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Comment by drivingmenuts | Hacker News Reader

Seems like determining water hardness would be something the dishwasher could do.

Have you ever taken a dishwasher apart? I have and it's an unbelievably simple machine that they charge you big bucks for. There's a lot it could do but manufacturers are in the business of making money, not selling complex, hard to maintain machines.

They are very simply constructed - and I think that's for two reasons: 1, it's cheaper, and 2 - My experience with dishwashers is that they are sort of intended to be disposable. They're relatively cheap, and replacement parts for the things that can fail regularly are very nearly as expensive as the actual machine.

The control board is the thing most likely to go (electronics and water); everything else is floats and switches. It's also 7/8ths the price of an entirely new machine.

This is one conspiracy theory I whole-heartedly subscribe to.

This is like Apple charging half the phone to fix a cracked screen.

Half a phone? The screen repairs are like $100-200 depending on your model, while the new phone is over $1000. It's also not just the glass, when you get your iPhone screen replaced, they replace the entire front half of your phone, basically everything involved with the display, and put a new front on. So I think you are pretty wrong here, I think they charge less than half the phone, and you actually get half of a new phone.

They can be well over $200 for some phones:

https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/service/screen-repla...

I get that it's a lot of parts, but this is the most fragile piece of the phone and Apple would be wise to take a note here from their competitors and explore other options. There is no reason why it needs to be a lot of parts replace to fix your cracked screen, or even have a screen that cracks at all, other than a lack of imagination in the engineering department.

My experience (and this may be brand or price-point dependent) is the opposite. My Bosch had a couple of failures (that ideally would never happen, of course), but because the parts are fairly standardized and the design is very elegant, I feel like it's one of the last few "owner-repairable" items in the house.

The replacement parts were very reasonable (a fraction of the original cost of the dishwasher), easy and quick to obtain (from a particular retailer which also does very informative non-pushy YouTube videos for reparing/diagnosing problems), the diagnosing was straightforward (like debugging code), and the replacement was manageable (if a little cramped).

There may be a price cut-off where this starts being true, and where it stops being true. My particular dishwasher was ~$1k 10 years ago, has had ~$120 of parts replaced over that period, one of which was cosmetic, and has otherwise worked flawlessly. All in all, I'm very happy with that trade-off.

I just checked, and there are two control boards that could be replaced - each $150.

I'm pretty enamored with the engineering elegance of the dishwasher. Until I opened one up and had to fix something I always thought it would be a lot more complicated than it really is.

I've had the same experience with our Bosch dishwasher.

It may depend on the manufacturer, but my impression was they were usually about the simplest white goods to repair. You can buy the pumps, valves etc cheaply, and they’re quite accessible.

The inexpensive ways to measure hardness are colorimetric: you add some reagents to the water and look at the color. Electronic colorimeters exist but are not particularly cheap. Electronic colorimeters with automatic reagent dispensing also exist and are quite expensive. And you need reagents.

I’d rather save $500 or more on my dishwasher and type in the hardness. Even without my utility report, hardness tests are cheap if a human operates them.

The main annoyance is the fact that there are a couple different units for hardness.

Probably not worth it, since your hardness doesn't change, and is a number that you can get from the water utility.

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