It's (Not) Getting Hot in Here

I think we've probably been in denial about this one for a few weeks (or more). Lately our dishes haven't seemed all that clean when they come out of the dishwasher. They don't have food on them, mostly. They just seem to be foggy. Of course we refilled our Jet-dry, but that didn't help. We cleaned everything out and ran a load of vinegar and baking soda. No luck. We splurged on fancy liquid detergent instead of Target brand powder. Nope. We even tried the power breaker and resets.

In fact, after the excellent suggestions from my mom that maybe it wasn't heating enough, we decided to finally run a load when we were home and awake enough to pay attention (it seems like we usually run it as we are going out for the day or when we are going to sleep).

Cool. Uh oh.

Usually our dishwasher heats up to probably just under boiling.

Searching fixes for this suggests that a repair will run us at least a couple hundred and that it is not, unfortunately, a do-it-yourself type job.

We looked up our dishwasher to learn more about it - turns out, our Bosch is quite a pricy model (or it was). It's been very good to us for 6 years - no complaints until now. And we don't want to downgrade to something cheap, especially if it doesn't do a good job of cleaning dishes, which so many of our friends and family seem to find with their own dishwashers.

Fortunately, our favorite home review website, The Sweet Home, highly recommends another Bosch. The reviews on pretty much every website for it are astoundingly high. With delivery and installation, it would run around $900. We also have the option of "cheaping out" and buying one step down for about $600 and lose what appears to be a magical third shelf at the top (this seems like it would have been amazing when we were still washing bottle nipples and other tiny parts, but still looks pretty cool for silverware, etc.).

Is it irresponsible to think that this might make more sense than throwing money away hoping to fix the old one? This feels like the standard used car dilemma - how much money do you put in before you give up and get a new one (not that we've put money into this dishwasher before, but still)...

And also - black or stainless? The fridge is stainless but the microwave, oven, and current dishwasher are black. We are leaning towards black if we buy at all, since the fridge is separate enough from the rest of the appliances that we feel like it can be an outlier and we don't have to work our way to full-stainless.

D has found one on sale for $800 (including installation) at Best Buy in the time it has taken me to write this post. We might have already made our decision...

Edited to add this nifty flow chart D found, that is helping us slide towards replacing: