Hi Guys! Livebetter, what happened at the appliance show? Did your dealer have any news for you? I am looking forward to hearing what you find out. I know there is a learning curve with any new appliance, so I am not going to let this spoil my fun and pleasure with these machines. Miele is a great product with many happy users, and I plan to be one of them. I can't figure out how to get the machine to do a cool water rinse, but I don't think the hot and cold are reversed. I checked and I think it is correct. I will do a wash with a pre-treat or soak to verify soon (these always start with cold, correct?). I have done some loads where I reduced the spin, but it seems that it should work well at whatever spin is already programmed for the cycle I select. I am not overloading the dryer. It must have something to do with the warm water rinse and fabric type. I was somewhat successful in reducing wrinkles when I did a fluff cycle after the initial one, but again, it shouldn't be necessary. It must be operator error. The 3 Tbs of Persil produced almost no noticeable sudsing, but the vaksa suds were huge! I used 50 ml, and even tho I added and extra rinse, there were still suds. Bummer! I'm going to have to figure that one out, too. Maybe not enough clothing (it was a smaller load). I will try the wrinkle free option too, and see what happens.

The word Prewash says it all. Prewash ÃÂ is pretty self explanatory versus Heavy Soil. In this case I think Miele (in their efforts to make their product easy to use/understand) meant to sub-label the Prewash button with Heavy Soil to make sense out of this wash option and the Heavy Soil detergent compartment (which is still labeled Heavy Soil), and someone in their development team accidentally sub-labeled the Extended button instead. ÃÂ I was playing around with my friends' W4842 and tested the Prewash button and it does exactly that - a prewash that takes the detergent from the Heavy Soil detergent compartment.ÃÂ Not a major issue but I will probably wait until Miele prints their control panels correctly before I hunker down the big bucks. Suppose it is my retentiveness. Now if only Miele would relabel "Sensitive" to "Extra Rinse."

@ suburbanmd Asko should be applauded for taking a stand and providing some sort of guidelines. They should also be applauded for offering dosing instructions that are significantly lower than the detergent manufacturers recommend, which probably caught them heat from the detergent industry. The same instructions appeared in the manual of my 8 year old Asko, long before there were any 2x or 3x concentrated detergents. Using your logic, detergent manufacturers' recommendations also are useless because they don't say what size load they had in mind, or the soiling level, or the hardness of your water, or even how much water is being used. Detergent manufacturers tend to recommend what works best for the majority of their customers. They have no idea what size or type of machine you are using, or how much you are washing. Given the oversudsing issues people are experiencing, don't you think that Asko's recommendations - which may be conservative - are a better starting point than what's on the detergent box or bottle? I certainly do. I also think this is a good time to call out Miele for their complete lack of discussion regarding water hardness, detergent dosing, etc. At least Asko tries to educate its customer, but Miele takes the "dumb and dumber" approach.

Many thanks mrb and sshrivastava for your staying power on this thread! I apologize for the delay in my update: I have, like many others, been suffering from the flu. Well, at this point, let me take back my praise of Miele tech support...I am now actually pretty ticked off with them about the situation. Though I might as well chill out...it is only a washing machine. So my local tech (who is a tech like mentioned on another thread here, contracted by Miele, not actually Miele corporate) came out on Wednesday and shot in the new board. I told him that Miele was sending out a senior tech the next day to take data from the machine and asked that he leave the old board with me since they wanted it back at HQ. He is a very nice fellow and was fine with that. Needless to say, no big surprise, as predicted here, the new board is actually exactly the same as the old board on the delicates cycle...... After my local tech left I called and left a message with Miele to apprise them of the situation and giving them a heads up because my tech implied that perhaps their factory tech could reprogram the machine in the field. I was hoping the senior tech, if he knew ahead, would then be able to change the behavior of the delicates program. Very late in the day I got a voicemail message from the person at Miele who had been handling this, with all kinds of cover your behind language, saying that the service call from the central tech was now cancelled. They had now gone ahead with testing of the machine at Miele and their machine is doing the same thing.....filling on cold and no heater for delicates... DUH!!!!! I was furious. I had expressly told them, after numerous phone calls, waiting on hold, being told it was user error etc., that I did not want to rip my machine open unless it was clear that the program was not acting correctly. They swore up and down it should be heating on that cycle. I guess it is as everyone is saying...Miele tech support is now reading from the manual/script, and treats customers as idiots. The only reason I was talked into going ahead with the board replacement was that they promised this senior tech was coming by and i felt like I had their attention and that would lead to an opening of discussions to get this resolved. So yesterday I called Miele and got the person I had been dealing with. I let him know that I was extremely unhappy, especially with the fact that they pulled the service call from me at the last moment and that I had been telling them for over a month exactly what the machine was doing. Why noone could be bothered to verify it before now is completely ridiculous. I am now told that the issue has been turned over to the engineering dept. I have demanded that a supervisor or someone senior call me because I still do want to follow this up. However, since they are now muttering rubbish about this being "by design"...which is essentially a copout since it is very clear from the manual that the cycle should be capabable of a warm wash at least...I doubt it will go any further. And of course they are only saying this now after a month of swearing up and down that the machine should be giving a warm wash and using the heater.. @sshrivastava: I take your point about Miele COLD. I should clarify, on handwash, wool and delicates, the machine takes in ONLY from the COLD valve. Therefore, the COLD fill for those cycles is not 86 deg but whatever temp your incoming cold water supply is. Right now it is around 10C in Buffalo so my washing is ridiculously cold. On this point, pretty much if Miele wants to fix this cycle they would have to allow the machine to fill on a MIX of hot and cold, if ever to achieve 40C. The delicates cycle uses a LOT of water, which is its great appeal, and there is no other cycle like it on the machine. The 110V heater would definitely not be able to get that much water up to 40C in the wash time allotted for the cycle. My suspicion is that the delicates cycle on Miele has always been designed to fill only from the cold water valve, but with the old 220V heaters it was not a problem. I suspect that something was changed in the programming when Miele went to the 110V machines in the US. In any case, I told them right out it was not by DESIGN, but clearly a MISTAKE. So now I think I need to chill out about this. I have absolutely no intention of releasing my spare control board so at least I have that in reserve if I ever need it. I the mean while I think I have found that the dress shirts program could be used in lieu of delicates. The wash action is not quite so gently and the water level not as good. However it does use the heater. Therefore, as the machine fllls I can dump in a few extra pitchers of warm water manually down the hatch and let the heater take it from there....it is better than nothing. Doing this with the actual delicates cycle itself is useless I have found because the heater doest not engage at all. Therefore even dumping hot water straight from my faucet (over 55C water) down the hatch results in a pretty cold wash after you take into account heat loss due to the mass of the drum and the wash time. So I think the bottom line is that there are at least two useless cycles on this machine: Normal (no heater) and Delicates (cold only). I also think wool is pretty much useless in that WARM is not achieved by the heater in the cycle time and that cycle does not allow the extended option. @MRB: Thanks for your info about the gentle cycle. Here is what my service manual says: 2.2.2 Gentle Cycle Setting for gentle cycle. Selecting the gentle cycle reduces the drum movement. Fabrics are washed gently. For lightly soiled laundry. It does not say anything about which cycle it affects. So far as I can tell it is not affecting my delicates cycle. However, I am leaving it engaged because all the cycles look aggressive enough to me, even with it enabled. I would not be surprised if it is not actually doing anything....