Why You Can Trust CNET Electrolux EI24ID30QS review: The unassuming appliance you'd want on dish duty
The Electrolux EI24ID30QS doesn't do much to impress, and doesn't do much to disappoint.
The Electrolux EI24ID30QS feels like a piece we've been missing from our collection of dishwashers thus far. It fits in the middle perfectly. Nothing about it is exceptional, but it's pretty good at just about everything you'd want in a dishwasher. It has an upper mid-range $900 price. It cleans well, has a nice lineup of features, looks the part of a high-end dishwasher, and it's easy to load and to use.
Electrolux EI24ID30QS
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
For roughly the same price, the $800 Bosch SHS63VL5UC has better cleaning performance but it's also a pain in the butt to use and doesn't have many features to speak of. The Electrolux EI24ID30QS does everything besides cleaning much better than that Bosch, and is a pretty good cleaner itself.
If you want the best dish cleaner for the price and don't care about the occasional headache, go with the Bosch SHS63VL5UC. If you rinse your dishes, I'd recommend the easier to use Electrolux EI24ID30QS.
Blending in nicely
With unbroken stainless steel on the front and few color accents breaking up the mostly grey interior, the design of the EI24ID30QS walks a fine line between understated and boring. In a crowd of premium appliances, you'd have a hard time picking it out, but taken on its own, it looks the part of an upper echelon machine.
You can purchase the EI24ID30QS from large appliance retailers such as Best Buy, Sears and AJ Madison. As usual with large appliances, you'll find it on sale for less than the listed $900 price. Best Buy has it for $720. You can also enter your ZIP into the Electrolux website and find retailers near you. The Electrolux EI24ID30QS isn't available overseas.
Loading your dishes
You can clip a water bottle to these fold out jets on the upper rack.
Blue accessories adorn the mostly gray interior in a few places. The bottle wash jets on the upper rack fold out and let you clip on tall items. It's a neat way of scraping the dirt off the hard to reach bottom of baby bottles or water bottles. The $1,200 GE PDT750SSFSS has something similar, but it's a clever feature nonetheless and I appreciate its inclusion in a sub-$1,000 model.
The upper rack also has blue braces on its stem holders which do a great job of keeping your wine glasses in place without taking up too much room. We saw similar stem holders on the $1,100 Frigidaire FPID2497RF, which makes sense, as Frigidaire is owned by Electrolux. Great stem holders might not seem like a huge deal, but Electrolux does them better than any other brand we've tested.
The stem holders keep your fragile glasses secure without taking up extra room.
You can also raise and lower the upper rack. Lift it to set it in its higher position, then lift it again and release it to drop it back down. That flexibility helps you put tall dishes on either the top or bottom rack, and a couple of sets of fold down tines also help make room for larger or oddly shaped dishes. In all, the front half of two upper rack columns fold down, and the back two rows of tines on the bottom fold down.
The rest of the rack design is pretty straightforward. The EI24ID30QS doesn't have anything tremendously helpful like a third rack or tines that change angles, but you'll be able to load plenty of dishes without much hassle.
Selecting your cycle
The last blue color accent on the interior comes from the orbiting wheel of jets at the bottom of the tub. Between the wheel of jets, the jets beneath the upper rack, and another set of jets at the top of the tub, the Electrolux EI24ID30QS does a good job of spraying every inch of your dishes once you get your stack of dishes loaded into it.
The wheel of jets at the bottom of the tub helps the EI24ID30QS keep missed spots to a minimum.
Select your cycle on the touch controls hidden on the upper lip. The EI24ID30QS has a standard mix of settings, including a snappy 30-minute "Fast" cycle and helpful options such as "hi temp" and "max dry."
I'd have liked some sort of display estimating the time to completion as you select your cycle. You'll need to hang on to the instruction manual for that info. It doesn't have a delicate setting for fine china, which might be a problem for some. And the controls can be a little sluggish when you first start pressing buttons.
The touch controls proved a little sluggish.
I also found starting the dishwasher unintuitive -- I never heard the start button beep to confirm that I'd actually pressed it. So I'd always close the dishwasher's door largely unsure if it was going to start. Fortunately, while it runs, the fact that the dishwasher is quiet is a good thing. The EI24ID30QS has a 49dB sound rating, which matches the $900 LG LDF7774ST. Handily, a blue light shines on the ground once the cycle is complete to let you know your dishes are ready.
Coming clean
We were pleasantly surprised to discover mostly clean dishes inside the EI24ID30QS after our tests. That might sound sarcastic, since you'd ideally hope for completely clean dishes inside a $900 dishwasher, but we're quite hard on our dishwashers when we test them.
We slather 13 different foods across 112 dishes and let those dishes sit out for 24 hours before loading them in and letting the dishwasher go to work. We combine bulky spinach and mac-and-cheese noodles with sticky honey and eggs.
Our test was too much for the $1,100 Frigidaire FPID2497RF, which earned a 55.4% overall cleaning scores. So the EI24ID30QS surprised us in a good way when it produced much better results, beating both the Frigidaire and the similarly priced LG LDF7774ST.
That Bosch is still the best dish cleaner we've seen, but the Electrolux EI24ID30QS outperformed the similarly priced LG LDF7774ST.
The Electrolux EI24ID30QS doesn't miss many spots and its combinations of water jets take care of stuck on foods. On a couple of runs we found a little bit of peanut butter left on the knives, but otherwise, all the food we stuck onto our dishes came off.
If you rinse or scrape your dishes, the filter of the EI24ID30QS will easily handle whatever you throw at it, and you don't need to worry about missing one or two spaghetti noodles. The filter only faltered when we loaded it with plates full of mac and cheese and chopped spinach leaves.
We found a lot of redeposit on the large plates especially, but also on the small plates and bowls. We occasionally found small pieces of spinach stuck to the bottom of coffee cups as well. So the Electrolux EI24ID30QS isn't perfect. Without any drying add-ons, it also left a ton of water marks on our glassware.
Some redeposit aside, the EI24ID30QS handled our stressful tests admirably.
Fortunately, if you turn on "Max Dry" and use rinse aid, the Electrolux EI24ID30QS does well to fix the water mark problem. Its dry score with Max Dry increased to a respectable 58.8%, which matches the excellent Bosch on the same test.
Overall, the Electrolux EI24ID30QS isn't a remarkable performer like that Bosch, but it cleans well enough to stand out in a good way from the rest of the crowd.
The verdict
The $900 Electrolux EI24ID30QS doesn't earn my universal recommendation. If you want your dishwasher to be a statement piece, it's not for you -- the design blends in more than it stands out. If you're looking for a dishwasher that'll clean anything and everything you throw at it, and you don't care about features or tedious loading -- the $800 Bosch SHS63VL5UC will be a better fit.
If you rinse or scrape your dishes, you're better off the with the Electrolux than the Bosch. It handles stuck-on food just as well and has more features, more flexible loading and more cycle options. Yes, you can find cheaper options, and you can pay more to get more features and nicer design. The Electrolux EI24ID30QS isn't glamorous, but it sticks the landing as an upper midrange dishwasher.