what the video was about? That tablets 'fly in the face of how dishwashers are supposed to work' because you also need rinse aid?
That's nonsense, how every dishwasher I've used has been supposed to work is you keep the salt topped up, the rinse aid topped up, and (supposedly optionally) use a tablet with each wash.
No, not rinse aid. The video discusses the way dishwashers work; most of them have two distinct cycles, one spraying off most of the loose food, draining the tub, and then another, which has its water recycled.
Most dishwashers are designed to have a little detergent in the first cycle and then most in the second cycle. The detergent from the first cycle becomes available to the water immediately, the detergent for the second cycle is the part that you put in the compartment.
If you want to know the details, watch the rest of the video. Or, if you don't want to do that, read your dish washer's manual. Maybe yours was designed without to forego detergent in the first cycle, because people have switched to pods anyway. Maybe it wasn't, and you can get a hygiene boost by using powder instead of pods.
If you use detergent pods, one of your cycles won't run with anything but water. If you put the detergent in the tub, the longer, second cycle runs without detergent. If you put the pod in the little compartment, the first cycle is much less effective than it can be.
Many machines are still designed for powder or gel detergents that you put into both compartments. You can get the same dishwasher performance by using two dishwasher tablets per run (one in the tub and one in the compartment) but that'll use up way more detergent than you actually need.
Rinse aid is for maintaining your dishwasher, that's something different entirely.
> Most dishwashers are designed to have a little detergent in the first cycle and then most in the second cycle. The detergent from the first cycle becomes available to the water immediately, the detergent for the second cycle is the part that you put in the compartment.
None that I've ever seen here.
> If you want to know the details, watch the rest of the video. Or, if you don't want to do that, read your dish washer's manual.
The video is.. I'm not its target audience. But I do actually have the manual: its 'programme phases' are 'pre-wash', 'wash' (different temperatures depending on setting), rinse, and dry. The detergent tablet is dispensed in the 'wash' phase. There's nowhere to put any to be dispensed in the 'pre-wash' phase. So, instead of 'some then most', it's 'none then all'. I've never known one work differently.
> Many machines are still designed for powder or gel detergents that you put into both compartments.
Right, again, not here: I don't have and have never seen one with two detergent compartments.
I still don't think tablets 'fly in the face of how the machine's supposed to work', there should just be big & little detergent tablets for markets with big & little detergent compartments.
Everywhere else with single compartments, a single tablet works fine, is exactly how the machine's designed to work, and they often even have a 'recommended brand' (for whatever commission).
> There's nowhere to put any to be dispensed in the 'pre-wash' phase.
Some comments here have mentioned that one can put it into the main compartment of the machine. Just squirt it in on the floor, if I understood correctly.
I mean.. sure. But it's definitely not 'designed to work' that way, and to be clear what I was objecting to was the tablets being described as 'flying in the face of the way [the dishwashers are] designed to work'.
Yeah I thought that was probably the case (just predates at least my memory) - but surely putting powder/liquid directly in vs contained in a water-soluble capsule is.. the same, not 'flying in the face' of how it works?
(For what it's worth, I still put liquid in the top of my washing machine! Tablets only seemed to appear for washing machines ~10y ago, at least that I was aware of, and still seem way more expensive /wash.)
> putting powder/liquid directly in vs contained in a water-soluble capsule is.. the same
Assuming you mean putting it directly in the "tub" versus in the compartment, no that's not true.
The initial fill - which will dissolve anything put directly into the tub - drains fairly quickly. The detergent in the compartment is only released after this point.
If there's nothing in the compartment, there won't be any detergent being used for the bulk of the washing - so regardless of form factor, it's important to use that.
But in addition - rather than instead, putting a small amount of powder in the tub will make the initial rinsing much more effective.
That was the aside about Clothes Washing Machines.
I believe US (clothes) washing machines are usually top-loaders? And stored somewhere else, like a basement or garage?
In the UK most washing machines are front loaders, usually in the kitchen (large houses have a separate utility). There's a draw on the top to put various powders, but I don't remember ever using it and I've been washing clothes since the 90s.
