I have a Miele La Perla II.

I use Miele tabs and rinse aid.

I would suggest you start there too.

For normal load I use half a tab, for heavily soiled dishes (e,g, burnt cheese and potato casserole dish) I use a full tab.

Perfect results every time. You can use that as your baseline and see if Method from Target work as well or some other brand. Some detect a chemical taste with other rinse aids. Nothing from Miele or Somat.

I would not put in salt at first. If the water coming in is not softened enough the dishwasher will tell you by asking for salt. I use Somat Dishwasher salt.

BTW The whole house water softer can confuse the hard water sensor in the Miele leading to error codes. In that case you turn the built-in water softer off. How to do that is in the instructions.

This post was edited by deeageaux on Thu, Jul 25, 13 at 16:36

I have a whole house softener. I called Miele and had them program the machine to disable the softener. I've never used the DW softener or added salt. Attention should be paid to that or glassware can be etched.

I use Method and Finish Quantum. Half to 1 method (grapefruit rose) for light loads; 1 whole for heavier. Anything heavier or for pots and pans I use a whole Quantum.

Since we are on a septic I try to use more Method than Quantum.

Rinse Aid is Jet Dry, set on 3. With soft water it can also be on 2 or 4 -- they can tell you depending on results. If you get good results with default 3 that's it.

Have used Somat rinse aid and liked it a lot. Also Somat tabs. But I didn't find either of those that much better than the other options which are more accessible and affordable.

Had used several boxes of Miele tabs until they changed the formula and eliminated the handy scoring so the tab could be cut. They are harder to find that the other two, more costly and again, no better IME.

As new things come along I tend to try them out to see if they produce better results. If so, I change.

I have the La Perla II as well. I use Miele rinse aid and salt. I've found that dishes get cleaner with powder, I get superfluous results with Somat powder. I've used Cascade Complete powder with fine results. Somat still has 30% phosphates so it gets the edge. Well no comparison really. I have had good results with Miele tabs, but not the others. They don't do a great job on pans. I think it's because there is no soap in the presoak cycle on p&p. I used Finish Quantum in my old Bosch, in fact all I would use. Hated them in the Miele.

I use Cascade Complete, one tablespoon for full normal load. Our water is medium so I believe my setting is at 6. I use Jet Dry. I did follow the Miele instructions upon receipt and added almost the full box of provided salt.

I'm very pleased with the new Miele.

If you desire to add phosphate, by TSP at your local paint store and add a few grains in on occasion.

We have an older Miele (model G 848) dishwasher that has served us well for ten years come fall. Our local water (Portland, Oregon) is soft.

From some time before we installed the Miele, we had begun to use Ecover powder exclusively, and cannot imagine that we would ever use anything else as long as Ecover is available. We had switched to Ecover from "supermarket brands" (Electrosol and pre-Henkel Dial [Armour], mostly) while we still had our prior dishwasher (Whirlpool), after we learned that the severe etching on glassware washed in our dishwasher was due to chemical action of the dishwashing detergent exacerbated by the softness of our water, rather than (as we had supposed) from mechanical action. We have had not the slightest hint of etching since we switched to Ecover (which, not incidentally, gets our dishes really clean).

Formerly, we preferred Cascade (then called "Cascade Crystal Clear") rinse aid to Jet Dry rinse aid, and we were in the process of reevaluating our options after Cascade was reformulated some years back (conclusion then: Ecos WaveJet seemed closest in performance to the former formulation of Cascade), when a poster here on Garden Web touted Somat. Somat was hard to find, but we sought it out to give it one try, and once we tried it, we were hooked. It is the only rinse aid that we use now.

With our soft water, we never have used salt in our Miele, and it works just fine after almost ten years of heavy use.

Hope this helps.