I am so upset by what I am reading and what I have experienced over the last 12 years .. I am in the process of two major kitchen remodels and have 6 more to complete before I have them all done. Based on what I am reading here and on the internet blogs, I have ended up unwilling to order ANY new appliances. Over the last 12 years the only things I have purchased that have had great customer service are my Jura Capressa coffee makers and my Tempurpedic mattressses. All other purchases have been major headaches or outright nightmares. I am at the point that buying anything at all literally makes me sick at my stomach (and this is not just because I am a guy who does not enjoy shoppping in general). I have noticed that I have become openly hostile to sales people in general. With very few exceptions, I have never met a "sales" person who had even the scant ethics of even a democrat politician. The fact that I am now expected to buy appliances from one of these ingenuine sociopathic sales types is so upsetting that I have my two kitchen remodels on hold. I have great inset all wood custom cabinets with great custom granite counters ... and no appliances. Friends of mine in CA hate their Miele, friends in Henderson Nevada hate their Subzero and Dacor, friends in NY hate their Monogram, friends in Naples Florida hate their AGA and Viking, friends in the Netherlands hate their Miele, friends in Carmel Indiana hate their Traulson and Miele, friends in Arizona hate their Kitchen Aid ... and it goes on and on with nightmare after nightmare of new appliances defective out-of-the-box, incompetent installers, unethical distributors, sales people that grab the big commissions and then can't even return follow up calls, manufacturers that don't honor their warranty committments or try to stong arm the very customers that their business should be treating with dignity and integrity. To add insult to injury, many regional better business bureaus rate these retailers and businesses A+. No wonder consumers have stopped purchasing ... it is not the recession that has stopped people from making major purchases, but, rather, the expectation that after-purchase headaches will take months and months to resolve with stress levels higher than paying for your childrens' college educations. Short of having an attorney produce a contract that the appliance supplier has to sign and be held to legally, does anyone out there have any other magic process. A process that assures the customer won't be setting themselves up for an extremely stressful experience with underpaid customer disservice departments trained by the Insurance claims industry to intimidate and wear down the customer to a point of having to just give up? signed - a potential appliance customer in limbo

I had a Miele Novotronic for 8 years and it worked great when we replaced it purely based on looks (dh wanted stainless). Now we have the Miele Crystal and it is even more wonderful (and looks awesome too). I ADORE how quiet our Mieles have been and that is very very important to me as we have an open concept kitchen and my "office" is the dining table near the dishwasher. Programming - read the manual...it is not rocket science, just takes a little fiddling. You do it once then it's done. Salt - find out whether you even need it. We don't due to soft domestic water supply and we have programmed our dishwasher accordingly. Rinse Aid - dishwasher works fine without it, but dishes don't dry as well. With our new dishwasher I have the rinse aid setting programmed to the lowest setting and will work up until I am satisfied with the drying. You can disable the rinse aid indicator/setting if your tabs include rinse aid - mine don't. I think having separate rinse aid makes sense so you can calibrate it. Tabs - Method Smarty tabs are easy to cut in half, but require a little pressure. Some of the "eco" tabs available to me in supermarkets and specialty food stores seem like they have less soap to begin with so they probably don't need to be cut in half. None of these have rinse aid built in. All of these tabs are cheap and readily available to me. Rinsing/scraping - I doubt rinsing will cause damage to normal dishes, but I never rinse, only scrape. The Miele manual specifically says that rinsing is not necessary. Stuff I put in the dishwasher - EVERYTHING! Even the worst pots and baking pans go in the dishwasher. Occasionally something doesn't come off 100%, in which case a 10 second scrub with a brush finishes the job. 3rd tray - LOVE Express - mine is 35 min

"claimed that it came with a manufacturers warranty" sellers can claim anything. it's called a manufacturer's warranty , and the contract is with the manufacturer - a third party cannot alter the contract without the manuf. written consent which will never happen. storm - let me try and clarify the winds for you. I don't think moja's problem quite meets the vote the free market I was/am talking about. He should not have bought a product from Miele in the first place. By telling people about this he brings the debate forward and can shape the market if he convinces enough people to to not buy Miele gear because they do this or that. Look at the aforementioned Maytag. They used to make superior washers, and no they don't really exist anymore. Enough people vote with their wallets by nit buying their washers because they turned to crap. Re: the Gaggenau / Miele fatherland thing. Gaggenau is highline- high quality - high price everywhere. Miele USA is really a different business than Miele Germany and what I'm saying is they have chosen to position themselves here as ONLY a high quality make. They don't import even half of their offerings to this market, and like I've mentioned to dodge before they are not simply putting a NA plug on their units, shipping them here and jacking up the price over the German/Euro markets. If a product is available both places the prices are very similar after currency variables are considered. Miele simply doesn't offer mid to entry products here. Because they offer a more broad range in Europe their rep. is slightly lower simply because of exclusivity. Benz does the same thing here. You couldn't get a SMART here until they figured out how to distance that brand from MBenz so as not to dilute the mark. They did the same thing with their vans via Freightliner and Dodge. I take exception at your assertion that I bow to the marketing chants or the winds of corp. top floors. I make no bones about being a Miele fan. But I also rec. lots of other makes. It's all dependent on the customer's need/wants. What I really have a problem with is what's moja's complaining about: I tried to save a few bucks by not buying through an authorized distribution channel and now the manuf. won't help me free of charge. The (my) problem is not that he's complaining per se, but that he seems to feel he has no responsibility in this and that it's totally Miele's fault because they are bad or that the system is bad because big government has allowed companies to set prices for their own products and say where they are sold by upholding a decades old practice. My problem with him over the health care thing is his math. Sure an office visit for the flu is cheaper in Canada than walking into the ER here in the USA. No one will rally debate this. ER's are set up for trauma and critical care and that care is very expensive to deliver. My tummy hurts or I have a cough don't really qualify but the public doesn't really feel like waiting because they are soft and or lazy. I saw it in the UK as I worked in an ER for 8 months. Care was no cost out of pocket and people would still come to the ER for sore knees, headaches, whatever instead of making an appointment with their family doctor which was also no cost, simply because they's have to wait several weeks to see him. They wait at the ER too sometimes a whole day while serious stuff like guys that got shot with a nail gun, or wrecked a motorcycle, or broke they arm playing soccer were attended to. Anyway the overall total cost of socialized system is more than a private one and the numbers bear that out. Oh and the CDC doesn't really keep that info, or didn't . It's not in their pervue. If they do now, please point me to the hard data.

I wanted to add that on the left side of the top rack, I removed the little fold down shelf-thingies along with the bracket that held them. My glasses fit better now, but barely. Our coffee mugs slide off, as do my glass measuring cups. It really seems to be designed for espresso cups, and those little drinking glasses you see in Europe. Anything with a larger diameter just does not fit/stay in place. If I could still buy the old rack and have it work with the redesigned water "pipe" I'd do it. If you look in the manual at the loading instructions, they show two layers of little coffee cups on the left side. No one I know uses those very often. I can't even see any of my European relatives using more than one or two a day. Maybe they're targetting people who own that built in coffee maker. DH hypothesizes that they made the areas where you put the cups steeper so that water would run off the tops better. Most of my cups and glasses are pretty flat on the bottom, so I don't know if it does better on that count vs. the old one. As you can tell, the DW is a hot topic over here. LOL. We keep trying to figure out what drove them to select such a poor design. I have to say of all the appliances I purchased for my new kitchen, the DW is the one I like least, whereas in our old house the Miele DW was one of the top two (other being Wolf ovens.) I have multiple complaints, most having to do with the racks. (The other is the control panel and having to click OK so often - can't figure that one out either.)