I think you're talking about washing machines (as in clothes)? The part of my comment you quoted (all except the parenthetical, matching the one I replied to) was about dishwashers.
Good point though. A lot of people who use liquid (as opposed to a pod thing) put it in the drum anyway, in a reusable container that comes with some brands. I used to, until I bought a brand that didn't come with one of those on the lid; put it in 'that old-fashioned drawer', and wondered why I hadn't always.
I started seeing them in supermarkets (in the UK) ~5 years ago; actually I think I only noticed them after a colleague mentioned using them, so maybe that's not accurate at all.
I've never used them though, they seem to solve a problem that barely exists, and at quite a premium.
I don't even have a pre-wash compartment on my (not cheap) EU dishwasher. There is just a place for the tablet and then rinse aid (which I never used). And always get good results with quality tablets.
I started using rinse aid this past year and I was pleasantly surprised how it removed nearly all streaks from my glassware. Thankfully the wash cycle only uses a minuscule amount of rinse aid, so a large container lasts me almost a year.
No matter what product you make, it seems that it's impossible to earn money without using unethical proprietary practices. I guess the brand will argue that the products are "hard to find" and that it requires "precise refilling".
And apparently it's even true for such crazy good home products that really don't get enough visibility.
I mean it's the first time I discover this washing machine, and I want one. It's almost like this hacking article was just designed as a disguised advertisement for this washing machine.
I don't think the existence of this product means it's impossible to earn money without using unethical proprietary practices. It just means that this company is yet another one where honestly selling a product one time for the customer's money is not enough. The goal, more and more often, is to lock the customer into a scheme where they will be milked monthly for even more money. It's just too bad these schemes are spreading into every product category. And since they are often disguised as normal products, it is getting easier and easier to accidentally get roped into one of these without realizing it.
The thing is that it is impossible to compete with a chinese made appliance just by selling a product that will last. You have to sell it for the price significantly lower in hope to return investment by selling locked cartriges. That is where such perverted business schemes come from. The more we allow chinesium to penetrate to our homes, the less room we left for other better products to get developed and find their way to the market.
It's absolutely possible to earn money by solving a real problem. It only becomes impossible when there is no real problem to solve and you're intentionally creating a problem.
Dishwashers are a solved problem and have been for decades. If you search hard enough you can find lower-profile models that solve the "size" problem this current product is trying to address.
I'm not sure whether this company is profitable. Most likely they aren't and the proprietary cartridge system is a way to lock people in for future profits and potentially fishing for VC funding or an acquisition by a bigger unethical company happy to milk this thing out until it collapses.
Their whole eco-friendly concept (pseudo - because shipping the cartridges is anything but) is to appeal to environment freaks with more money than common sense and/or fish for eco-related awards or government grants (just like Solar Roadways).
Selling the base product at a loss to make it up in accessory/operational purchases is as old as razors and razor blades. My favorite example was I think it was one of the early xboxes was being sold for less than the cost of the hardware, expecting to make up the difference in licensing on game sales. Well, a bunch of college CS labs realized the cost advantage, starting buying them in bulk, loaded linux onto them, and used them as cheap GPU clusters.
I see this model as a financing hack... the reason you can buy an HP printer for like $40 isn't because the hardware costs $40, it's because you're effectively paying interest on an invisible loan every time you buy inkjet cartridges. The longer the manufacturer has you buying cartridges, the bigger return on their initial (invisible) loan.
What makes this model shitty to the consumer is there's no cap on the "interest". The "loan" ends once the plastic gear somewhere deep inside the machine breaks and your customer needs to get a new one. Then you're back to competing against everyone else offering the same invisible loans on the Best Buy shelf. If you're lucky, the consumer doesn't see the stockholm syndrome they got themselves into last time and they choose your product again because it's familiar.
It's not helpful to call this an "unethical proprietary practice". It's more helpful to see this as the useful "low teaser rate" financial hack it is, then try to think up new financial models that might be a bit more honest (while still being sufficiently profitable that it makes business-sense to switch).
