Why Buy a Fully Integrated Dishwasher?

Mother kneeling down next to an open LG dishwasher, smiling at her young daughter standing next to her

Integrated appliances are extremely popular across the UK and beyond. They are a fantastic design feature, especially in kitchens where your white goods and appliances may not be as stylish as what you had hoped for in your kitchen. We’re going to look at why you would want to buy a fully integrated dishwasher in your home and things to consider. 

Reasons To Buy a Fully Integrated Dishwasher

With a dishwasher, it’s not like a washing machine or tumble dryer or other appliances, where if you have the space for it, you can stick them in a utility room or in your garage. The dishwasher really needs to be in the kitchen as you can’t lug your dirty dishes around the house. 

However, this can create a problem when designing your kitchen as a freestanding dishwasher might not fit in with the look you had in mind. Say you’re planning a redesign of your kitchen and you’ve picked out the cabinets and so on. It all looks idyllic in your head, but you hadn’t imagined a block of white in there. And let’s be honest, dishwashers are creations of function, not beauty. 

An integrated dishwasher is built into your cabinetry, meaning the design of your kitchen remains intact and essentially ‘hides’ the appliance. You can crack on with any cabinetry you had in mind and your kitchen design keeps its integrity and uniformity. 

If clean lines are your thing, then there really is no other choice than an integrated dishwasher. There’s no neater, sleeker way to install a dishwasher in your home.

Another big reason to install a dishwasher into your cabinetry is that you can’t hear it! Lots of dishwashers have been built with their noise in mind and it’s definitely something you should look out for before buying.

Something to remember when looking at the noise levels is that decibels are a logarithmic unit. This means that a singular decibel doesn’t have a set value but are an indication of how much more powerful that sound is. So if silence is 0dB, a sound that is 10dB is actually ten times more powerful than the sound of silence. It’s a roundabout way of looking at it, but it’s a good way of understanding it.

This means that a dishwasher that is 55dB is probably twice as loud as a dishwasher that is 45dB. With fully integrated dishwashers, this noise is insulated. So, if you already have a quiet dishwasher, you will barely hear a peep when it’s on. If your dishwasher is much louder than that, you will enjoy a much more bearable level of noise with it inside a cabinet. 

If you’re tight on floor space, moving from a freestanding to integrated unit will free some of that up if you are able to install in your existing cabinetry. It’s not a huge amount of space, but sometimes it can make all the difference. 

Not only that, but there is no functionality sacrificed in integrated dishwashers. They can do everything a freestanding dishwasher can do, except they just look better whilst they do it!

Things to Consider 

Fully integrated dishwashers fall just shy of being the perfect option because there a couple drawbacks that you should consider. The pros and cons of integrated dishwashers are quite situational in that, they’ll be perfect for some people but not the best idea for others. 

First thing to consider is the extra work you’ll need to do installing it. It’s not that much more of a job than a freestanding dishwasher as you still need to connect a water supply, but there are extra processes and things to consider with regards to installing an integrated dishwasher.

Integrated dishwashers also aren’t very future-proof. If you move out, you’ll have to leave it behind. Also, if you plan on a major kitchen shuffle at any point, consider that you won’t be able to move your integrated dishwasher from where it is. 

Although they can free up some floor space for you, integrated dishwashers may end up taking up some crucial storage space. If you’re already at capacity in terms of storage in the kitchen, just consider whether you can afford to lose a cabinet to keep stuff in. On the flip side of that, you could think up or find some storage solutions to go in the place of where your freestanding dishwasher stood. 

All in all, integrated dishwashers are a smart choice for the kitchen. They’re actually the most popular choice of dishwasher in the UK and we really can’t recommend them any higher.

Make sure you’ve considered all aspects of the integrated dishwashers as there are some outlying circumstances where it would be wiser to opt for a freestanding dishwasher, or even one of our semi-integrated dishwashers

With great prices and free delivery across the UK, you can save money today if you buy at Appliance City!