Miele Ovens, Cooktops, Dishwashers
      - Customer Reviews & Safety Hazards

LIST SUMMARY OF PROBLEMS/DEFICIENCIES/SAFETY ISSUES

Table below indicates perceived importance/impact.

• IND - 42" Induction Cooktop
• DW - Dishwasher
• MW - Microwave+Convection "Speed" oven
• ST   - Steam+Convection oven
• WALL - 30" Wall oven
• OVENS - ALL THREE ovens (MW, ST, WALL)

Issue severity:     10=Severe/Important/DailyImpact;    1=Minor Aggravation

MIELE PICTURES/ILLUSTRATIONS/DEMONSTRATIONS

Miele Wall Oven

When sliding one rack out, it bumps adjacent rack such that it drags along the other (or prevents it from moving at all)
Image shows red circle point of contact/collision where it's worn thru the metal surface after just 2 months of use.

Metal is wearing down after just a few months of normal usage for oven racks.
We hope this will not lead to corrosion or filings of metal dropped below into food.

The convection wall oven has EXCELLENT heat distribution, but when two racks are positioned adjacent to each other,
they do not easily move in and out without colliding with their neighbor.
The oven rack structure could be easily modified by a redesigned bracket part
that spaces the shelves apart by an additional 1/8" (the brackets are held in with one screw), OR
have better manufacturing tolerances.
Miele's comment was: just don't position them adjacent to each other (and they say they will be editing their instruction book
instead of fixing the problem).

Yale's own web site shows a Wolf brand convection oven (above) with racks in adjacent shelf positions
(hopefully the bottom shelf is not warped but is due to cheap camera lens distortion).

Miele product image (above) shows Steam oven with adjacent shelf positions being used.

The following Miele touchscreen control panels are similar for the Wall Oven, Steam Speed Oven, and Combi Microwave Oven

for any of the ovens, if you enter anything in the range of 60 thru 99 seconds, [OK] is greyed-out (bottom right in red here),
thus not permitting you to "think in terms of seconds"
It's certainly easy to convert to minutes:seconds, but
why did some programmer go to great lengths to explicitly prevent you from entering "60" ??

Miele Oven Touchpad: The ^ and v arrows are mere cosmetics and are NOT clickable to step-up/down the time setting.
(shown above is HOURS duration, but these counter-intuitive indicators are displayed for MINUTES and all other settings (temperature, etc.) )
Having this capability would offer a more reliable option to change the temperature instead of the unpredictable swipe-scrolling.

Miele Wall Oven touchpad: one way to change temperature is to finger-scroll(swipe) up and down.
The touch-sensitive zone is ill-designed, such that if you touch/nudge near the top of the temperature number area (orange list),
the touchpad thinks you're clicking on "Operating Modes" touch-area and tries to cancel cooking.
One must have the fingers of a surgeon to use this mode successfully.  One owner is a concert pianist, and even that level of finger contorl is evidently not good enough!

The Wall Oven manual claims to be able to set the oven to 75 degrees F.
The touchscreen goes out of the way to prevent you from entering less than 125 degrees.
Similarly for all ovens, a time in seconds is limited to a maximum of 59 seconds, you cannot
think in terms of 60 seconds or 90 seconds. The keypad is overly programmed to only permit certain values to be entered - not very user-friendly.

Miele Induction CookTop

Low-impedance meter brings down the induced leakage voltage to the range of 3 to 9 VAC
As shown, meter is measuring the voltage between the pan handle (in operation on the cooktop) and the human hand(essentially "earth ground")

70VAC neon tester (high impedance) lights up readily from induced leakage voltage in pan handle.
Neon bulbs won't strike a glow until a minimum of 60-70VAC is reached.

Miele kitchen appliance Induction Cooktop turns OFF without any beep or notification other than a silent blinking F,  
     all due to a bit of onion   (1/4" square) that fell out of saute pan.
Especially when cooking several items in parallel, and being busy with all the pans' cooking progress, the entire cooktop turns off and
one doesn't notice anything until all cooking stops.

12" AllClad Sauce Pan demonstrates where the coils are located for the Miele Cooktop largest/central burner, an effective diameter of only 6".
6"dia (28 sq in) out of 12+"dia (176 sq in) would indicate that only 15% of this pans bottom surface is being energized, and the pan is expected to distribute the heat evenly and fully to the other 85%.
Above is shown after 6 minutes of carmelizing onions (continuous stirring, but intentionally not scraping the pan surface for this demonstration).
Temperatures are measured by an infrared gun thermometer.
Because of the limited diameter of the transformer primary coils, even with a duration of 6 minutes,
the temperature is 1/3 cooler outside that central area.  As a high-end appliance,
the central burner area should be far larger than a normal 6" generic/low-end rangetop burner.
This seems to be a Miele marketing design-specification deficiency (why the small coil area limitation?), and is not a good choice for a large family or a serious cook.
Additionally (altho not intended to demonstrate this), the pan is off-center from the induction coils because when the pan is in place, there are no visible surface markings on the glass top to show a "landing pattern" for the pan's placement: the pan itself covers the existing centering markings. (Parchment paper is recommended to prevent scratching in the inevitable slight moving of the pan on the surface during cooking)   One must memorize the distance from the edge of the overall cooktop.

Dusted flour heated to show that the heat distribution for large pans does not cover the entire large-pan (central) area for the top-of-the-line Miele induction cooktop.

An even coating of flour in the 12" sautee pan shows the heated distribution experienced
for the two bridged burners.

Induction cooktop instruction manual excerpt:

Red Rectangle icon button would seem to match operating manual instructions

To turn on a burner (cooking zone), one needs to tap the numeral zero "0" followed by the numeral for the desired heating level.

Miele Steam Speed Oven and Microwave Combi Oven

Incompatible pan: Even tho the glass trays are identical (and fit both), the supplied Steam Oven's metal pans
are 1/4" too narrow to fit the sister Convection Speedoven product. Why such an obvious incompatibility for side-by-side ovens?

BOTH  ST & MW ovens accept an (owner-supplied) standard commercial half-sheet size (17.75")
The feature and size compatibilities are hit and miss among products in the same family.

Ovens have to be unplugged or turned off at the circuit breaker in order to intentionally STOP them from cooling down.
Many times we WANT the oven to stay warm (ex: cheesecake overnight or yogurt making).
In any case, we do not want the ovens to waste electricity to cool down needlessly, especially when there was no moisture involved in the cooking.

Miele Microwave Heat Distribution (evenness) tests.
1/2 C flour spread as uniformly as possible. An orange towel is used in the pictures for visual contrast.

THe bottom shelf was much faster indicating its hotspot, after about 4 minutes

The same experiment done at the middle shelf height took about 7 minutes (we're not sure why it took longer, perhaps less energy in the central height area?)

Shop Drawings for Architects and Cabinetmakers

Imprecise/Incorrect/Incomplete notation in design drawings where exact accuracy is needed for architects and cabinet makers.
Our actual dimensions varied by 1/2" -- enough to cause the oven not to fit in a custom-made cabinet if the carpenter used the drawings available/provided.

Miele Kitchen Appliance Problem Details

1. Wall oven: The oven racks, when placed in adjacent height-positions, bump into each other, causing the adjacent rack to be “pulled along” while the lower neighbor is being pulled out. This is most certainly a design tolerance flaw that many consumers will just put up with as an aggravating inconvenience.  Because we use this oven often with multiple racks, we have discovered something that may not have been noticed by the test team, but it comes across as looking like a lack of attention to detail for a seemingly common configuration for usage.
   We use this configuration several times a month for cooking large batches of cookies and granola.
   If this had been a $1000 product, we would "just put up with it" (and everything else on this page)
   We're seeing that Miele is not a "high-end brand" (for high-end cooks and "foodies") but rather just a "high-priced brand" with poor design features.
   SEE IMAGES BELOW
   
   
2. Dishwasher: We love the dishwasher. It is so far superior to our other dishwasher (Bosch – we still have a Bosch as a second unit for our large dinner parties), that it is difficult to consider these two machines in the same class.  We can see the incredible amount of intelligence and care that went into the Miele dishwasher design.  The only problem we had with it was during our installation:  both cast aluminum support brackets that attach the plastic kickplate to the machine broke when the door was first opened because the kickplate included was for a 6” kick, not a 4” space that we have, and there weren’t effective instructions nor warnings about the need to break off part of the plastic in order to fit. The directions, as good as these are, somehow didn’t communicate how to make certain that this didn’t happen, especially since it’s a case of breaking a component (as opposed to something needing adjustment or special attention).  I imagine that people experienced with Miele dishwashers wouldn’t have this issue for those who install Miele every day. Many other appliance installers would. Miele Wellesley showroom DID replace these at no charge. This was one of only TWO responses in the four pages of line items we sent them.
   
