Fisher & Paykel DD601

Good Erg; Bad Eng – My single dishdrawer is an older one - in the kitchen when I bought the farm. As an engineer with 35 years in design, let me say that the ergonomics of the dishdrawer (less bending over, ability to split use between two 'halves' etc) was absolutely innovative. But the engineering detail is very poor. My one has lasted because it is in a weekender, used 30 days/year on soft tank water (no chlorine etc). But now the drain pipe has a leak about 1m away from the machine. But rather than having a half-inch or three-quarter-inch standard thread connection on the exterior of the unit, it uses a proprietary connector on the end, and the whole Dishdrawer must be disassembled to change the waste hose-pipe. By merging the internal hose with the external hose into a single part, a slight 'wear' on the external pipe becomes a failure of such magnitude that it is better to throw the dishwasher away, than pay service fees to have the plastic hose replaced. Glueing any external waste hose failure onto a stent is preferable to complete dismantling of unit.

At the top of each drawer is a thin plastic lid that sits down inside a 8mm rebate around the inner-edge of the top of all four sides of the drawer. This lid is what keeps the water inside the drawer, even when water is being sprayed upwards aggressively. But if a user happens to put a 10cm too tall item into the drawer, the drawer will still close, but the lid will not come down and 'seal' the water spray inside the drawer. So water runs down the outside of the drawer to the bottom where the electronics is housed. A smarter design would have been to locate the electronics atop the plastic lid, so that it did not receive a water-drenching every time the lid did not 'seat' properly.

As others have put it: Great idea but poor implementation.

The other point to note is that F&P does not support third-party repair services, so one has to pay F&P technicians to do any service calls... and outside the major capitals, the cost for a call-out quickly gets exorbitant.