> My favorite example was I think it was one of the early xboxes was being sold for less than the cost of the hardware, expecting to make up the difference in licensing on game sales.
This is still common practice: Sony and Microsoft generally either sell their consoles to break even or at a loss. The only difference between then and now is that they've made it much harder to run alternate operating systems. As far as I'm aware, Nintendo is the only console manufacturer that actually tries to profit off of hardware sales.
I think many product designers try to replicate the success of printer cartridges. I try to avoid buying any device that limits the input or supply especially those that require a cartridge.
It's a clear method to milk consumers and they can hardly justify the benefit in most cases.
I even don't buy the idea of capsule coffee machines. I like those that give you the option to use pads, but not those that only accept capsule. The environment impact is one reason, but I also want the freedom of choosing the supply and the having control on the running cost.
> It's a clear method to milk consumers and they can hardly justify the benefit in most cases.
For a second there, before I'd fully parsed your sentence, I read "milk consumers" as "consumers of milk", and all kind of wild ideas started running through my head: "What, they're going to implement the cartridge scam with MILK?!? How's that going to work -- the carton is connected to the Internet, sends a notification somewhere every time I open it, and I get billed according to the number of times, or...?" Then I realized "milk" was a verb here. Whew!
OK, so call me paranoid... But still: I think the fact that the idea even occurred to me says something not only about me, but about the current state of the world.
The Bob Dishwasher is an interesting concept. Looking at their website it looks like it would fit 6 plates, 6 cups and a set of utensils. What’s the point of this? If you’re cooking for 6, you would have pots and pans which would have to be hand washed. Is 6 more plates and cups worth going through the effort of loading and turning on a dishwasher? Alternatively, I suppose it is more water efficient..
I would have loved something like that when I was a student and/or when I was single.
I used to have breakfast on the way, lunch at the Uni/work, and a small dinner. 6 plates is therefore close to what I'd use in a week. It's also close to what I'd use nowadays if I weren't still in home office. And while I do have enough room now for a full-sized dishwasher, that wasn't always the case.
His page links to a YouTube review of the Bob where the reviewer claims that it gets things cleaner than it's possible to do by hand, especially irregularly shaped items like electric grill parts. And yes, the dishwasher uses at most 3L, while he estimated sink washing used 10L, not including the 1 min. of running water wasted waiting for the hot water to arrive.
Yes, that was my first impression with dishwasher many years ago. It is plain impossible to achieve this quality with hand washing. Especially for glassware.
I've been in my current place for about 5 years and have never used the dishwasher. Sink works fine and is almost instant if you wash everything immediately.
Personally I think the biggest argument for a dishwasher is that stuff is not in-sight anymore.
They also are more efficient, water wise. Our dishwasher uses 8 liters per wash. If I fill our sink with 8 liters, it barely covers anything. Dish washers use more detergent though, this is why I switched to powder which can be dosed better.
Great post! But so many poor posts about dishwashers in the thread. Ask anyone who services dishwashers (well outside the US at least) and they'll tell you two things:
1) Don't rinse first but if you do only use cold water. I have no idea why on earth dishwashers are connected to hot water in the US as this will make the first rinse work very poorly indeed. It is supposed to be cold to removed starches and dairy products...
2) Tabs are a no go but if you insist it should be soap only (not those 3-in-1 etc.) and should be broken in half. It will gunk up the machine in the long run otherwise.
I'd bet that dishwashers would need to be serviced or replaced half as often on average if everyone did this.
Where? The US? OP is right about the cold water, here in Sweden dishwashers are only connected to cold water and often say in the manual that they take nothing but cold water.
Yes it's a strange idea in the US that water should be preheated. Using cold water first is a lot more effective at removing things like dairy and eggs for example. It's way more environmentally friendly to use cold water and let the dishwasher heat it to the correct temperature especially since the first rinse is short so the heated water will just be pumped out again pretty fast.