   
3. Cooktop: Pans in operation on the cooktop induce a voltage in the metal that is "felt" (vibrations/tinglings) when lightly touched. Perhaps a life safety issue for those with pacemakers?
   NIH generic brand study does not mention the induced voltage aspect: NIH research link: "With eccentrically positioned large pots, voltages of up to 800 mV could be induced."
   We observed 70VAC (high impedance) and 9VAC (low impedance meter load) while touching the metal cookware.
   Another article says: pacemakers use induction heating technology caused by electromagnets, which should not be capable of creating a magnetic field large enough to “bubble over” [sic] your pacemaker. Probably not dangerous for pacemakes unless you lie down directly on top of the unit, but certainly TINGLY to the touch for 25KHz 9VAC to 60VAC (depending on how one measures it).
   SEE IMAGES ABOVE

Aggravations/Deficienies:  

1. All appliances – website and sales literature documentation:  There is no clear documentation AT THE TOP LEVEL and at least in the overview of each appliance that indicate clearly what’s “included in the box”. At the next level, provide details about power cord configuration/plugs supplied, etc.  (because 4 of our 5 units came with electrical plugs already attached (which was actually quite nice), not knowing the plug style caused extra trips to Home Depot and Standard Electric to purchase matching receptacles.
   This “what’s-included” information needs to be available to all salesmen anyway: the website does not have this simple list in an obvious manner.  
   Related aside: As it turns out, all of us, including the excellent salesperson at Yale appliance (and based on the showroom display model configuration) had misunderstood how many racks were included with the wall oven and we had ordered an extra rack for the wall oven that we don’t need (Yale is kindly accepting a return).
   
   
2. All appliances – operating manuals:   Operating manuals all need a basic operation instruction section, often called a “Quickstart Guide”.  Not having such a section is an unfortunate way for consumers to be introduced to your appliances: a bad out-of-the-box experience takes a while to get over.  We have been using your operating manuals as we continue to use our appliances and find the manuals not all that friendly for consumers.  It appears to us there has not been enough consumer testing of these manuals (nor appliances themselves).  For example, some of the information on the cooktop manual was incorrect, ambiguous, and incomplete.  This was not at all a matter of English translation – the English sentences themselves were fine;  rather the technical & ergonomic/UI (User Interface) details conveyance were lacking.   We wonder if your whole-quality assurance dept or your technical writers actually used the manuals step-by-step (or tested them on anyone who was previously unfamiliar with your products, in order to be an impartial new-user).
   
   
3. All appliances – help consumers and potential increase profit margin: For this level of product expense (five major appliances), there were no coupons or first-usage expendable products that were required for operation that often come with other products.  Examples:  cooktop cleaning solution/wipes;  dishwasher salts.   The one thing that was included was anti-scaling product for the steam oven, but we wouldn’t be needing that for many months.  This could be a profit center for the company simply by including (co-marketing) coupons that work for ordering off of the Miele website (the anti-scaling item is still not needed after a year of frequent home usage).  
   
