The 5 Biggest Dishwasher Design Flaws and How To Fix Them

We’ve all seen it: the dishwasher with a ‘45cm’ label plastered on the front – and we all know that it doesn’t refer to the number of litres of water it takes to wash, but rather the depth. But why ‘45cm’? It seems to be an arbitrary number that will only mean something to people who already know what it means. I’m sure there are many dishwasher engineers out there who can explain the logic behind this standard, but from a design perspective, this is just another example of the way the industry has designed for itself, rather than for its users.

There are a lot of ways in which engineering and design don’t intersect well. (I have written before about how design thinking is an essential ingredient in good engineering.) This is one case where a little bit of extra effort spent on user-centred design could have saved many people some confusion and frustration.

Dishwashers are great until they break down and you have to fix them. Then they are nothing but a huge waste of time and money. You would think that after all these years of development, dishwashers would be reliable, but unfortunately this is not the case at all.

There are many common reasons for a dishwasher to break down and most of them are easy to fix yourself. Below I have listed what I believe are the five biggest design flaws in modern dishwashers and how you can fix them yourself.

1 Water-level float switch

The water-level float switch is a small plastic float that rides on top of the water as it fills the tub; when the proper level is reached, it trips a switch that shuts off the water inlet valve. Unfortunately, if there’s too much pressure against it while filling, it won’t shut off properly, allowing water to flood out of the tub onto the kitchen floor. To test whether this is happening, simply lift up on the switch with your finger (you may need to remove some screws first) and see whether it turns off the water flow. If not, you’ll have to remove and replace it, which will involve shutting off the water supply at your home’s main cutoff valve

While this is an improvement, it is still a flawed design. The 45cm dishwasher is too small to accommodate large plates, which will fit into a 60cm dishwasher. The 45cm dishwasher also cannot accommodate large pots and pans. In addition, the 45cm dishwasher doesn’t have enough room for cutlery.

The solution is to use an integrated cutlery tray that sits on top of the dishwasher basket. This way you can store all your cutlery in an easy-to-access space and not have to worry about it falling off the side of the basket.

It’s not a bad dishwasher. The problem is that it’s too big.

I first noticed this when I moved to Amsterdam, but only recently did I realize how bad the design flaw was. My Amsterdam apartment had a dishwasher at least twice as wide as my dishwasher in California. And yet the Dutch dishwasher could barely fit in more dishes than the California one.

The problem was that it had the same racks inside, and since it was so wide they were spaced much further apart, leaving huge empty spaces between them where nothing would fit.

Even worse was the depth of the dishwasher. It was so deep that I couldn’t reach to the bottom with my arm; I had to lean way into it just to put in and take out dishes. And again, this is because they scaled up everything about it, including its depth; but its depth didn’t have to scale up with its width or height, because all the parts that go inside are still the same size they would be in a smaller dishwasher.

If you put a Kindle inside an oven, it would still work fine. But if you made an oven twice as wide, you’d end up with a lot of useless space between burners and racks because they’re fixed-size

1. The dishwasher leaks when filling with water.

The door gasket on a dishwasher is not very complex. It’s simply a rubber ring that fits into a groove around the door frame, creating a water-tight seal to keep the water in while it’s running. If you find that your dishwasher is leaking from the door, chances are the gasket has worn out or been damaged by heat or detergent. To replace the gasket, open the door and remove all of the screws around the sides of the door panel (usually about six). Remove the old gasket and replace it with a new one, then put everything back together again.

2. The dishwasher won’t fill with water.

This problem can be caused by several different things: a faulty float switch, failed timer, or clogged inlet valve screen. You can check these things out fairly easily by following these steps: First, unplug your dishwasher and turn off the water supply to it at either the wall shut-off valve or at your home’s main shut-off valve. Remove all of the screws around the sides of your dishwasher’s front panel and remove it to expose its internal components. Locate the float switch (it will look like

The biggest problem with dishwashers is that they are too big.

Stupidly large, in fact.

I have a dishwasher that’s 45cm wide. Standard-sized plates are 26cm across. That means the plate has to go at an angle in the dishwasher. So that they fit, you have to leave a lot of space between the plates and the racks — and the spray arms — meaning the dishes don’t get cleaned properly.

The latest models are 53cm or wider. The plates haven’t gotten bigger; it’s just that everything gets bigger every year, for no good reason — like cars and houses and sofas and TVs and humans themselves.

A standard-sized dishwasher should be 45cm wide, not 53cm or 60cm or whatever they are now. This would allow manufacturers to add more spray arms, which would improve cleaning performance while also reducing water consumption. Dishwashers use a lot of water because they’re inefficient. If you made them smaller and more efficient, you could reduce their water consumption by half without reducing performance or convenience.

Any dishwasher larger than 18 inches wide is a waste of space. Dishwashers in the United States are made too big. The standard size dishwasher ranges from 24 to 36 inches wide. The average family does not need anything this big and will only use half of the space in the dishwasher. In Europe, the standard dishwasher size is 45cm (18 inches) wide, which is only slightly larger than a typical microwave oven. A 45cm dishwasher can hold 9 place settings or 12 if you have a compact model that folds down the tines on the racks.

Most families do not need a dishwasher that holds more than 12 place settings. If you have large pots, pans or baskets they may not fit into a compact model, but they will fit into a full-sized 45cm model.