In article ,
Rod writes:

A very long time ago I used to walk past a shop that had a dishwasher in
the window. Working.

In order to attract interest, after all a white door isn't exactly
rivetting, they had fitted a sheet of clear perspex (or similar) across
the front of the machine. (I assume that they had left the door in the
fully open position - but it might have been removed.) They must have
made the machine "think" that it's door was closed.

Well - it worked. I certainly noticed and still remember.

Do dishwasher engineers have such things? Surely the manufacturers have
them to enable testing (at least during development if not on the
production line)? Strikes me as the obvious answer to this problem -
look and see!

They clipped onto the open door.

They were quite standard sales props when dishwashers were
new gadgets in homes and few people knew how they worked.
Washing machines were more universal, and some people thought
their crockery would get damaged when the dishwasher did its
final spin, so they hadn't considered getting one. (This was
probably compounded by there being some dual purpose washing
machines and dishwashers in the early days.)

On a similar topic, when I bought my Hotpoint Micro Profile
1400 over 20 years ago (then Hotpoint's top of the range),
it was always on show in shops with its display cycling
through all the wash programmes. I was told there was a magic
sequence of button presses to put the microprocessor into
this mode, but I never managed to work out what it was.

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]