For the last few years we've had a small dishwasher, who is called Bob. (The company knows how to make friendly product names). This has had an effect on us, and I'm slightly ashamed to say we occasionally say things like "I'll feed Bob" rather than "I will fill up the dishwasher.".

Bob was made by a startup company in France, and the company values seemed attractive:

Daan Tech’s mission is to address the challenges of the 21st century.

With Bob, Daan Tech’s mission is to prove it is possible to make high quality consumer products at a competitive price, designed to last at least 10 years while using recycled materials to reduce their environmental footprint over the lifetime of the product. More than making public goods, Daan Tech wants to show it’s possible to use technology for the public good.

To back this up: They provide circuit diagrams and exploded views of the dishwasher here and supply replacement parts. It's nice to see a company being open nowadays (and I'd rather buy from such a company) - so a few years ago we bought a Bob dishwasher.

To get back to the over-anthropomorphisation: Bob recently started having fits of bad temper, where he would fling his door open at the end of the dishwashing cycle - almost in a fit of disgust at the food we were feeding him.

I contacted the company and they advised me to replace the plastic springs that hold the door partially open. As our dishwasher is now out of the three year warranty I paid for the reasonably priced parts and they shipped them out, including a link to a video showing how to replace them.

Their video showed a nice clean dishwasher (and ours was a bit grubby in places) but it was straightforward to repair the dishwasher, and the door no longer flies open. Result!

While the machine was in bits I noticed some writing moulded on the inside of the base plate:

PXL_20251119_182759732-1.jpg PXL_20251119_182759732.jpg

It reads:

TRIBUTE: To those who bravely worked at Daan Tech early on to make Bob a reality.

(Lists the names of the people who worked on Bob)

A special thanks to Celine for having hosted us at Cafe Fauvé Paris basement during our first year of existence.

…was established on August 5th, 2016, by Damian Py and Antoine Fichet. A company whose aim was to prove that high-quality products can be made in France. They called it: Daan.Tech

It was nice to see this gratitude, hidden away from most people. (It has made me want to sit in a Paris cafe again). Maybe the designers had seen the case signatures inside the Apple Mac or Jay Miner's dog's paw print in the Amiga 1000.

You could argue whether a simple part should fail within a few years. The new part seems to be made of a different material (and so perhaps improved), so maybe this is part of the risk from buying an early product from a new company. But the company were helpful in resolving the problem and shipping out the replacement part, so I thought it would be good to credit them.

It's nice to see they are trying to keep production local, and they have some videos showing the production processes which I liked:

It's hard to know what is corporate speak and what is the truth nowadays, but so far Daan Tech were helpful, so fingers crossed they are being true to their word.