There's too much soap in each tab (to sell more tabs). They also often include things that a dishwasher do need but not where the tab goes. For example some have salt in them (which doesn't belong in the main compartment but in the water softener).
That Bob is actually a nice piece of tech, well thought off.
A bit pricey, though. I like that ultraviolet disinfects option.
I am currently living alone, so my 2/3 size (60cm wide) dishwasher stays for days in rinse/wait mode, until it gets close to full to do an actual washing. It is not very good for tableware.
A friend of mine got a cheap chinese countertop dishwasher with form-factor of Bob, it is not that fancy, but still got color LEDs inside) She is totally happy with it, except small bits like draining used water into bucket with a hose. I can see Bob's designers didn't solve that too.
> "Over a year of daily washes, it would have cost £174 ($242) in Bob cassettes alone!"
I was particularly struck by the this comment. So, the machine is small enough that he can have it as a countertop appliance, but it is also small enough that it gets fill with one day's worth of dishes and needs to be run? So it's a high price to pay for diswashing, especially when it seems the machine is not really doing a lot. It seems like it would be better to just wash the dishes yourself.
All cool and good, but I'd have stopped at step 1: Considering buying a dish washer with DRMed detergent. Sorry, but rewarding people with such outrageous proposals with a purchase is morally questionable in itself.
You would think that, but I've been in the market for one of these things and this one looks to be about US$100 above the median price. Pay more and become a recurring revenue stream, sounds great!
To be fair, a large section of population does not see it that way, nor is the advertisement fully truthful. Usually they are advertised as pods that cost such and such for such and such cycles. And then you have offers and combos, etc to market the pods.
Somewhere in some tiny text somewhere, it says you are prohibited from using other similar pods.
>Credit where credit's due, Daan Tech didn't completely lock down the machine with Bob cassettes. Once empty, you can leave it there and add detergents manually.
Original hacker did say that he's never allowed the thing an actual internet connection, though, and it's still working just fine. So clearly the internet connectivity is not a hard requirement. I wonder what it does send back to the manufacturer, though...
Anybody who owns one up for dumping the contents of their dishwasher's conversation with Mom?
OP still rewarded the company. Through work I'm somewhat connected to a big appliance maker and whenever they do the big presentations on their Vision For The Future it's all IoT. That every little shit in your home from your blender to your dishwasher to your drill will be internet connected and have software updates and upgrades and tracked servicing and tamper proofing and usage statistics and paid feature unlocking and upselling and better market segmentation etc.
They'll extort our very last penny we can shed and we will be happy about it and march into this future willingly.
I think, for this particular machine, the internet connection is for sending alerts for when new pods are required.
However, I still remember how scarily fast did TV manufacturers go from "the internet is for a richer experience" to "all your data are belong to us". And the worst part is no one, not even regulators flinched a muscle while this data grabbed happened before everyone's eyes.
I have mine connected to a wifi power meter and the data is logged in InfluxDB and monitored by Grafana, so I get an email and XMPP notification when the dishes are done.
Then the same for the washing machine, and there it is super useful since the machine isn't inside the apartment, but in the washroom, and it is a real problem if I forget the clothes.
Honestly it's a blessing if your washing machine let's you know that the clothes are ready to be taken out. Since I started with this around 4 years ago, I've never forgotten the clothes in it. Also, it's 1-3 notifications a week.
Then again, I also get notifications multiple times a day when the backups of the servers finished successfully or failed, so it appears that I'm ok with receiving notifications (from machines). Or when devices have connected to the wifi.
Each apartment has his own washing machine in the communal washroom, so I have the cable plugged into the power meter and every time I need to wash I plug the power meter into the wall socket.
I'm considering replacing it with an ESP32 and wrap a wire around the cable which should then detect if current is flowing, but I lack a bit of motivation since the current setup is working.
From the picture, it looks like I2C to SPI (or similar) and then SPI to USB virtual serial port. Not sure why they didn't just go straight to USB with an I2C-USB adapter. Perhaps they didn't have one. Anyway, from there it's just write a quick program to read/write the 24C02 through the virtual serial port and Bob's your uncle, as it were.
