Monday, August 26, 2013

Bosch Dishwasher - Super Energy Saver - Super Quiet - Super Annoying Buzzer

If you read my blog, it shouldn't be of any surprise to you that we have the latest and greatest energy star appliances in our house.  For the most part these appliances are quieter, clean better and save energy.  All good right?  Well It's all good until the Bosch dishwasher buzzer won't turn off.

Now that we have a Chevy Volt in the house, and have changed our electric plan from the standard to the "Home and Auto" plan.  The Home and Auto plan allows us to charge the Volt at night at very very low rates.  The tradeoff is higher than normal mid peak and peak rates.  Our Bosch Dishwasher is prepared for just such a plan with delayed start.  

The delayed start feature lets us load the dishwasher, go to bed and it will start when electricity is cheap.  If you notice the time of this post you'll see that I am up quite early for a Monday morning, even for me.  That is because the engineers at Bosch thought it would be nice to let people know when the dishes are done with a very annoying beep.

Being a pilot, when things beep in the airplane, we are trained to fix them.  My wife can ignore this beeper, I can not.  Our lives are full of warning beepers.  My Volt warns me if I get to close to another car, and chastises me for changing lanes without signaling.  It thinks I am "wandering" out of my lane so it beeps.  This might come in handy tonight when I am tired from getting up so early.

Apparently no one at Bosch thought that if you delay start the dishwasher that you might not want to hear the beeper at 3:31 am.  The manual says to hold the power button and the delay start button at the same time until the display says "0" to turn off the beeper on the Bosch Dishwasher.  The problem is you have to power off and on every time.  Another "feature" I can't figure out.

So if you don't want to hear the the load finished buzzer or beeper or whatever you want to call it, starting your dishes becomes a binary programming exercise.

First you must power off your dishwasher.  This is required every time of our model.
Second you must hold the power and delay start buttons to turn off the buzzer beeper warning system.
Third you must select the delay time to start at the lower power rates
Fourth and finally you have to select the wash cycle.

The next dishwasher will require some method to skip the first and second steps.  Some friends have the Fisher Paykel drawer style dishwashers, and the beeper is way quieter and is simple to turn off via the display.  Maybe that is the trick, Bosch wants to annoy me into spending more money.

For now if you want to turn off the beeper on your Bosch Dishwasher, there you have it.  Power off, then hold the power and delay buttons at start, and select "0" for no buzzer.  Do this everytime you don't want the buzzer on.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Thank you for your insights.