Kinsler: Why our dishwasher is upside-down
I can’t imagine that when Silas G Whirlpool invented the first home dishwasher he wished to market a pure exercise in frustration. Our particular machine, however, excels in nerve warfare. It simply stopped the other day, probably because Natalie was giving a dinner party and it knew it was needed.
And so, when the festivities finally concluded I got to work. After many battles, I’ve gotten fairly good at dissecting the machine’s electronic controller, but it seemed relatively happy this time. I would have to investigate further.
And so I learned the realities of the more recent home appliances. For one thing, our Whirlpool du1055xtp is made primarily out of plastic. From an engineer’s point of view this is permissible because it lightens the machine tremendously and can be intricately molded without much trouble (provided the mix of plastic resin is virtuous and contains neither sawdust or ground-up dishwashers.) Otherwise, it cracks, which our machine has not.
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If we’d wished to spend an extra $200.00 we could have purchased the state-of-the-art Whirlpool, which is made of the same white plastic and contains the same innards but whose door is embellished by a thin panel of stainless steel. We declined.
The difficulty on this occasion was that the machine was completely dead as if electric power was far in the future. This meant that one of its many electric safety switches had failed. And all are inaccessible unless the dishwasher is upside-down.
The power cable for our machine had been made slightly too short, so some electrical work had to be done before we could flip the noble device over. This required several days of highly intermittent work, after which time I’d grown used to hand-washing the dishes anyway.
It occurs to me that Natalie might be correct in her assessment of the situation, viz, that we need a new dishwasher already. Today’s housewife, raised under gentler circumstances than her sturdy frontier forbears, is less willing to put up with husbandly repair projects which occupy the majority of the kitchen floor and who is fast running out of patience for the whole enterprise.
“We’ve tolerated Mr. Whirlpool’s technical shortcomings for 20 years already,” she would say. “It’s time to let go.”
Mark Kinsler, [email protected], lives in a little old house in Lancaster and will likely give the project one more shot before succumbing to the preponderance of opinion as expressed by Natalie and the two supervisory cats, who always take her side anyway.
This article originally appeared on Lancaster Eagle-Gazette: Is it time for a new dishwasher? Yes, says Natalie Kinsler