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.

Are you ready for LED Lights?

If you have been following my blog, you know that I have gone to the fringes on saving energy.  As humans we are clearly smart enough to do better.  Over the last two years I have finally found a dimmable Compact Florescent Light or CFL that works like a champ.  The only thing we haven't found is one that is in a daylight or natural color.  The bulbs that we found in the daylight range reacted very poorly to dimmers.

For the sections of my house without dimmers, we found that the Lights of American PAR 38 bulbs with 60 LED's worked nicely and provided a semi-focused spot light.  Every other LED bulb that we tried failed within a couple of days.  This week I installed three Four Seasons 120 LED 8 watt bulbs next to the 3 60LED 5 Watt bulbs in my car port.  The Four Seasons 120 LED lights put off a very nice slightly blue daylight color light.  Additionally they have a fluted lens so they have a smoother transition of light closer to a flood light instead of a semi-focused spot.


We have just started testing these, and so far they are working great.  Keep up and I will let you know how they do over the next three or four weeks.  Past history has shown that LED either fails quickly or doesn't fail for a long time.

I also noted that LOA now has a candelabra base LED that is just 3 watts.  Since all of my candelabra fixtures dim, I will wait for a CFL to fail before we try these.  There are two lights in my bedroom that don't dim I may try them in.

Who you calling a "Tree Hugger"?

Over the years I have been accused of being a “tree hugger” more that once. Personally I associate the term tree hugger with the nuts that spike trees and hurt loggers, stage sit ins to save some worm or sit up on billboards fasting until some developer stops bulldozing land. Being called a tree hugger seemed like my friends were calling me crazy or something.

When I was growing up in Southern California, I remember smog alerts and days where the sky was so brown we couldn't see the valley from our home in Tarzana Hills. The area I lived in has a little pull off area that is featured in movies like “Valley Girl” They must have filmed right after a Santa Ana wind blew all the smog to Lancaster. I can't remember ever seeing stars at home in Tarzana. Surfing at the beaches of California meant coming home with tar spots all over your feet from the oil wells off the coast and scrubbing off the oily layers off goop that would stick to the Zog's Sex Wax on your surfboard. When my parents couldn't take it any more we would get on the Catalina ferry boat or drive up to see our family friends, the Bushnell's, in Bass Lake California which is just outside Yosemite.