The best dishwashers are not the same as the best dishwashers for your money.

The top-rated dishwashers are like the most popular books: they will be well reviewed, but they won’t be the best sellers. As with a lot of consumer products, the people who buy them are people who want them. They are not always what you would want if you could afford to buy only one.

If you can buy only one and you really know what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter how much more expensive that one is. The best dishwashers aren’t very good at all. They cannot compare with real dishes they are supposed to wash.

I bought a new dishwasher this weekend, and I was really excited by the number of reviews online. Some of them seemed pretty good, so I thought I’d look at a few of the ones that stood out.

I don’t know for sure that they were all written by real people. Dishwashers are like cars: everyone knows how to fix one and most people have a used one lying around they can use in an emergency. But because the reviews were on Amazon, where people only buy things they’ve tried themselves, it seemed likely that some of them were written by real people.

Five of the seven models were rated four or five stars, which is pretty good. Plus there were two reviews that gave five stars but also mentioned some problem that was easily fixed with a simple workaround, which again is nice to see.

But then there was one review that said a dishwasher had broken on arrival and the seller was not responding to customer service requests, so I decided to look into that.

I bought the model from Amazon Warehouse Deals because it promised free delivery (that’s the first time I’ve ever done this). The website promised six-day delivery and said “We will provide you with every detailed information about our products including samples.” It also said

Dishwashers are the best example of things you can make yourself, but that most people don’t. They are also a good example of something that is even better if someone else makes them for you.

If you have a big enough kitchen and don’t mind spending some time washing dishes, by all means make your own dishwasher. But it’s not easy, and you will either have to put up with the boring task of loading and unloading the machine, or hire someone to do it for you. And then there’s a big question about how many dishes you can load in one go. After all, a dishwasher is only as efficient as its weakest component, the mechanical arm that carries the dishes from one place to another.

If you aren’t willing to spend time washing dishes by hand, then there are plenty of other good reasons why you would prefer a dishwasher made by someone else. Most of them involve economics. You won’t get much better performance than this:

Much cheaper: In general, if the dishwasher costs less to use than buying the same amount of detergent and doing the same amount of laundry by hand, then it’s probably better to buy it.

There are very few things that can’t be improved by the addition of a smartphone app. And so it is with dishwashers. There are plenty of people who don’t have one and love it, but what I’ve noticed is that the people who don’t love their dishwasher are usually the ones who own digital scales. After learning how easy it was to weigh out my dishes every day, I’ve never looked back.

There’s a funny thing in the US. About two decades ago, you’d buy a dishwasher and it would be very quiet. Then there was a trend for them to get louder and louder, until recently we’ve had a whole new range of dishwashers that are just so noisy they make the old ones sound like whisper-quiet.

There’s an obvious reason for this.

In the past ten years, when people bought dishwashers, there was no way to compare them. Except by price. And because dishwashers cost more over time, most people decided that spending less money on a dishwasher was worth it. So if you could save $50 or $100 on a dishwasher every year for 20 years, you’d be ahead by about $4,000 and you’d have saved yourself the effort of buying a second new dishwasher in 20 years’ time.

But wait: you’re going to need to buy another one in five years’ time too. And while your first one was probably pretty good value and selling at around the same price as other models, most models today seem to be at least twice as much as they were two decades ago. And all of them are almost certainly twice as loud too.

In the old days, washing dishes by hand was a major chore, and something that was often done only by servants. But in the 1950s there were two innovations that made washing dishes much easier and more pleasant: detergent and dishwashers. Dishwashers eliminated the need for people to wash dishes by hand, and detergent meant that people no longer had to wash their plates before eating, which is a major source of bacteria.

The first dishwashers were unsatisfactory because they didn’t clean the dishes very well. They were also not very energy efficient: you had to keep turning them on, even if you didn’t want to use them at all. Today’s dishwashers are much better than they used to be, but they are still not perfect.

The chief problem is that they aren’t as effective at getting rid of germs as they should be. That’s because detergents are messy, and we tend to forget to wash our hands before handling food or putting things in the dishwasher.

At the time, I would have predicted that dishwashers had an inherently higher risk of failure than washing machines. And I would have been right. It is true that dishwashers are more likely to break than washing machines. They are also more likely to be totally destroyed by a single accident (a flood, for example) than washing machines are.

But when you look at overall product reliability, washing machines beat dishwashers.**