Miele Appliance Reliability
I’m writing this little post and throwing it out into the void with no attempt at SEO on the off chance that someone considering a purchase similar to mine will come across it (and think twice).
When we decided to build our (fairly high-end) custom home we naturally took a look at all the usual appliance suspects — Thermador and Wolf and Viking and so on. But there were a suprisingly large number of comments found on various sites discussing the poor reliability of these brands. Ultimately we decided to go with Miele across the board, so a side-by-side fridge-freezer, A 48" gas range, a nice dishwasher, and a separate steam oven.
And now, about 3 years into that purchase… not thrilled. Let’s just say that the refrigerator has been working great! Beyond that, however…
Freezer. Look, I get it — ice-makers are finicky. I’ve NEVER had a freezer with an ice-maker that didn’t seem to have problems. But I end up needing to do something about every two weeks or so in order to keep things moving on this one. Some of it is simple, like when the little rotating thing that holds the ice gets frozen up and you need to reach in and give it a tiny twist to break it free. But other times it just… won’t work. The best solution, believe it or not, is to just ‘reboot’ the freezer. Turn it off and then back on. Hello, it’s Windows ‘95!
Get ronbrinkmann’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
The 48" range is pretty nice to cook on, I will say. There’s a lot to like about this beast. But as far as reliability? Have had it serviced 3 times now. Little stuff, like the fact that the spark igniters will sometimes click for nearly a minute even though the burner has fully ignited. But the worst part is definitely the built-in microwave. Clearly microwave technology is not their strong suit. We’ve had to replace the magnetron twice and it still sometimes makes this ominous and pretty loud ‘thump’ when it starts up.
Meanwhile, the little touchscreen on this range is, quite honestly, a MASTERCLASS in crappy user-interface design. Things that should be simple take multiple button presses to accomplish. Do you want to use that built-in microwave? First you turn the unit on with a button press, then ‘operating modes’ then ‘microwave’ then rotate a really really fiddly virtual scroll-wheel until you get to ‘45’ and then ‘start’. God help you if you have to also set a lower power level.
Contrast this with the old Panasonic microwave I have. Three taps (4,5, Start) and it’s cooking.
(The touchscreen itself is pretty crap too… don’t expect anything even CLOSE to the responsiveness of a modern phone. it requires long presses and sometimes you need to wiggle your finger a little bit for it to register.)
Ok, what about the separate steam oven? Beyond the same annoying touchscreen that plagues the range, this thing is just plain unreliable. Actually the ‘oven’ part works okay, it’s just the ‘steam’ part that doesn’t. We have had someone (an actual Miele rep) look at it twice but he was never able to identify a specific problem. Yet it periodically throws ‘faults’ as soon as you try to steam something about 1/3 of the time. There have also been a couple of incidents where water just started pouring out of the bottom of the closed door, filling up the drawer beneath it. Joy.
And then there’s the dishwasher. EVERYBODY knows that Miele dishwashers are reliable, yes? Nope. Look for ‘miele intake error’ on youtube and you’ll discover many many videos suggesting how to temporarily fix this problem. Many of these solutions include (I kid you not) the use of a makeshift tool you can create by bending a fork into a specific shape. Unfortunately my newer model now has a plastic wall in place that interferes with doing that anymore. We’ve reverted to only using the ‘quick’ cycle because that seems to have the problem less of the time.
Ok, rant over. Good luck out there people.