   
4. Microwave, Steam, Wall Oven - programming & ergonomic operation:  
1. The Miele touchscreen command-hierarchy-tree design and features are sub-optimal.  Most high-end companies have an ergonomic/usability/userability engineer to optimize feature effectiveness and ease of (logical) operation, AND compatibility of operation BETWEEN appliances - there are many differences in similar operations for the ovens. The engineer writing this is embarrassed for their engineers by the 1990s-style design interface.
2. The most annoying usability issue for us is the limitations of programming for the these ovens and one-touch access to start cooking for the (programmed) most common usage mode.
3. Boot speed:  One has to wait for microprocessor booting.  Why cannot the concept of “warm-start” or other hibernate/low-power-consumption techniques be employed to provide no-wait and true one-click operation to access/initiate the most frequently used mode(s).
4. MW: After booting,  Minute+ and Popcorn(!) are the only two single-touch buttons possible.  The front panel real estate should be FILLED with user-programmable buttons at every possible inch of touchscreen real estate. 
5. Temperature & Time Scrolling:
   (1) The “feel” and operation of the momentum-scrolling and even micro-adjusting scrolling is awkward and counter-intuitive. It certainly is not in the same ballpark of other commonly used touchscreen devices. We do not understand why this would have been designed to be different from widely accepted algorithms from even a decade ago.
   (2) There is plenty of real estate in your touchscreen area to initially display the keypad view (and once entered or proceeding to more settings, dismiss/hide it) – this would allow the user to work-around the awkward scrolling without the need for an additional click. Initial keypad display could be a programmable option.
   (3) Allow Time scrolling (and more importantly keypad display) to be a programmable parameter for temp/time as a deeper level of START MENU than is offered now.  You have hierarchical menus, why not allow access to them for those who are comfortable with them.  
6. MW: The limitation of programmability of Minute+ and Popcorn  does not allow programming of less than one minute.  This is a software limitation with no possible justification.  How can we get upgraded firmware/microcode to fix this (and other limitations)?   “Popcorn” should have an option to be additive (cumulative) for successive clicks (like Minute+ successive clicks).
7. The Combination of START MENU and FAVORITES features does not allow one-click operation.  Three clicks are needed to commence cooking.     One click is consumer-friendly:  after we program a Favorite, we want to click and cook.  Providing an option to edit each Favorite is great, but not at the expense of going from one touch to three separate commands in three different locations on the touch screen.  Thank goodness this can be easily fixed by Miele with re designing their software.
8. Allow “long-press” (hold) to engage the operation for additional flexibility with default button definitions, and also within the programmable options.
9. There are no lists/references we could find for “programming recipes” (NOT meaning cooking recipes, but programming tips)  for how to work-around the various programming limitations and mode constraints. Please share your experiences and tricks for better programmatic usage.
10. Many of the above sub-topics result from our need to try to circumvent the omission of your design decision to omit a single-touch  30-Second+  button,  where you chose instead  Minute+.   The only downside of 30 Second+  is that someone would have to click twice.   By having only Minute+,  you prevent a quick gesture to start cooking with ease for the more common granularity of 30 second increments.   Furthermore, the engineers have explicitly prevented anyone from re-programming Minute+ to act as 30Second+  by limiting the minimum programmable time to 1 minute.  This limitation appears arbitrary and wholly unnecessary.
11. Wall & steam: The wall oven seems not to have what we would call an energy-saver mode that also doubles as a no-energy-keep-warm mode in order to maximize the residual heat left in the oven at the time of shut off:  the fans are forced to be  left on to cool down the equipment (at most stopped by the option of temperature vs. (a long) time) and even tho fans require minimal electrical power, it’s not an option to be able to turn that off—only thwarted by turning of the breaker. In fact, we employ the residual heat for certain types of uses that do not require the oven to be operating AT ALL.  Bread rising.  Yogurt making.  General warm-and-hold where exacting temperature is not an issue.
12. OVENS: There’s an aggravating difference between the Steam and other ovens.  The cook time function on the steam oven properly and logically BEGINS timing-countdown when the oven reaches the desired temperature.  The wall & microwave ovens start the countdown immediately, thus one must add ~5 minutes to the desired at-temperature time entered.
13. Microwave-specific (but related to this thread):  FAVORITES cannot be programmed (downward in the menu structure) past the level of Operating mode – so it’s not very useful—you cannot pre-program time and power, for instance, just select a mode.
14. Microwave-specific (but related to this thread):   You cannot control the power level for Popcorn (in order to re-purpose it as a customized single-touch button) – the only option is time (but – horrors! – no time shorter than 1 minute).  Again, this all seems arbitrarily constraining.
15. All ovens: The so-called “buzzer” tone is volume-controllable but has no ability to be modified to be a simple beep.
16. All ovens: Many times we want the oven to be turned off at the end of cooking, but to just remain casually at the temperature to "coast". However, it seems that all three ovens put themselves in a cooldown mode, which is only avoided by unplugging or turning off the circuit breaker. The cooling fans still are taking power, and even if the oven is empty, we do not wish to expend energy to hasten the oven cooling for no reason.
17. Wall oven: Low Limit of oven temperature setting is 50 degrees different from the manual.
18. Microwave operation does not kick in until temperature reaches request temp during combi-bake. It would be good to get a headstart in MW heating during convection heating.
19. Wall Oven: you have to turn back on the oven to turn off the oven LIGHT in some case.
20. All ovens: Cannot enter "90 seconds" - have to enter 1:30 minutes. Even our old 1990s microwave allowed "90 seconds"
21. Steam: the microprocessor can get confused at the end of steam cooking. EMPTY CONDENSATE (rinsing water) [OK] turns OFF steam oven. Even when done cooking, it requires you to refill the fresh (tap) water container even though you're not going to use the oven for several days. (We keep ours empty/dry to avoid fungal build up)
22. Microwave: Allow MINUTE+ to restart microwave after door open.
23. Steam: When START AT is set for a time (several hours) in the future, the fan (etc) still runs unnecessarily. Has an energy-saving consultant reviewed these products?
24. Steam: Even though nothing was cooked or set up, turning the oven OFF can cause a RINSE operation.
25. Microwave: No way to adjust time after starting cooking. Have to cancel and start over with new desired cooking time.
26. Microwave Speed oven: for some of the pre-programmed baking operations, the display steps go thru unneeded and aggravating steps and requirements to open and close the door (when you ALREADY had put in the item), and only near the end does it tell you what shelf to use (which should be PRIOR to the instruction of "put the item in the oven")

