You should 100% do that. Efficiency gains are less and less, they love baking in “eco” features that are to work around deficiencies in design, and modern home appliances suffer from poor cold solder joints failing causing the whole machine to die frequently. Easy to fix if you have a soldering iron, but should be unacceptable.

Only reason I ended up replacing my old old dishwasher, for example, was that a leak developed in the bottom of the wash pan and it started leaking on the floor, and at that point, 20+ years old, it was likely going to have cascading failures of other parts, and mold mitigation and replacing the subfloor were not worth the risk. Otherwise I’d have kept swapping parts as they failed.

Ended up going with the Bosch 500 due to friends’ personal reviews, as well as Consumer Reports and the like backing up that it does its job. Didn’t buy it for cloud, didn’t buy it for apps, bought it to wash dishes.

The extra price was annoying versus a cheaper model, but better build quality and less noise is what that extra price is paying for. The app/cloud stuff is just silly bonuses that don’t matter.

Definitely keep the old stuff though, it’s generally simpler to repair and maintain and more reliable, unless you hit a critical failure that increases risk too much. (There’s some statistical analysis rule about that, with each new operating mode, each new feature, that adds a multiplicative factor to chance of failure.) Sometimes you get a pleasant surprise too, replaced the main controller in a 20+ year old stove and the modern flavor of the controller cycles the heating coils differently, it actually produces more consistent heat than the old controller board. It was like a free cooking upgrade.

You could also just pour that into the rinse aid dispenser…

On the 500 series, it needs a rinse aid refill about once a month using it once a day to once every other day.

That dishwasher runs perfectly fine without connecting to an app. Been using it that way for half a year.

People are so obsessed for nonsense features. Just set normal mode, auto air, start. Done. You know when it finished because the red light shining on the floor turns off, it beeps at you, and auto air opens the door so it can dry faster.

Guess what? You just had a machine wash dishes for you and you didn’t even hear it running the whole time.

Check the trash filter occasionally, which is a physical part you can pull out from the bottom and wash in the sink. Clean the gaskets occasionally to keep a clean seal like any dishwasher.

I will probably open it up at some point and see if I can damage/remove the radio so it can’t ever connect to anything.

It’s a dishwasher, it doesn’t have to massage your plates’ backs. Nothingburger rant.