Renaissance man: a present-day man who has acquired profound knowledge or proficiency in more than one field.
I sometime consider myself one. Maybe not in the sense of profound knowledge, but one who does not shy away from a challenge, short of anything requiring a true artist.
Case in point, our dishwasher went kaput this week. The machine is about 15 years old. I installed it when we remodeled our kitchen back then. Nothing catastrophic, but it stopped and had an error code of the "clean" light flashing 7 times. It is a Whirlpool model. The 7 flashes means that the water did not come up to temperature when required. A quick check on Google found a couple of normal failure modes for this error code. 1 was a burned-out heating element, the other was the control board relay. No problem, I've done this type of troubleshooting before, just not on this appliance.
I got my tools ready and started to disassemble the control panel from the door as the videos on YouTube showed. Not the exact model so my door was just slightly different. I removed the 6 screws to drop the control panel down two of the molded plastic bosses were broken away from the panel itself. No problem, I'll take care of them later once I figure out what caused the washer to die. As instructed, I removed one connector from the board and measured the heating element resistance from that connector to the door switch. Uh OH! this tested within "spec" I guess that is not the problem. I guess it is good that I don't have to replace that part.
I went on to inspecting the control board. WTF? The board was snapped into a plastic housing. That plastic housing was then snapped into the front panel. I have no idea why they bothered with the housing at all. The YT videos showed common problems were solder joints around the relays and the pins for the connector. The videos showed evidence of burned boards in that area too. I have seen this type of problem before on other electrical appliances.' relays. Upon inspection, everything on my board looked good and clean. No bad solder joints, no burned traces or PC board fiber. I decided the measure the resistance of the coils on the 3 relays. Nope, they were good too. Hmmmm. Maybe I have a fried computer chip. I wonder what a new control board would cost. For reference I recently bought a new main board for a Roku TV and it was only ~ $10 used on eBay. All the new parts suppliers showed "NLA". eBay boards for my dishwasher were > $200! No way was I going to buy one for a 15-year-old dishwasher hoping it was the problem. Cheap [Fatherless Child] I am.
A bit further investigation was required. In order for this heater to work there is an interlock switch on the door that completes the circuit. I tested the switch by manually activating the switch. Nope. It tested good. Now, there are 2 switches there. One id for this circuit, the other...... well I don't know. Some signal to the control board I assume. Both are activated by some crazy plastic mechanism related to the opening handle/closing latch. Nothing wrong there either.
At this point, I am stymied. I decided to call it a night. The next morning, I took the plastic pieces from the panel screws and, using 2-part "plastic epoxy", and reglued them in their proper location with a little bit of reinforcement glue. A day later, after giving the epoxy plenty of time to cure, I gently re-assembled to panel to the door. When I closed the door, I heard a familiar, strong click. I hadn't heard that in a while. It was the door latch doing it's job. Hmmmm. Could this have been the problem all along? I opened and closed the door several times. Each time there was a definite "click". Time to do a test run. After a little over an hour, the dishwasher completed its cycle. To my surprise, there was no error light flashing. It did its job. I asked my wife to come and listen to the door-close-click. She said it hasn't sounded like that for a while. Could the only problem have been that the 2 bad mounting screws were allowing the door to flex, just enough to prevent the interlock switch from activating. From what I could tell, there is not adjustment in that mechanism.
It may be too soon to call this done. For the meantime I will consider it so. I'll now add the title of dishwasher repairman to my long list of "fields of expertise". That is until next week when it fails again. At least I now know where to look first.
_________________ Chuck. “Any suspension will work if you don’t let it.” - Colin Chapman Visit my ongoing MGB Rustoration log: over HEREOr my Wankel powered Locost log : over HEREAnd don't forget my Cushman Truckster resto Locostusa.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=17766
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