Car manufacturers employ vehicle harmony engineers (that’s Ford’s term for end-user sound-experience experts)
to optimize not only the ambient/mechanical sounds emanating from the car mechanics, but also the ergonomics of the signal pitches and alert tones produced by the car’s various systems.  Hopefully a MIDI or MP3 option might be made available in Miele products – or at least have an option of a simple beep.
FWIW, the various arpeggios for the several Miele “buzzer” sounds are dated and annoying (at least for this professional musician).  A simple  300 ms beep would suffice.  In this day and age of programmable ringtones, it’s surprising that there is not an option of any kind except less loud annoyances.

1. Suggestion for all touchscreens:  The diameter of the hot-spot (sensitive) area would be helpful to be programmable. With my skinny/boney fingers, it’s aggravating to finagle the finger angle needed in order to hit the mark and have a large enough (capacitive?) area to activate a button. I have to aim high (especially on edge-located-buttons) and with an overall finger profile parallel to the surface, and MAYBE it triggers.  Having a parameter to control “sensitivity” in this way (even as coarse a granularity as S-M-L diameters) would benefit a wide range of customers’ finger physiques.
2. Suggestion for all touchscreens:  It’s nice to press (click) the setting status (time/temp/etc) to change that time or temperature or bring up the time-temp menu (via screen title).  However, it seems inconsistent that not all parameter fields are hotspots to trigger the screen to change for adjusting parameters.  It seems arbitrary to exclude the small-font digit fields themselves when the word “Change” is adjacent – for me it’s more intuitive to aim for the digits-to-change than to parse “Change” and re-aim for the word.
3. Wall oven temperature range limitation:  The wall oven’s low temperature setting is limited to 125 F.  This seems arbitrary and unnecessary.  Your convection oven allows temperatures down to 80 F for warming/proofing, thus proving your technology capable of sensing that low.  Someone has gone to a LOT of trouble to program the oven’s keypad to grey-out digits that would lead to a setting that’s out of range.  We do not understand the rationale for not being able to “warm” something in your wall ovens.  We were indeed aware of this prior to purchase, but include this suggestion in our list of limitations because the design seems so capricious.
   
