Dishwasher Drama - Tragedy, Comedy, History...?

Reduce, Re-Use, Re-cycle. We try as hard as we can. We keep our cars for a long time rather than replacing them for newer models; we have a fabulous home-built compost heap (nay, a compost mansion) at the bottom of the garden; our oven is 25 years old and I am not going to replace it because I 'deserve a lovely new one'. With the aid of an angle grinder, our old metal oil tank got re-used as a log store. We produce all our own logs from our garden. We don't buy new stuff for the sake of it. If it didn't wreck the rhetorical rule of three, I'd add another to the trio: Repair.

Last week my dishwasher stopped working. It was churning away - and away, and away - and would have done so ad infinitum if I hadn't pressed the reset button - but it wasn't heating up and therefore wasn't washing the dishes. I gave it plenty of chances to stop playing up: letting it go on different cycles in case it had got bored, giving it a 48 hour rest in case it was just exhausted, and gently pleading with it in case it had a plant-like tendency to respond to kind words. But no. Nothing worked. It just continued to swoosh cold water around inside itself as if had become addicted to some kind of dishwasherine colonic irrigation.

Bother, I thought to myself. It's the element. Better get the dishwasher repairman in.

Got the dishwasher repairman in.

Now, he was very good last time, when the dishwasher was all clogged up with dirt because I had forgotten that it occasionally needs to be dosed with one of those citrus-y poddy things which degunks its system. He managed to get rid of the porridge, muesli, eggshells and so on which were causing the - erm - internal clogging. (I could go into all kinds of bowel/digestive analogies here but I'll spare you that). This time, however...

Enter Dishwasher Repairman. Takes machine apart. Spends at least an hour peering into its interior and sticking metal things into it.

DWRM: It's not the element. Must be the printed cicuit board.

DWRM takes the door of the machine apart. Removes plastic box that contains PCB. Forces open box to reveal PCB. This process takes a further half hour.

DWRM: Well, I can't see anything here, but the PCB must be the problem. It'll be expensive. You'll probably be better off buying a new dishwasher.

ME: How much will it cost?

DWRM phones someone. Scribbles down some figures.

DWRM: Well, you're talking about £150 or £160 altogether, including VAT and my labour. I should get a new dishwasher if I were you.

ME: Is that including your labour today?

DWRM: Yes. Today will be £25.

ME: So that's about £135, or buy a new dishwasher? This one's only five and a half years old, and it cost us £370. I think we'll go for the new PCB.

DWRM: You can get a new dishwasher for under £200, easy.

ME: No, that's too wasteful. I'd rather repair it, and not just because of the money.

DWRM: (Anxiously) Well, I'd have to do some more tests then to make sure it IS the PCB. I'd have to stay here for several hours and run it through all the programs. That'd cost you a lot of labour.

ME: So it might not be the PCB?

DWRM: (Sounding even more anxious) Well, it's probably the PCB...

*********

So now I'm in a quandary. Here are my options:

Option 1: Insist on repair, but risk discovering that it isn't the PCB and have to pay out even more money without the dishwasher being fixed. And that would be throwing money away. With the dishwater, in fact.

Option 2: Buy a new dishwasher, possibly unnecessarily, with all the concomitant environmental costs of the manufacture of the new dishwasher and the disposal of the old one. That really goes against the grain.

Option 3: Call out another dishwasher engineer, who might be able to ascertain that it is the PCB, but might not. Therefore I might have to pay him/her a load of money to possibly end up in the same situation as I am in now.

Option 4: Do without a dishwasher.

Ranking these choices gives me:

Best for the Environment: 1, 3, 4, 2
Best for DWRP: 2, because he doesn't have to risk doing a 'repair' that isn't.
Best for me: None of them really, because of the uncertainty of the outcomes of 1 and 3.

So, at the moment, I'm going for Option 4: doing without a dishwasher. This isn't great for the environment - it takes a lot of energy to heat the water for three lots of washing up per day. In addition, it loses me hours of my time per week. And it will be nightmare at family gatherings!

I'm going to do some research, try and contact the manufacturer directly to see if they can tell me if there is some way of being sure where the fault lies. I don't want to thow away money, but I am NOT going to throw away a possibly perfectly good dishwasher for the sake of a printed circuit board. I want it repaired!