The 40-year-old dishwasher and other kitchen miracles

2 hours ago 3

Opinion

November 17, 2025 — 7.00pm

It’s the Monday morning after a big day in the kitchen. I’ve got a big dishwasher and I’m not afraid to use it – the day before, it ran five cycles.

But when I go to empty the dishwasher, it’s blinking. Bad sign. We’d just celebrated the fifth birthday of my beloved Bosch top model dishwasher, the one which pops open to let the steam out, the one with the third shelf for flattish toddler bowls and tongs. On average, it runs full, three or maybe four times a day. At least it did.

As it turns out, says the repairman, it would be a waste of money to fix it.

Some dishwashers last longer than others. But it’s not all about the brands.

Guess how many dead dishwashers, fridges and gas heaters end up on our streets, abandoned by once grateful owners? Every year, about 400,000 tonnes of large appliances enter the market. If my luck with dishwashers is anything to go by, those same large appliances will eventually end up either on the street or on the back of the van which brought you your new dishwasher.

How do you pick? Is five years normal? Chris Barnes, senior project officer at consumer advocacy group Choice, tells me my old Bosch had a pretty good workout. Cost per cycle might have meant someone else’s dishwasher lasted 10 years. He runs his dishwasher once every two days but then it’s just dealing with one person’s dirty dishes. We’ve got a population of six and sometimes more.

“Nevertheless, five years is a shorter lifespan for a dishwasher than I would have expected – nine or 10 years would be a reasonable life expectancy these days,” says Barnes. Using that estimate, it’s only when the product gets to six to eight years that you might think that replacing will be more cost effective than a repair. My repair would have been more than a thousand bucks – and who knows how long it would have lasted.

Barnes has tips which I’ve paraphrased for the lay shopper, like me and you.

Prices are never an indicator of performance or quality.
Don’t fall for the marketing hype.
Looks are deceiving. That gloriously stylish dishy will leak in the time it takes you to stack it.
Country of origin is irrelevant these days. Most dishwashers are the sum of their parts - from all around the world.
Do lots of research. Read all the product reviews. Ask your friends.

The 40-year-old dishwasher

That is how I found Paul and Carmel Sarks of Strathfield. Take a deep breath. Their Miele dishwasher is 40 years old and it’s perfect.

“I make sure everything is fairly reasonable before it goes in,” says Carmel. “I’m very careful with it. Scrape the dishes. If they are really messy, I might rinse.”

Also, Paul and Carmel are assiduous cleaners of the filter in their vintage Miele.

So what happens to all the dead dishwashers and other large appliances?

John Gertsakis, director of the Product Stewardship Centre of Excellence, says around 90 per cent of used products are being collected with just over half of the material is recycled. The rest ends up in landfill.

Plastics and ozone-depleting gases (in fridges and heat pump dryers) can be difficult to recover and, says Gertsakis, only a handful of brands removes old appliances when a new product is sold and delivered. The rest end up in the back lane waiting for council collections.

Gertsakis says: “We need a regulated product stewardship program that enables more whitegoods to be repaired and recycled. That’s well overdue in Australia.”

In comparison, he says, the European Commission laws require manufacturers to fund and participate in repair and recycling schemes.

That would have been great for me. Instead, nearly two grand for a new top-level Bosch dishwasher with all the cycles and three shelves, as well as the callout for the repairer. That’s on top of not really knowing what went wrong.

In our case, it wasn’t the cockroaches, which Barnes says cause mayhem. They love the warmth and the wetness and they destroy dishwashers. What can you do about that? Cockroach baits, keeping the area around them clean, and some experts suggest a lanolin wax spray.

Gertsakis says that, with the support of the Southern Sydney Regional Organisation of Councils, his team modelled what it would cost to get industry to fund collection, recycling of large house appliances and improve the repairability of appliances - a levy of $49 per appliance. It would create nearly 500 new jobs in the repair sector. They also interviewed those in the industry and found strong support for a co-designed stewardship scheme.

Could I live without a dishwasher? Maybe. But I’d be bloody grumpy. I speak to an old mate, Julie Macken, of Chippendale. In all her many decades on this earth, she has never had a dishwasher. She has a partner, three kids, four grandkids, 10 brothers and sisters. Big, big dinners. And who does the washing-up? She does.

Family arguments have broken out about the best way to pack the dishwasher.

“My mother doesn’t have a dishwasher either,” says Macken. “Dishwashers are not on my emotional map.”

Her partner does all the cooking, she clears up. They talk and talk and talk. But there’s also the chance to chat while stacking as those of us with two contrasting styles of dishwasher stacking know: the Scandinavian architect (not me) and a “raccoon on meth” (not my significant other).

Want to argue about the benefits of dishwashers? Sure. But here’s what the experts say. Dishwashers save on water compared to handwashing. And that’s not all. One study showed households with dishwashers used nearly 30 per cent less energy per cleaned item compared with households not owning a dishwasher.

Let’s hope our next one lasts longer than five years.

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