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Fisher and Paykel
May. 18th, 2010 10:40 pmThe Fisher and Paykel DishDrawer: just how clever is it?
Having just repaired one I can say, VERY clever. With a few major engineering oversights.
The washer has 5 moving parts: the spray arm, a fan for drying dishes, two motors to close the lid, and the impeller pump.
The pump is genius: basically a giant stepper motor, the impeller is driven by a ring of electromagnets. Drive it forwards and it pumps to the sprayer arm, backwards and it drains the wash chamber.
Pulse it and you can measure water level by detecting the inertia. That's kind of clever.
The unit is programmed via an optical link on the front edge- which also doubles as a 'drawer closed' sensor. Clever.
The dishDrawer uses cold water, heating it internally by heating traces printed onto the lower plate, a bit like the rear windshield defroster in a car. DishDrawer monitors the current drawn by the heating element to deduce the temperature of the water. Clever.
Dish Drawer has a flooding/overflow sensor built into the chassis circuit board. Unfortunately, the flooding circuit is particularly susceptible to corrosion and damage caused by flooding. That's right, the circuit designed to alarm and protect the machine in the case of water damage is itself the most susceptible to water damage.
Not clever. Luckily, it's a $50 part, and the new circuit board comes dipped in water-resistant resin, so they've clearly figured out what goes wrong and fixed it.
Oh and the internal seals tend to go a little slack after a few years (at least on the earlier models) but are easily fixed by the careful application of Hylomar Blue jointing compound. If it's good enough for Rolls Royce, it's good enough for a DishDrawer.
Having just repaired one I can say, VERY clever. With a few major engineering oversights.
The washer has 5 moving parts: the spray arm, a fan for drying dishes, two motors to close the lid, and the impeller pump.
The pump is genius: basically a giant stepper motor, the impeller is driven by a ring of electromagnets. Drive it forwards and it pumps to the sprayer arm, backwards and it drains the wash chamber.
Pulse it and you can measure water level by detecting the inertia. That's kind of clever.
The unit is programmed via an optical link on the front edge- which also doubles as a 'drawer closed' sensor. Clever.
The dishDrawer uses cold water, heating it internally by heating traces printed onto the lower plate, a bit like the rear windshield defroster in a car. DishDrawer monitors the current drawn by the heating element to deduce the temperature of the water. Clever.
Dish Drawer has a flooding/overflow sensor built into the chassis circuit board. Unfortunately, the flooding circuit is particularly susceptible to corrosion and damage caused by flooding. That's right, the circuit designed to alarm and protect the machine in the case of water damage is itself the most susceptible to water damage.
Not clever. Luckily, it's a $50 part, and the new circuit board comes dipped in water-resistant resin, so they've clearly figured out what goes wrong and fixed it.
Oh and the internal seals tend to go a little slack after a few years (at least on the earlier models) but are easily fixed by the careful application of Hylomar Blue jointing compound. If it's good enough for Rolls Royce, it's good enough for a DishDrawer.
