The beast was the Frigidaire Ultra Quiet III that came with our house. A go kart driving around the living room would have been quieter. Plus our neighbor’s failed pretty quickly after they moved in. And their replacement also did recently. We figure with data points like that ours wasn’t likely to last much longer and we’d rather move on to something else before being forced to, perhaps with an associated flood. And it was a pretty easy decision that moving on was going to be to a Bosch.
I pulled out the beast because I suspected it was sitting in an echo chamber. The cabinet turned out to be even worse than I thought with lots of extra space around the dishwasher and gaps allowing sound to reflect straight out. I bought a sheet of heavy plywood and built a cabinet within the cabinet sized specifically for the new dishwasher:
It’s not silent, but it is so much more quiet. I think getting towards truly not knowing the dishwasher was running would have required a big step up to the thousand dollar more expensive unit which trims quite a few more decibels off the noise level of their more reasonably priced dishwashers. The 500 series unit and a $30 sheet of plywood seemed like a good compromise.
And happily there was no water damage. We’d been starting to suspect it was leaking a little on occasion. For extra measure I added a coat of fresh sealer on the wood floor in the cavity before the new washer arrived. I also sprang for a higher quality water hose with good compression fittings instead of the cheapo plastic one that was on the original hook up. Should be safe from floods for a while now (we’ve had enough water fiascos in this house already).