Maytag is in the House!

I recently purchased one of the newest Maytag Dishwashers in the MDB7100 Series - mine is an MDB7130 and from what the salesman told me they basically made some minor improvements to the 7100 model.

This machine to my surprise is very quiet. My parents have a dishwasher that was made in Europe and paid ALOT of money for it , so they could have the peace and quiet while the dishwasher was running, mine is almost as quiet, enough for me to say shhh listen, I hear nothing!!! I have been using this machine for over one month now and the only adjustment I had to make with it was to adjust the amount of rinse aid that would be used with each wash. With a twist of the Rinse Aid cap you go from more to less - we needed less.

There are several cycles on this dishwasher: Auto Clean, Heavy Wash, Normal Wash, Light Wash, Rinse Only - All but Auto Clean are self explanatory so I will only explain the auto clean feature. Auto Clean is an energy saving feature which adjusts to the type of load you are cleaning. According to my salesman - once the water in the dishwasher is clean (after doing a load of dishes) there is an electronic eye in the bottom of the machine and as soon as the water is clean - the cycle shortens itself, thus being more energy efficient. If I pick Heavy Wash because of the amount of dirty dishes, (this is normally a 2 hour cycle) it will automatically shorten the cycle once the water in the dishwasher is clear.

Other Features are Tough Scrub and Sanitize (I haven't used these features as of yet), but based on the fact that all the other features and cycles I have used have been yielding clean dishes, pots, pans I can only assume these additional cycles work just as well. You can also choose to use heated dry - I don't use heated dry and my dishes come out barely wet. There is an indicator panel that shows the minutes left for the load and it also shows at which point in the dishwashing cycle it is at. Once the cycle is done, a red light stays on next to the word clean on the panel so you know the dishes are done and will stay lit until the dishwasher door is open for at least 30 seconds. There is also a locking feature, which when pressed for 3 seconds locks the control panel so the dishwasher can't be started my little children or interrupted during the cycle.

This machine can be stacked with (according to the manual 10 place settings of dinnerware - (I only have 8 place settings) which fit with a lot of extra room to spare. It has an adjustable top rack so if you have baking sheets that need to go on the bottom, you can raise or lower the top rack to accommodate the sheets. It comes with a utensil basket that is in 2 sections and can be put in the dishwasher connected together, or you can separate it and put only one side it or just simply put the utensils in different parts of the dishwasher to make better use of space.

You can easily fit large spaghetti pots in the bottom rack. My old dishwasher had one spinning arm that was in the middle of the machine so I could not put oversize pots, sheets, dishes on the bottom and would have to wash them by hand. This one has a spinning arm on the bottom of the machine, a center spray pole and another spinning sprayer at the top of the machine.

It was a bit confusing at first when I tried to use the dishwasher without reading the manual first (the old dishwasher had a knob that simply said start wash! But once I got used to it, it's a piece of cake!

I paid $479 at a local Mr. Jays Appliance store - shop around get prices and go to a reputable store. I also purchased a 5 year warranty on all parts and labor for $99.

UPDATE 8/24/04 - I have now been using the dishwasher daily for the past 3 1/2 years and have not had any problems with it. I have not had to make any service calls for this machine.