One appliance, one maker, one city

Denver is hard on a dishwasher in four separate ways, and they arrive on the same machine. The water leaves a deposit on every surface it touches, so the inlet screen, the heater and the spray jets fur up long before the manual expects them to. A mile of elevation lowers the temperature the final rinse can reach, which changes how much water is still on the load at the end. Winter drops fast enough to freeze a supply line run through an outside wall. And a good deal of the housing stock here still drains into cast iron laid a century ago.

The machines themselves are worth the trouble. Viking builds a dishwasher to be hidden: integrated controls, a door heavy enough to carry a cabinet panel, and a tub that is meant to outlast two kitchens. When one of them goes wrong it goes wrong quietly — a filter nobody has lifted out, a drain hose that lost its high loop during a remodel, one relay gone on a board where everything else is fine. Almost none of it is the fault it looks like from the front.

So the work is narrow on purpose. Twenty-one symptoms written up in plain sight, six published price bands, seven neighbourhoods on the route, and no form to fill in anywhere on this site. Ranges, wall ovens and built-in refrigeration are still repaired — they were the original trade and they have their own pages — but the dishwasher is what this site is for.