One of the things I like to do around the house when something breaks is make absolutely sure that the thing that breaks can be fixed before writing it off for scrap and spare parts. Today I found all the cutlery and plastic in the dishwasher bent, burned and pretty much destroyed. I thought about how that could have happened knowing that it couldn't have been an acid from the dishwasher powder since plastic is immune to it so the only thing it could have been was heat.
I took out everything including the sliding draws so I could perform a test run. After a little while I noticed the distinctive sound that I always heard was gone; the loud grumbling noise indicative of the pump below. I opened the door after a minute and the heating element at the bottom was red hot but not a scrap of water was shooting about to cool it so something had stopped the pump from working.
It took a little time to disconnect it from the water and power before pulling it out from under the kitchen bench so I could examine it in detail but once I had it out I could get to work. I removed the front panel and examined every part of the circuit looking for burned out components or some sign of what had happened to it. The relays had a little singe but that was to be expected since the machine was 10 years old and I knew they were working as I tested the machine again with the relays visible. I took the circuit diagram, traced it to the main pump and found it connected to the second relay on line L1. I followed the wires and found one of them had snapped due to being unnecessarily tight against the corner of the metal frame; all the other wires seemed fine and not under stress, I grabbed my heat shrink, soldering iron etc and set to work.
I reconnected the wires back together making sure to heat shrink both sides and ran another test, this time I reconnected the water and the pump started up just like it had for the last decade. When I opened the door it shot water at me and drenched me completely; guess I had the water turned up too high.
After re-attaching everything back to the frame I slid it back under the kitchen bench and screwed it back in to the wooden frame. I added a few more screws here and there for good measure and in just a couple of hours I had a working dishwasher again and saved a lot of money too which is always nice. :)
Thanks for reading,
Ashton.
