Repaired the Dishwasher Today

Hey Everyone,

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.

Dodgy Vergola Motor

Hey Everyone,

My family got a vergola built to cover our deck out the back, it came with a remote controlled 12v motor which after about half a year or so it began to stuff up and could no longer open the cover. Since I'm quite handy around the house I decided to have a go at repairing the motor to save on spending ridiculous amounts of money to get it replaced. I opened it up and it was full of rust water so I took everything out, cleaned it all up and screwed it all back together. It seemed to work again so I applied a skin of silicone around all the outside of the case to prevent any further water making its way in. It worked well for a month or so but ended up breaking again, I took it apart to see what had happened and the silicone did the job of keeping out the water so I knew it had to be a flaw in the design. I allowed the gears to function while the case was open so I could see what was going on, the arm was attached to a worm gear that allowed the small 12v motor to apply enough torque to open an entire vergola with a small gear box to slow the ratio down. In the back of my mind I kind of knew what must have been happening so I applied the idea in practice; I thought about the worm gear pulling the arm as far back as possible while I examined the structure of the plastic, something just wasn't right to me. I allowed it to pull back and the moment it touched the plastic that stopped it, it would jam which I had imagined was happening in my mind. Since I had a dremel handy I got myself a thickish metallic washer to act as a more solid buffer and cut a section out of it for the worm gear shaft to fit, I placed it up against the end with superglue to prevent the worm gear from pressing the arm too close to the plastic and allow a small air gap, I put everything back together and added a new skin of silicone to make it water proof which I'm still shaking my head about since it's designed to work outdoors and at that kind of price? these companies that skimp on waterproofing disgust me to be honest; nothing that's made these days have any quality and the only real way to obtain quality is to either make your own or fix what you already have, it's just disgraceful. To this very day it has worked without a hitch thanks to the simple modification I made and my family can now enjoy the sunlight on the deck without wasting a single buck.

Thanks for reading,
Ashton.