Our new Miele Futura Diamond DW was installed on Friday. I was not happy with the installer, who was held out to be Miele trained, but not employed by Miele. He spoke only broken English, so communication was challenging. And the few questions I asked--from reading GW forum threads--he dismissed as not applicable to my situation. (For instance, he said I didn't need to test or adjust the water hardness setting because I don't have well water. And when I asked for the DW to be connected to the cold water line for proper China/Crystal performance, he insisted on connecting it to the hot water line.)

When the installer left, the dishwasher was running (with water only, presumably to test for leaks) and he just left without a word of explanation. When the cycle stopped, I opened the DW and discovered he'd left some soft foam packing material on one of the racks!

I settled in for an evening of reading the 82 page Miele manual. This morning, I returned to the kitchen to try to get my new baby up and running. My DH has been very patient but is visibly amused that I just spent three grand on a dishwasher that--48 hours later--has yet to wash its first dish. ;) After removing the red-bar plastic protector from the control panel so I could read the display, I began anew, with the manual open to the 9 page section entitled: Before using for the first time.

Since the control panel display said to add rinse aid, I did that. Then I programmed in our water hardness setting at 15 gpg, as determined by a SofChek water hardness strip test that I picked up at the shop where I purchased Miele DW supplies yesterday. Sure enough, the factory default setting for water hardness was 1 gpg, much different than our actual "non-well water" hardness.

Next, I proceeded to the directions for adding salt, and this is where I am currently stuck. Page 16 of the manual says to add 2 quarts of water before adding salt for the first time so the salt can dissolve properly. After unscrewing the lid of the salt container, I proceeded to add 8 cups of water with my measuring cup. When I started pouring in the 5th cup, the water overflowed. Since I find it unlikely that the German engineers would misstate the quantity of water required, I now had to question whether my installer may have added some water to the salt reservoir.

DH suggested that I remove all the water and start anew. So, turkey bulb baster in hand, I removed the water. I took out the same amount of water I had poured in--just over half of what Miele instructed. Despite DH's suggestion that there could be a lower portion of the water reservoir that my baster could not access, I am thinking that my installer did not, in fact, even unscrew the lid of the water reservoir.

The Miele manual state that the salt container should be "filled" with salt, but does not say how much salt it should take. Since it took only half the water amount specified in the manual, how much water and how much salt should I put in? The manual does say that the salt container holds approximately 4.4 lbs. (2 kg) of salt. An entire box of Miele salt contains 3.3 lbs. (1.5 kg) of salt.

If I put in half the amount of water per the Miele manual (4 cups) would you think I should put in half the amount of salt (2.2 lbs) the manual states it takes to "fill" the salt container? I can't imagine that 2.2 lbs of salt would dissolve into the amount of available volume (approx. 1/4 cup) left after I add half the prescribed amount of water to the salt reservoir.

This must seem very amusing to those of you who happily operate your Miele DWs without a second thought, but we have never used a water softening system of any kind in our house, so the whole concept of salt for softening is new to us. Many thanks for any advice!