Maytag Dishwasher - Quiet Series 200 Review

My parents own this diswasher (Maytag Quiet Series 200) but I'm very familar with it, having loaded/emptied dishes and also unfortunately had to repair it frequently when it gave them problems.

 Starting out on a positive note, the dishwasher has some nice features, like the all nylon rack (keeps you from having rusty rack stain your dishes/silverware as the washer gets inevitable nicks in coating).  It is also well laid out, though it makes you think a bit differently about loading the dishes to use the most of its capacity.  In particular, the racks are canted such that one side holds tall glasses better, and opposite side below holds tall dishes.  There's even a handy "flat" rack to lay skinny plates or lids on very bottom of dishwasher.  The dishwasher has a "tall capacity" form factor that seems to be able to hold a lot of dishes/glasses/etc.  It does a credible job of washing them, though we do pre-rinse/scrape dishes and sliverware before putting them in the dishwasher.

So...what's the problem?...in a word, poor design choices severely hamper the reliability of this dishwasher.  There seem to be two nagging problems that I'm pretty sure Maytag is aware of but for some reason (keeping repair people busy?) they don't seem to want to fix.  The biggest problem is the door latching mechanism which uses a plastic handle to actuate the latch...the problem is that the plastic cracks (after about 6 months of use in our experience) and you can't easily open the door.  Albeit the latch looks very nice from the outside style, but when it does fail, you have to circumvent this plastic handle to "break in" to your dishwasher to get your dishes out or to repair the latch...of course this seems to happen at most inopportune times (if ever there's a good time for this to happen?).  My family keeps spare plastic handles in stock to avoid having to wait a week without the dishwasher to get a new replacement handle.  It is tricky to open the dishwasher door with a broken latch.  The fix would be pretty easy for Maytag if they would simply come out with a metal handle rather than this crack-prone plastic handle, but in the 5 years we've owned this dishwasher, they've never done so (this handle design is used on other Maytag dishwashers, and I'd likewise avoid them due to this problem).

Another poor design choice is simply the electronic functions of the dishwasher (controls) are of course subject to steam which is produced while washing dishes, and it seems to make the dishwasher controls go wacky.  I've reseated contacts, etc, to avoid this, but it keeps reoccuring, making the pushbutton controls on the front of the dishwasher inoperable (until the controls "dry out" and things start working normally).  It may look fancy, but I'd avoid electronic controls on a dishwasher since by the nature of their operation they will always produce steam which seems to interfere with how these controls work.

I'm a big fan of keep it simple...best to go back to dishwashers with the old-fashioned mechanical controls (timer) and old fashioned metal cammed door latch (rather than plastic).  These don't look fancy, but seem to work well in the dishwasher application, so I think Maytag shouldn't have abandoned them in favor of fancy but questionable-reliability components.