Suggest you talk with a repair person. They know alot.
Had a decent $800 Kitchenaid dishwasher. It had three things go wrong with it in 7 years. One was under warranty. Two were not. Repair guy said the kitchenaid line of refrigerators and dishwashers are not so good – i.e. he sees alot of them. Our fridge is a Kitchenaid and we have had it repaired twice in 10 yrs.
We replaced the dishwasher with a very nice Kenmore from sears. Got it on sale – really on sale, not on the pseudo-sale they have every week. Was a $1400 dishwasher got it for about $800. It’s very good and very quiet.
When we bought it from the Sears at UTC, there was this dude. I forget his name. He was like super dishwasher guy. At first I was leery because he asked questions like a sales guy, but as we talked further, I realized he knew basically everything about dishwashers. Knew the product line backwards and forwards. Knew the competitors, steered us away from gimicky stuff, slickly combined two sales to give us a great deal on a great machine. Maybe it was Richard, or Robert.
One thing I learned from him is that dishwashers which have the little garbage disposal/mascerator in the bottom are much louder, cost more, and break more. Our Kitchenaid was one of these and it was not very quiet.
The ones that have the passive trap in them that you have to manually clean are much quieter, cost less and are more reliable – one less thing to break. Our new Kenmore is one of these so it is not apples to apples comparison.
Super Dishwasher guy also steered us away from Bosch. You can get one that quiet if you just avoid the disposal units.
We had a 40-year-old Maytag in our house when we bought it. Original Clairemont issue. Chocolate-milk brown in color. We threw it away in perfect working condition at the ripe old age of 46 because it was butt-ugly. Sigh.