   
   
1. Cooktop Manual:   The rectangle/parallelogram icon in the manual, which we now know was meant to be a round zero digit,  is nowhere to be found on the control/display screen in order to turn a burner on.  In fact the surface button that best matches turned out to be the burner-bridging control which has nothing to do with turning the burner on, and proved to be quite a distraction (proverbial red herring) to keep pressing it to try to turn the burner on.    It took us a half hour of experimenting to try to find where is that “rectangle”  to press to turn on the burner. 
   What an unfortunate “typo” (choice of 7-segment fonts/symbols)  to use for this very major function of “ON” especially when first-time users would have no idea of the odd, illogical incantation sequence needed
   to first turn it off (press zero) in order to turn it on (even tho it may be a necessary safety consideration). This was confounded by these instructions being buried in the middle of the operating manual.  In retrospect, we were indeed shown this in the showroom, but it’s so far from being logical, we did not remember at all.
   Again, this point #5 is about clear manual instructions and providing a quickstart guide.
   SEE IMAGES BELOW
2. Cooktop Manual:  The operating manual omits showing the “F” error code in the diagram of possible display codes on the main display explanation:  the diagram should at least indicate that this display field could contain a warning code (and point to a list of what they mean).  Instead, this information is in the FAQ section in the back.  We had to do a google search, having overlooked the FAQ. 
   You might imagine our initial horror when upon first power-up, that all of a sudden the cooktop kept shutting down and displaying “F”  -- What did we do wrong?   ‘F’ seems awfully scary like it’s broken just after turning it on the first time  -  Why did the cooktop keep turning off by itself, especially after our extended contortions to get it turned on.  
   [FYI: General, general fault signal · Sammelstörmeldung [f]]
   As a point of comparison, in our area showroom visits, Thermador’s cooktop displays rather detailed English phrases for various errors with solutions – impressive for a less-expensive and less-sophisticated product.
3. Cooktop:   Suggestion to add dots or tiny marks or design elements as (horizontal) alignment marks for the center burner for when a LARGE pan is being used which covers all the etched landing-pattern guides for where the coils are.  Once occluded by a utensil, there’s nothing else on the entire cooktop to use for easy reference for alignment.  Not that it’s an exacting science for where to align, it would be an easy visual indication to add that could be cleverly/creatively included.  In the X-dimension, the Miele logo can be used for up to medium sized pans, but there’s nothing in the Y dimension. Our 17” pot has no choice albeit not quite centered because that’s all the room there is between the trim and the sensors that display “F” and turn off the cooktop.  Miele’s sister cooktop models are worse:  there’s nothing is EITHER dimension to be helpful for aligning when a large pan covers up the etched landing pattern positioning circles.
4. Cooktop: The cooktop turns itself off (supposedly as a safety feature) when anything passes over the touch menu area for more than 1 second. While we can see that this is likely a safety necessity, there is no indication that this has happened except for a blinking "F" (how appropriate!). Many times in the midst of cooking a large meal with several burners going, an implement or the protective parchment paper can land within the sacred menu area and turn off the entire cooktop. Only several minutes later does one notice that cooking progress has stopped and cooking quality compromised. We would hope there would be an audible beeping when this happens, and a programmable option to set the length of time for the menu intrusion to trigger the power-down.
5. Purline 24” Combi-Steam Oven DGC 6800 XL manual:  We are fabricating our own cabinets and appreciate the difficulty of supplying accurate information about the various dimensions and restrictions for all different types of installations.  That being said, we’re glad we didn’t construct the cabinets based on the drawings ahead of having the units in-hand!  Some pointers for this manual: Page 4 Isometric View – great to see – needs approximate flange directions or notation for where else this is included. Front View (also true for Page 6, Door Swing Detail): the unit is actually 17 ¾” tall, so the 455mm dimension and the 18” dimension is not accurate.  Page 5 Top View, Door Open – great to see – place for the flange dimensions or just a simple note? Side View: really need dimension of the “feet” for clarity purposes, and the 17 11/16” dimension is actually off.  This manual needs some more “detail drawings (such as the Door Swing)” to show the details more clearly.  See attached PDF annotated Miele diagram.
6. There are a few more issues that at this time we are unable to reduce to a repeatable root-cause sequence of actions that cause them in order to convey instructions to reproduce the problems.  We may add to our list at a later date.