It’s just an I2C EEPROM. You could read and write it with ~50 lines of code on an Arduino (or ESP32 or STM Bluepill or any other microcontroller dev board).
The ROI for the effort probably wasn’t that great. But I can respect the obsession for the hack all the same. Sometimes it’s not about the dollars and cents, and if you let it be a hobby versus work that helps make it worth it.
> What's more, the 5L detergent can last well over 3 years of daily wash, while the rinse aid can last almost 12 years! Over those time you would have spent £2088 on Bob cassettes, and who knows if they will even be around then.
They certainly will be if even a small percent of their customers buy into their ridiculous subscription model. Look at those sweet, sweet margins!
The entrepreneur in me loves this idea. They are able to turn dishwashers into a subscription model.
I love the reverse engineering even more. A really step by step process, very well written. However I don't understand this specific step here -
"So my plan now is to read what's inside the EEPROM. It seemed that a special connector is needed, but after rummaging around the parts bin, I found that it fits into a USB-A female socket just fine! Although I had to insulate the metal case so it won't short on the PCB contacts."
Can anyone that understands explain how the EEPROM board can be plugged into a USB socket? Are they similar or is there some overlap? Once its inserted do I use USB protocol to read the data? This is the most interesting part of the whole thing for me. Wish the author explained this more, even if in a separate blog.
It looks like the connector just happens to fit so it's only being used to make the electrical connection. The 4 pins are actually power, ground and I2C data and clock.
The EEPROM board uses pads on its PCB to create an "edge connector" with 8 pads. Apparently only 4 pads are needed, and presumably there are twice as many for redundancy. Physically, the PCB happens to fit into a USB socket with close enough spacing to make good contact. This isn't surprising, because it's a very common trick to make USB plugs out of PCBs.
Electrically, it's not USB though. It's two pins for power, and two for I2C clock and data. It might happen to have the same voltage and pin mapping for power as USB, though, so plugging in to a USB port on a computer might not blow anything up. A microcontroller with a USB host port might even be able to bit-bang I2C over the appropriate pins, but that would be rather clever...
As others have said, it's not speaking USB - it just happens to be the same shape. But it's probably not a coincidence that it's compatible with a USB socket. In this case the designer wanted a socket that had 4 pins and could be hotswapped fairly regularly. USB sockets satisfy those criteria, are cheap and are easily available. It's pretty common to find standard connectors re-used for other purposes in the embedded world (I've found SATA connectors in some extremely strange places), so it wouldn't surprise me if tearing down this dishwasher did reveal an actual USB socket.
Dammit, there's one tech company using my first name, and they mess it up with a harebrained DRM scheme for soap!?
Maybe I should get out of tech. At least "Daan carpentry" won't come up with results that make me instinctively close the tab...
Yep. I purchased some new tablets yesterday (I'd say the most popular ones available) and they were abou 0.12c (€) per tablet. So assuming usage every day of the year (not uncommon in our household) that's €43.80 a year.
Great article.
I truly wish that companies that base their business model on environment destroying convenience would just die. But people love their convenience unfortunately.
Investors don't want to invest in only HW. They want their MRR. This is all just going to get worse. We'll start seeing everything coming with built in cellular soon.
Luckily thats never gonna happen in Germany. At least not with a mandatory connection. The cellular coverage is way to bad for that. My parents live in a smaller village. The Dishwasher would have to stand on the upper balcony to get a network connection.
The cell modems I've worked with are able to maintain a connection to the network even with a terminating resistor in place of an antenna, and that is from the middle of a cattle ranch 8 miles from the tower. You basically need to go full faraday cage...
Of course, in order to hack one of these Ter Bebbies, you have to buy one. Either way, Deputy Daan gets ya.
"Dosing can be tricky..." So can holding onto your sanity in today's consumer world. After generations of TV advertising, reason is supposed to be the consolation prize.
I wonder how environment friendly that tiny dish washing machine and its detergent is.
