{"id":108708,"date":"2025-03-26T12:19:50","date_gmt":"2025-03-26T17:19:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=108708"},"modified":"2025-03-26T12:19:50","modified_gmt":"2025-03-26T17:19:50","slug":"108708","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=108708","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.jeffgeerling.com\/blog\/2025\/i-wont-connect-my-dishwasher-your-stupid-cloud\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">I won&#8217;t connect my dishwasher to your stupid cloud<\/a><br \/>\nMarch 24, 2025<\/p>\n<p>Jeff Geerling:<\/p>\n<p>This weekend I had to buy a new dishwasher because our old GE died.<\/p>\n<p>I bought a Bosch 500 series because that&#8217;s what Consumer Reports recommended, and more importantly, I could find one in stock.<\/p>\n<p>After my dad and I got it installed, I went to run a rinse cycle, only to find that\u00a0<em>that<\/em>, along with features like delayed start and eco mode, require an app.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"insert-image\" src=\"https:\/\/www.jeffgeerling.com\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/bosch-dishwasher-home-connect.jpg\" alt=\"Bosch dishwasher Home Connect logo\" width=\"700\" height=\"394\" data-insert-type=\"image\" data-entity-type=\"file\" data-entity-uuid=\"insert-image-75c66f24-bf26-4873-9ca6-695e60ce93df\" data-insert-attach=\"{&quot;id&quot;:&quot;75c66f24-bf26-4873-9ca6-695e60ce93df&quot;,&quot;attributes&quot;:{&quot;alt&quot;:[&quot;alt&quot;,&quot;description&quot;],&quot;title&quot;:[&quot;title&quot;]}}\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Not only that, to\u00a0<em>use<\/em>\u00a0the app, you have to connect your dishwasher to WiFi, set up a cloud account in something called Home Connect, and then, and only then, can you start using all the features on the dishwasher.<\/p>\n<h2>Video<\/h2>\n<p>This blog post is a lightly-edited transcript of my latest YouTube video on Level 2 Jeff:<br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"I won't connect my dishwasher to your stupid cloud\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/5M_hmwBBPnc\" width=\"650\" height=\"365\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<h2>GE Dishwasher &#8211; Planned Obsolescence<\/h2>\n<p>So getting back first to that old GE dishwasher, it was, I don&#8217;t know, I think that\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Planned_obsolescence\">planned obsolescence<\/a>\u00a0is something that applies to many consumer products today.<\/p>\n<p>Companies know if they design something to last only 5 or 10 years, that means in 5 or 10 years someone&#8217;s going to have to buy a whole new one.<\/p>\n<p>And on my GE Amana dishwasher, it started having weird power issues, like the controls would just not light up unless I reset the circuit breaker for a few minutes. That started happening more often, and this past Saturday it just wouldn&#8217;t come on no matter what, even after I tested and re-wired it all the way from the panel up to the dishwasher&#8217;s internal power connector.<\/p>\n<p>So it was dead.<\/p>\n<p>Next up, I looked at what it took to get a control board. Well&#8230;\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.repairclinic.com\/PartDetail\/Control-Board\/WD21X24901C\/4980378\">$299 for a control board<\/a>\u00a0that was &#8216;special order&#8217; and might not even fix the problem? That&#8217;s a non-starter for my $600, 8-year-old dishwasher.<\/p>\n<p>Even if I got it fixed, the front panel was starting to rust out at the hinge points (leaving some metal jaggies that my soon-to-be-crawling 6 month old could slice his fingers on), and other parts of the machine were showing signs of rust\/potential future leaks&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>It was Saturday night, and for a family of five, a dishwasher is kinda important. We don&#8217;t have 1.5 hours every night to spend hand-washing dishes (not to mention the water bill!).<\/p>\n<p>So I needed to get a new one, and it&#8217;s really hard for me to schedule a few hours for my Dad and I to get it done in the middle of the week (plus that&#8217;s multiple days without a dishwasher!).<\/p>\n<p>So I did some research, and I found Bosch\u00a0<em>seemed<\/em>\u00a0to have the best bet for under $1,000, available locally on a Sunday.<\/p>\n<p>Consumer Reports, random Redditors, etc. seemed to have some praises for Bosch\u2014on Reddit many also praised Miele, but I couldn&#8217;t find any of those available locally. And Consumer Reports especially praised\u00a0<em>all<\/em>\u00a0the Bosch units, with them topping all their reliability and customer satisfaction charts!<\/p>\n<p>I remembered five or ten years ago, whenever I had bought my old GE, I remembered Bosch topped the charts too, but back then I settled for GE to save a few bucks&#8230;<\/p>\n<h2>Installation was (mostly) great!<\/h2>\n<p>So I spent a little more this time, hoping for a better experience. And installation was actually great\u2014it was a lot easier to install the Bosch than it was that the GE.<\/p>\n<p>It has a plastic base that slides better on the floor, and there&#8217;s easier routing of the drain hose, inlet hose, and power wire that makes it less risky when you&#8217;re pushing the thing into the blind cutout under the counter.<\/p>\n<p>The one weird thing was that whoever like tightened the feet on the bottom at the factory must&#8217;ve used an impact driver or something because they were all practically embedded, and wouldn&#8217;t budge.