Miele Customer Support¶
357 words on Hardware
After all the fun I had with the customer service of ‘high-tech’ companies like Apple or Canon, here comes a different story: Sven in low-tech customer service land. Back in winter we bought a second hand tumble drier. As luck had it, I managed to score a Miele – machines which have the reputation of being indestructible.
As non-luck had it, though, we recently started having some problems with the machine. Problems of the kind that it kept spinning and spinning and became very hot and humid inside but the humidity didn’t leave the machine. And we were at a bit of a loss to figure out what was going on there. Particularly as the previous owners had lost the instruction manual for the dryer.
So off I went to the internet, looking at Miele’s web site, hoping to find the manual there. But I suspected that this wouldn’t happen. The dryer is easily five years old and they’re the kind of solid low-tech company who probably didn’t jump the web bandwagon early on.
And my fear was right. While they have instruction manuals for newer machines online, the link was missing for the older machines. However, there was a small note that in case the PDF isn’t available, you just have to fill out a form and they’ll send you a printed manual for free. Certainly not ideal, but still a pretty good compromise in my opinion. Particularly as ordering the manual didn’t require any registration hassle, was immediately confirmed by e-mail and the manual arrived within a few days.
While we must have ‘fixed’ whatever the problem was by removing all removable parts, confirming that they look good and clean and reinserting them into the machine in the meantime, it’s still great to have the manual around anyway. It appears that we could in principle hook the dryer up to the drain and save the effort of having to empty its condensed water tank manually this way… so if I were into DIY and wouldn’t have to move the dryer around to access the drain that’s behind it, this would be really useful information.