MAybe it can save some water instead of trivial manual washing, but how pollutant is that waste water?
Isn't it better to manually wash those 2 to 6 dishes, 1 to 3 glasses and maybe 1 pan?
> An eagle-eyed user flopp pointed out the value at 0xa1 is calculated as Washes left XOR 0x50, thanks! Not sure why they did it like this, but anyway!
Hilarious. Sounds like somebody's manager overheard a conversation about one-time pads on the subway
I wish more appliances would would have some sort of refillable cartridges or containers (not DRM'd obviously). I saw some Japanese laundry washers have large containers for detergent.
With that, the total cost per wash is:
0.62p + 0.018p = 0.638p, or 0.87 US cent!
We know from earlier that Bob Cassettes costs 48p (67c) per wash.
Therefore, refilling it yourself is more than 75 times cheaper, resulting in a massive 98.7% cost saving compared to buying new!
I bought a detergentless ozone washer this last year. It works pretty well most of the time for general washing unless you have something really heavy on your clothes like oil
No? Water is a "chemical". The contents of your digestive tract would probably sound scary to most people as well (hydrochloric acid in the stomach, chenodeoxycholic acid in the intestine, among others).
Not really. The surfactants/detergents get removed during the rinse cycle. The concentrations are also relatively low. Dishwashers often have a "rinse only" cycle so if this is a concern for you, run one of those after the main cycle.
Running a second rinse cycle will still put you ahead so far as water consumption, because dishwashers use much less water than hand-washing.
I don't think that's a protective measure, to me it just looks like a convenient way of tracking the liquid level in the cartridge. I don't think that a hack like this is harming the company or cuts into their revenue - most people wouldn't bother resetting these thing to refill them manually - the labor investment probably isn't worth it. Their target audience would pay for convenience, they already do by opting for cartridges instead of manual addition.
It would have never come into my mind that this is something that even exists.
What's with the tabs you put into the little chamber, or which I'm just dropping into the cutlery holder since the chamber lid broke of. Aren't they compatible or what?
----
For their website:
Is the use of a Bob cassette mandatory?
No.
However, to ensure optimal washing quality and higher Bob life durability we recommend using the Bob cassette.
Can I refill my Bob cassette myself?
No.
We use a highly concentrated detergent formula which is not publicly available for sale.
So we have set up a way to collect used cassettes, clean them and refill them in our factory.
This allows us to offer you an optimal washing quality with a zero waste solution!
Are you aware that if your dishwasher has a pre wash cycle before the main wash cycle; then your detergent will be wasted. ?
A pre wash cycle is common in european dishwashers.
Pre-Wash cycle ("Vorspühlen") is an additional button which would need to be in a depressed state for this short cycle to be additionally executed and fully exchange the water, but I never use it. I think the main cycle also does refresh a certain percentage of its water, I'm not sure about it. But just using one tab is not enough.
I buy the cheap ones from Aldi which are € 0.04 a piece. I use the machine 1.5 times a week, so that extra tab is ~ €1.40 a year.
Bob looks really cool. I'd 100% buy one and use the "DRM" detergent capsules until they went out of business, just to support them. $2K over 12 years is not enough to bother.
It turns out the water intake valve solenoid was jammed or gummed up somehow, as applying 120V to it directly had no effect. I went to find an OE replacement online only to find that they are $580, sold by only 2 places, and sold out. You need to be a certified Miele technician to buy them.
Given I knew the specifications from the model number and the printing on the solenoid itself wrt voltage and flow rate, I bought the cheapest replacement I could find on Amazon, spliced the wires into the existing harness and boom, it worked perfectly.
One thing I didn’t understand was why there were so many different inlet valves that all did the same thing. There were 120V AC and 12V DC versions but other than that the only difference was the water connector/dongle/bracket. It seemed absurd there would be so many but the reality is that actual solenoid is super generic and should only cost $20 and should be made to fit them all. Of course nobody really repairs things these days but I think this is the reason why. Even when the part could easily be standardized and replaced/repaired like a light bulb, companies want you to buy a whole new one.