In subsequent testing the wall oven racks in the Wellesley Miele distributor demo showroom, we realized that there were  two distinct issues that we’ve been having at home with adjacent rack movement tolerances: 

1. as re-enacted in the showroom model, when the non-glide rack is above a glide rack, the glide rack catches on the under-structure of the adjacent non-glide rack.  This is a design tolerance issue in error of 1/4”.  The showroom did supply us with a replacement glide rack that resolves this issue by replacing the non-glide with a glide rack.
   However, the units should not be shipped with racks that could present a major safety issue when dealing with hot bakeware and clumsy racks (a rack could catch its neighbor and pull out hot food unexpectedly)
   
   
2. however, the second category of two adjacent glide racks' mfg tolerance issues that we’ve been experiencing did not manifest itself in the showroom context, but when we returned home we debugged further, as detailed below.

   regardless of which two adjacent rack positions within the oven (i.e., it’s not an oven shelf level support structure issue),
   two adjacent glide racks have a tolerance issue where the adjacent structures catch on each other, thus causing a hiccup in the otherwise elegantly smooth glide, non-friction rack movement. The issue is more severe when the upper (of two) racks is weight-loaded, and could be result in a safety issue when dealing with large/hot/heavy cookware.

   The new replacement rack given us (to avoid the #1 issue above)  exhibits the same  #2 issue properties both in an upper- as well as  lower-neighbor position.

   In other words, our glide racks have different dimensions than the one in the showroom, but note that we did not test the showroom unit with any sort of loading on the racks.

   We could be happy with a solution where WE grind down the rod structure area of each rack so that it doesn’t collide with the upper neighbor. This gets us going, but we’re disappointed that such a remedy is needed for a $4000 high-end oven. Another solution, more difficult, is to bend some of the parts of the glide assembly and rack.
   

   The first image (in the above pictures section) shows where the two adjacent GLIDE racks touch/hit

   The second image reveals that, even in our limited time of usage (2 months), the chrome(?)  finish shows the wearing/abrasion of the collisions during motion.  Note that we have not yet done any sort of grinding on the racks in order to modify them to NOT hit each other.

Miele Kitchen Appliance Review Summary

Five appliances were purchased in December 2016 based primarily on Miele's high-end/high-style architectural design appearance and the promise of great performance.
We are foodies, engineers, and contemporary architects. The appliances are superb in their functional(*) results:

• The Dishwasher is spectacular: our other similar high-end dishwashers (Gaggenau, Bosch, Asko, Asea, GE Monogram) pale in comparison to the cleaning success of this Miele.
• The 42" Miele Induction cooktop provides wicked fast heating and precise, responsive control over cooking temperature, far better than even gas. (see problems below)
• The Steam combi-oven is impressive in its range of cooking styles, range of cooking "programs" (sets of time/temp/etc steps, pre-programmed), and is especially successful with vegetables and breads. (see problems below)
• The Microwave speed oven is flexible and useful in its combination (convection+microwave) modes. (see problems below)
• The Wall oven has unequalled consistency of heat distribution throughout the oven shelf levels - no need to rotate/shift/swap baked goods. (see problems below)

  (*) By functional, we are referring to the actual cooking results of the food being prepared. The safety, ergonomics, user-interface, (modern-day) logical operation, and logistical aspects range from life-safety danger, to usable (with reservations), to embarrassing design engineering.

We would expect there to be a few rough edges for any product, and we would expect that high-end product families like Miele's would have implemented bug fixes/improvements over the years to their operational software/firmware. The number of major usage issues we've encountered is unconscionable: these products have been in production for many years and are not "modern" in their user-interfaces. The lack of responsiveness is embarrassing, especially for a high-end product line.

Operating/usage modes vary between appliances such that one has to "learn" a different set of conventions & behaviors for each appliance. Their design teams apparently didn't "speak with each other" and seemingly there was no overall usage-design quality-control across the product family. We are disappointed that Miele's product improvement team has not updated their 1990s-class user-interface designs. Smartphone and consumer touchscreens have been commonplace for over a decade; Google & Apple engineers have set the conventions for logical, convenient, and efficient human-factor user interfaces. If Miele is to be an industry leader, one would think they would have top-shelf, intuitive designs.

