When we redid the kitchen a couple of winters back, we replaced all the appliances except for the dishwasher. It was only 4 or so years old, the quality was on the upper side of medium, and it worked well. It didn’t match the rest of the appliances, but it didn’t look bad, either. The other day, we opened it after a load was done, and the dishes were pretty grimy, still, and there was dirty, standing water at the bottom of it. I tried to force it to enter the drain mode, but it wouldn’t power on.
When I was installing the baseboard, I had foreseen that a difficulty with the dishwasher might arise, and had create a removable panel of baseboard for in front of it. I popped this out, and using my awesome non-contact voltage tester tool (yellow pencil-shaped thing in the picture below), I verified that the dishwasher was, in fact, getting power. About 30 mins later, I’d narrowed the problem down to having something to do with the control panel. After opening it up and looking for any obvious shorts or loose wires, I did a price-check on a replacement control panel. It’s a bit shy of $200. We decided that it wasn’t worth repairing, and off I went to the nearest Sears Scratch-and-Dent center.
There, I picked up an Electrolux model that was a customer return. It matches our other stainless steel appliances and has all of the options we wanted. It retails at $1100, but I walked out with it for $515. The only negative is that I failed in something I usually excel at. Dani would say I excel at this to the point of ad nauseam. Research. I should have done more. This model has a lot of bad reviews on Amazon. I’m just crossing my fingers that we don’t have to join their ranks. I was in a rush, though, and the price was good. We had 5 house guests this weekend… the dishes were piling up fast, and hand-washing was becoming untenable.
Before I removed the old one, I turned off the dedicated breaker for it and disconnected the power feed in the electric box on the dishwasher. After turning off the water feed to it, I then had the joy of sucking out all the nasty water still inside with my ever-venerable shop-vac. In my last entry here at the ol’ blog, I mentioned that I had inadvertently caused ashes from the fireplace to spew skyward and cover most of the surfaces in the family room, causing cleanup to take far too long. Knowing I had a shop-vac full of ash, I emptied it outside and removed the filter before sucking up water. Apparently I wasn’t thorough enough, though, because as soon as I turned it on, ash blew out of the thing all over the kitchen floor.
Pain. In. The. Ash.
You may have noticed in the image above of the old dishwasher that it is sitting up on some 2x4s. This is because all of the cabinets in our new kitchen sit 3” off the ground. I talked about why we did this when I installed them. Because a dishwasher has feet at the front and the back, it's kind of hard to get one pushed in correctly when the surface isn’t flat. I was having trouble getting the new one in, so I quickly whipped up some 2-by-4 base-extensions to sit perpendicular to the existing cabinet base. It made the whole process much easier. The white pex visible in the picture is the water feed for the as-of-yet-unpurchased-or-installed pot filler above the stove.
With the new bases in place, I wired in the new dishwasher and connected the water feed and the drain line, then pushed it in.
It’s a much more pleasant experience loading and unloading a dishwasher that sits higher off of the ground. I cannot over-recommend this to fellow tall people.
So the new dishwasher is in place. It’s Dani’s job to get the sticker residue off the front and get it all nice and shiny, and I have still have to reinstall the baseboard panel. The first test load worked well, so here’s hoping our luck holds.