<\/p>\n<p>I was turning the little screw on the front that pushes the rear foot down through a little gearing, but the worm gear slipped out and kinda shoved the long rod that connects the front to the back out of place. I had to buy a 10mm hex socket to wiggle the foot loose enough the gearing would actually work.<\/p>\n<p>But once that was done, the rest of the install was seamless. (Thanks especially to some help from my Dad).<\/p>\n<h2>First use, encountering the Cloud requirement<\/h2>\n<p>So I turned it on, and immediately hated the new touch sensor stuff on it.<\/p>\n<p>The old GE had buttons: you press them in, they click and you know that you pressed a button.<\/p>\n<p>The touch sensor, you kind of touch it and the firmware\u2014like this new dishwasher actually takes time to boot up! I had to reset it like three times and my wife meanwhile was like laughing at me like look at this guy who does tech stuff and he can&#8217;t even figure out how to change the cycle on it.<\/p>\n<p>That took about five minutes, sadly.<\/p>\n<p>But eventually I pulled out the manual book because I was like&#8230; &#8220;this is actually confusing.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>It should be like: I touch the button and it changes to that mode! But that was not how it was working.<\/p>\n<p>I wanted to run just a rinse cycle to make sure the water would go in, the water would pump out through the sump, and everything worked post-install.<\/p>\n<p>But I couldn&#8217;t find a way to do a rinse cycle on the control panel.<\/p>\n<p>So I looked in the manual and found this note:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"insert-image\" src=\"https:\/\/www.jeffgeerling.com\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/bosch-dishwasher-manual-features-home-connect.jpg\" alt=\"Bosch dishwasher manual mention of Home Connect\" width=\"700\" height=\"394\" data-insert-type=\"image\" data-entity-type=\"file\" data-entity-uuid=\"insert-image-b39c0aae-ac8e-4760-9392-88c7efa29bd6\" data-insert-attach=\"{&quot;id&quot;:&quot;b39c0aae-ac8e-4760-9392-88c7efa29bd6&quot;,&quot;attributes&quot;:{&quot;alt&quot;:[&quot;alt&quot;,&quot;description&quot;],&quot;title&quot;:[&quot;title&quot;]}}\" \/><\/p>\n<p>It says options with an asterisk\u2014including Rinse, Machine Care (self-cleaning), HalfLoad, Eco, and Delay start, are &#8220;available through Home Connect app only and depending on your model.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The 500 series model I bought isn&#8217;t premium enough to feature a 7-segment display like the $400-more-expensive\u00a0<em>800<\/em>\u00a0series, so these fancy modes are hidden behind an app and cloud service.<\/p>\n<p>I was like, &#8220;Okay, I&#8217;ll look up this app and see if I can use it over Bluetooth or locally or whatever.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Nope! To use the app, you have to connect your\u00a0<em>dishwasher<\/em>\u00a0to your\u00a0<em>Wi-Fi<\/em>, which lets the dishwasher reach out on the internet to this Home Connect service.<\/p>\n<p>You have to set up an account on Home Connect, set up the Home Connect app on your phone, and\u00a0<em>then<\/em>\u00a0you can control your dishwasher\u00a0<em>through the Internet<\/em>\u00a0to run a rinse cycle.<\/p>\n<p>That doesn&#8217;t make any sense to me.<\/p>\n<p>An app? I mean, I can understand maybe adding some neat convenience features for those\u00a0<em>who want them<\/em>. Like on my new fridge\u2014which I chose not to connect to WiFI\u2014it has an app that would allow me to monitor the inside temperature or look up service codes more easily. If I wanted those add-on features, which my old fridge didn&#8217;t have, I could get them.<\/p>\n<p>But requiring an app to access features that\u00a0<em>used<\/em>\u00a0to be controllable via buttons on the dishwasher itself\u2014or\u00a0<em>are still<\/em>\u00a0if you pay $400 more for the fancy &#8220;800&#8221; model? That&#8217;s\u00a0<em>no bueno<\/em>.<\/p>\n<h2>What can I do?<\/h2>\n<p>Well, first of all, I could just not use those features. That&#8217;s kind of annoying because I bought it with the assumption that I could run the cleaning cycle, that I could run the rinse cycle without having to have an app and Wi-Fi.<\/p>\n<p>Another option is I could just connect it to my Wi-Fi, maybe on an IoT VLAN.<\/p>\n<p>But it&#8217;s not like a video doorbell, where an Internet connection adds on functionality, like being able to see who rang while you&#8217;re on vacation, or storing security footage clips on the cloud so you have them available even after someone robs your house&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>But a dishwasher&#8230; I&#8217;m not going to remote control my dishwasher and like, run an extra rinse cycle while I&#8217;m on a beach somewhere.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t need Internet on my dishwasher.<\/p>\n<p>Another\u00a0<em>third<\/em>\u00a0option is somebody has reverse engineered this protocol and built\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/osresearch\/hcpy\">HCPY<\/a>, a Home Connect Python library.<\/p>\n<p>But here&#8217;s the problem: I already spent like four hours getting this dishwasher installed in my kitchen. I don&#8217;t want to spend another four hours configuring my own web UI for it\u2014which still requires at least a one-time connection through Home Connect!\u2014and maintaining that as a service on my local network, relying on an unauthorized third party library using reverse-engineering to get at the private dishwasher API!