Just bought a 300, i believe. I couldnt care less about how loud my dishwasher is, but it is very quiet. I do care about ease of installation (easy) and how well it cleans dishes (very.)
so i recommend one without reservation.
Paul
We have one going in today, good timing with this post!
Just had a Model RF30HBEDBSR/AA installed, but haven't used it yet. Don't know if I should expect a "beeping" situation as described above. The dB is claimed to be 44, so I exprect it will be very quiet.
I think you would care about dishwasher noise levels if you had the cheapest model available like in my first (and only) apartment. You could wake the dead in the next city when you ran the dishwasher. I could hear the dishwashers from surrounding apartments when other tenants used them.
When we had our kitchen redone we got an 800 series 42dBA model. The top utensil rack is a definite plus and I now wouldn't want a DW without one, but otherwise the machine has been underwhelming. It actually is less quiet than the upper-end 5-year-old Kenmore it replaced. The arrangement of tines makes it awkward to load (this is quite subjective, of course); you have to clean the filter often because it does not have a built in food grinder, which the Kenmore did (but was still quieter!). This also means you have to carefully scrape any crumbs or other tiny bits from your plates. We are careful about all this, and use the right detergent, but overall this machine gets dishes clean less reliably than the Kenmore did.
I looked into DWs for my parents a while ago, and at that time KitchenAid was the only brand that still made models with food grinders. If I had it to do over, I would go with one of those.
David B. Morris
"Holz ist heilig."
Our DW died about two years ago and we weren't ready to change out all the appliances, so we bought a cheap used on the local listings for $25. Wife didn't like it so she sold it for $40 and found a different one for $30. We used it for almost 18 months and we were ready to replace all appliances, so the wife sold that one for $40. She is Scots by the way.
The one we bought was a floor model at the Blue Borg. It is a Kitchenaid, but a top of the line model (don't know which) but the wife got them to sell it to us for $475 and it normally goes for around $1500. It is the best DW we have ever had. You can stand next to it and not know it is running, it is that quiet. Dishes come clean that we would never have loaded in any DW before without pre-washing them.
The Scots, you got to love them.
We had a cheap kitchenaid before this one. It was loud. I put myself thru university and grad school working in a commercial kitchen; so loud is relative. I only brought it up because the salesman kept talking about how quiet it was, even though we kept saying we didnt care about that.
Paul
We bought the Ascenta model that is one below the 300 this spring. Seems to be everything a normal Bosch is but maybe a little more plastic and a little less insulation. Still too quiet to tell if the dishwasher is running and still washes great. Got it on sale almost $100 off, used a coupon Lowes sent us in the mail and the guy took another 10% off. Then our gas company gave us a $50 rebate and I sold the old Kenmore one for $50 on Craigslist. Worked out nicely.
Thanks for all the info!