To spend £250 extra on a dishwasher with marginal improvement

[Crispleaves]

Hi, posting here for traffic sorry! Just not sure how much regular traffic the "Housekeeping" forum gets 😁

I'm hoping some dishwasher experts can come along to help me. I really need to save some money on my kitchen somewhere 😣I had picked the following Bosch integrated dishwasher which is a Which? best buy and very energy efficient but costs £730. I noticed this considerably cheaper series 4 model which costs £470. I can't see a major difference which bothers me other than the energy efficiency.

Is there something I'm missing?? Has anyone faced the same choice? Appreciate any views!

Thank you for all the comments, you are all so helpful! Even if my head is whirling a bit now. And I’m having to go through this process x5 for all the appliances I need 😭

I would love to buy Miele but they are SO expensive. I have latched onto Bosch as a reliable brand I trust. Never really sure if guarantees are worth it?? I’ll look into that a bit more

When I had to get my Bosch repaired for the 3rd time in as many years the engineer said if I was buying a new one to get a Beko, because they tend to be simpler so less to go wrong with them and parts are easy to come by. I took his advice and the Beko has been running without fault (touch wood) for 3 years now.

@Jellycatspyjamas - that's exactly what the repair man who looked at our old Bosch said! Almost word for word.
And the woman in the local (independent) electrical shop said Bosch are nowhere near as well made as they used to be. Having looked at a few when we were shopping, they were definitely a lot less robust than the one we were replacing.

@ReviewingTheSituation I have a cutlery tray and prefer it to a basket and can fit a large dinner plate in the bottom and a pint glass in the top with no issues .

I had tgis dilemma and the guy in Curry's was really helpful. He aid dishwashers came in 3 price bands, cheap, med and high and you're better off getting the top of the range in any of the tiers, rather than entry level. My budget was 500 and he recommended I got the top tier mid range bosh for 450 rather than get the entry level top tier for 520.

No idea if that was total bullshit but the dishwasher has been brilliant.

My tumble dryer is a Beko. I am really happy with it as a brand. My only complaint is that it has a light which turns on when you open the door but you can't set how long it stays on for, it doesn't stay on nearly long enough to load/unload a full wash. And it has this anti-crease feature which makes it tumble the clothes once every few minutes after the drying has finished. Nice to have, but it's mostly annoying noise and you can't turn it off. It's a very short window that it actually extends the no-crease time by IME.

I aim to get a guarantee for 5 years and then if they break after that it’s a new one. The one I have at the moment had something minor happen a week before the guarantee expired and the engineer also did something proactive in terms of something that sometimes goes wrong. I think it’s coming up to 15 years now, with lots of WFH and multiple uses per day.

I don't think I can cope with researching another brand of dishwashers so I think I will stick with Bosch (their marketing is clearly working 😓). I noticed that the higher priced Bosch surprisingly doesn't have a stainless steel tub whereas the top end Series 4 does, mirroring comments made by some of you. On the other hand the cost of extending the warranty up to 5 years is £89, so that puts the Series 6 into the same cost bracket as the Series 4 I just linked 🤔It would definitely be nice to have peace of mind that the dishwasher is sorted for at least 5 years... Is a stainless steel tub so much better than plastic? I've seen this mentioned a few times but I just checked my 3-year old Bosch dishwasher and it has a plastic tub - I never noticed before and it's not been an issue. So I guess I am answering my own question but it's hard not to be influenced by strongly expressed views online including from experts!
Or I could get the Series 4 without the additional warranty and trust in the brand... that's still a £150 saving, not to be sniffed at.

Maybe I should have mentioned that we only run the dishwasher around 3-4 times a week and it’s almost always overnight when the energy rate is lower so I don’t the difference in annual rate of energy will be material to us in the way that a couple of hundred right now when I’m buying a million other things for the kitchen is 😅

Why are you replacing your existing dishwasher after three years, are you fitting a new kitchen?

Yes I’m fitting a new kitchen so sadly replacing the current freestanding dishwasher with an integrated one

My integrated one is a Beko. It replaced a Zanussi fitted by the developer that gave up after three years.