<\/p>\n<h2>What can\u00a0<em>we<\/em>\u00a0do?<\/h2>\n<p>I don&#8217;t think we should let vendors get away with this stuff.<\/p>\n<p>First, it lets product designers get lazy.<\/p>\n<p>A feature like a little display, a little seven segment display that can show like two letters and a number of minutes remaining or something like that&#8230; How much does that cost?<\/p>\n<p>How hard is it to integrate that into every model, even the cheap ones?<\/p>\n<p>A lot of cheap dishwashers actually\u00a0<em>have<\/em>\u00a0those things, but not Bosch!<\/p>\n<p>With Bosch, you have to pay $400 for the privilege of a little display!<\/p>\n<p>Second, this might be a little bit conspiracy theory or whatever, but it feels like it&#8217;s part of planned obsolescence. Just like with the GE, where a lot of parts are designed to rust out after 5 or 10 years.<\/p>\n<p>If you have a cloud app, that means there&#8217;s a cloud service that has to be running. That costs money to maintain.<\/p>\n<p>And if there&#8217;s no subscription fee right now, that means one of two things:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>They could be selling our data already.<\/li>\n<li>At some point, they&#8217;ll either close the service because it&#8217;s a cost center (so the rinse cycle and eco mode on all these dishwashers just goes &#8220;POOF!&#8221;),\u00a0<em>or<\/em>\u00a0they&#8217;re going move to a subscription model.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>All of a sudden, if you want to run the self-cleaning cycle, you better start paying five bucks to Bosch every month.\u00a0<em>Forever<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s insane.<\/p>\n<p>Third, it&#8217;s a security hole in your local network.<\/p>\n<p>Bosch might be a\u00a0<em>little<\/em>\u00a0better than some no-name light bulb company making IoT light bulbs on Amazon, but only a little.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t want to have Bosch having full internet access on my local network.<\/p>\n<p>Their API would be able to talk back to my dishwasher, and the dishwasher\u2014unless I put it on a VLAN, which 99% of consumers have no clue how to do that&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s just something that shouldn&#8217;t have to happen.<\/p>\n<p>This is a dishwasher!<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know.<\/p>\n<h2>What\u00a0<em>should<\/em>\u00a0be done?<\/h2>\n<p>When I posted on social media about this, a lot of people told me to return it.<\/p>\n<p>But I spent four hours installing this thing built into my kitchen.<\/p>\n<p>I hooked it up to the water, it&#8217;s running through cycles&#8230; it\u00a0<em>is<\/em>\u00a0working. I&#8217;ll give them that. It does the normal stuff, but you know, there are some features that don&#8217;t work without the app.<\/p>\n<p>At a minimum, I think what Bosch should do is make it so that the dishwasher can be accessed locally with no requirement for a cloud account. (Really, it&#8217;d be even better to have all the functions accessible on the control panel!)<\/p>\n<p>Anyone building an IoT device, here is my consumer-first, e-waste-reduction maxim:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>First local,\u00a0<em>then<\/em>\u00a0cloud.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Cloud should be an add-on.<\/p>\n<p>It should be a convenience for people who don&#8217;t know how to do things like connect to their dishwasher with an app locally.<\/p>\n<p>And it&#8217;s not\u00a0<em>that<\/em>\u00a0hard.<\/p>\n<p>A little ESP32, a little $1 chip that you can put in there could do all this stuff locally with no cloud requirement at all.<\/p>\n<p>I think that there might be some quants or people who want to make a lot of money building all these cloud services.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t think that it&#8217;s people who are consumer-first and eco-conscious because if they were, they would give\u00a0<em>us<\/em>\u00a0control first and\u00a0<em>then<\/em>\u00a0add on &#8216;nice&#8217; quality of life features through a cloud service.<\/p>\n<p>With my Bosch 500 series dishwasher, I was excited after the easy install (besides those leveling feet), then was let down\u00a0<em>so hard<\/em>\u00a0once I found out I couldn&#8217;t use all the features it came with.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I won&#8217;t connect my dishwasher to your stupid cloud March 24, 2025 Jeff Geerling: This weekend I had to buy a new dishwasher because our old GE died. I bought a Bosch 500 series because that&#8217;s what Consumer Reports recommended, and more importantly, I could find one in stock. After my dad and I got &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=108708\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[87,80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-108708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","category-you-cant-make-this-up"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=108708"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108708\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":108709,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108708\/revisions\/108709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=108708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=108708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=108708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}