Because of the huge number of design & safety deficiencies in these supposedly high-end appliances, we would have hoped to have had timely & serious responses from Miele & Yale Electric.

Purchase & Usage Timeline - Widely unsuccessful at all levels as of Dec 2017

January 6, 2017: Products delivered - Yale's delivery team was unbelievably sophisticated, clean, careful, and communicated details of how they were bringing in the appliances, checking on pets in the house, and documenting each step with pictures. We were off to a fantastic start: in all the years of high-end commercial and residential construction, we've never seen this level of Cadillac-level treatment.
This is the best, most worthwhile $95 delivery one could ever buy!

January 17, 2017: We made our first contact to Miele's customer service (to their published address: technicalservice@...), with no response at all.

February 17, 2017: Inquiry via another avenue got an initial response that was almost a generic/canned response, as if to get rid of us--their response was:
         "We are sorry to hear you are disappointed in the design of the appliances.
           We do always recommend stopping in one of our dealer showrooms to
            try the equipment prior to purchase  
            so you can make sure Miele is right for you."
We were shocked by this corporate response. How is anyone supposed to use FIVE appliances in their showroom for everyday cooking combinations to discover all these bugs & deficiencies? Because of Miele's reputation, internet reviews, and salesman spiel, we had trusted that the architectural (cosmetic) design was indicative of a commensurate overall operational design.

Feb-March, 2017: Communications with Andrew in the Wellesley factory showroom, culminating in our visit to the showroom 3/30 (we visited the mfg showroom once prior to multiple visits & purchase at the retailer).

There were four issues for which the Wellesley(MA) Miele factory showroom rep (Andrew) was able to address to some extent using the capabilities he had available to him-- thank you Andrew for offering concrete help when no one else had, at least in these issues (out of many dozens).

1. Replaced one non-glide wall oven rack with one glide rack. This resolved one of our rack issues, but does nothing for the glide racks that bump into each other on their way in and out. And no mention of any redesign or remedy for the product line except to edit the manual and marketing materials to warn not to position two racks in adjacent slots-- a strategy we were incredulous with: why would an appliance be designed where you weren't supposed to use adjacent shelf locations? (The real solution would be to space apart the shelf supports by a mere extra 1/8" to allow for design and mfg tolerances.
2. Gave us a programming option work-around to eliminate the extra [OK] confirmation needed for U.S. Steam ovens. This worked for a while, but we suspect got reset upon a power failure, and is back to the inconvenient factory mode.
3. Ordered replacement dishwasher cast aluminum kickplate supports. Again this resolved our problem, but did not address the labeling/instructions issue that would help others avoid the installation problem/damage.
4. Sent us complimentary DW salts and ST de-scaling kits (we believed $10 starter-items like this should be included in a multi-thousand-dollar purchase, especially when co-marketing might be at no cost to Miele)

Aside from this mfg regional showroom help, there has been only one email from Miele USA and that was later in Sept 2017 regarding our cooktop, offering to replace the induction cooktop with a gas cooktop (we do not have access to gas; we do not want gas).

August 21, 2017: After many months (since 1/17/17) of no overall action, we sent an email to Yale Electric CEO (Steve Sheinkopf) recommending to STOP SELLING Miele appliances if Yale & Miele are not willing to stand behind their warranties. 23 minutes later the VP of (Yale) Cust Service called (we had not included a phone number, so he would have had to have researched it) and he was supposedly taking charge of our plight. On the phone, he said he would be sending his Customer Service Manager to personally check out our appliances, and contacting Miele corporate offices to see why there has been no response. Corey Stryker from Miele additionally called on 8/23/17 to offer help, but nothing materialized. This was but a brief moment of attention to the list of issues.

September 2017: We got a call from the Miele US representative offering a replacement gas cooktop. We got a call from Yale attempting to set up an appointment, but Yale never followed up the following week when we were back in town.

December 2017: No further communication; NEVER any (5-year) warranty visit, etc.

January 2017: We sent yet another email to Yale and got a response that they had handed off the issues to Miele since Yale perceived that all of our issues were design-related (i.e., the appliances are operating as intended). We were never informed of this hand-off.Subsequently, we were able to arrange for a home visit in late January to have a top tech from Yale as well as a US regional Miele tech person.