What to Do When Your Dishwasher Needs Repair

Repairing a dishwasher on your own can be frustrating. Call in the professionals to be sure your dishwasher gets fixed right the first time.

A dishwasher is a huge convenience for many contemporary American families.  Just load the dishes inside, add soap, press a few buttons, and it takes care of scrubbing the dishes while you sit back on the couch and catch an episode or two of your favorite show.  Doing dishes by hand?  That’s for old-fashioned people who don’t have anything better to do with their time!

That’s what you believe right up until your dishwasher breaks.  Perhaps it’s a subtle change:  suddenly, instead of pulling sparkling clean dishes from your dishwasher, you’re pulling out dishes that are smudged, still dirty, and kind of gross looking.  You’ve washed out the dishwasher yourself.  Maybe you’ve even tried the vinegar trick that you’ve seen floating around Pinterest.  Unfortunately, your dishwasher still isn’t getting the dishes clean–and you’re back to standing at a sink, slaving over your dishes.  Other times, it all hits at once:  your dishwasher isn’t running at all, refuses to drain, or you find yourself standing in a puddle of water.  If you’ve found yourself in this position, there’s only one thing to do.

First, change the settings on your dishwasher in the desperate hope that using a different one will lead to better results (nine times out of ten, it won’t).  Wait hopefully for the familiar sound of a functioning dishwasher.  Despair when it fails to happen.

Next, remove all of the dishes from your dishwasher.  Examine the interior.  Discover that you have no idea what any of those parts have to do with a functioning dishwasher.

Resort to Google, hopefully while someone else is washing and drying the dishes that were previously in the dishwasher.  “How do I fix my X brand dishwasher” is a popular search.  It helps if you can be specific about what the dishwasher is failing to do.

Watch videos on YouTube of someone who effortlessly repairs the dishwasher in less than thirty minutes.  Decide that you can do that.  Go hunting for your toolbox.

Open up your dishwasher, only to discover that you remember none of what you watched in those videos.  Attempt to take the dishwasher apart anyway.  Realize that you don’t really fit into the space allotted, and you have no idea how the people on YouTube fit in there with a camera.

Try cleaning out all the places that it was suggested that you clean things out.  Bang your head at least twice.  Cut your finger on something that shouldn’t have been sharp enough to draw blood.  Discover, on attempting to put the dishwasher back together, that getting all those pieces back in is twice as difficult as getting them out in the first place.  Wish you’d taken “Dishwasher Appliance Repair 101″ as an elective in high school.  Or college.  Or any time, really.

Turn the dishwasher back on and discover that it still doesn’t want to perform the action that it wouldn’t perform prior to taking it apart.  Kick it in frustration.

If all of that sounds like too much effort, consider a better alternative:  call in the professionals!  If you’re in the  Cuyahoga, Lake, Geauga, Ashtabula, Lorain and Portage areas in northeast Ohio, contact us!  We’ll send in our professional appliance repairmen to take care of your dishwasher as soon as possible.