Andrews Family

One night last week, our dishwasher decided it was next in line to need repair. I had come home from work and the dishwasher was running. I thought it was odd since Jenny usually runs it in the afternoon or at night, so I commented about it to Jenny. She said she had started earlier but that it should have been done. The dial on the front was half-way through the hot start phase and when we opened it up we found suds and steam. Uh-oh, things didn’t look good. Just to be sure, I reset it and started it running while I watched it closely. The dial clicked around right to where it had gotten stuck before and sure enough it just sat there. Problem confirmed.

So I disconnected the power and removed the back of the door. OK, those of you who know might have guessed that I didn’t actually disconnect the power but I did turn off the light switch that provides power to the dishwasher and told Jenny not to turn it back on. Your basic dishwasher is really pretty simple. It has the guts down underneath including the pumps and valves. And the brain/timer is a metal box inside the door that the dial attaches too. The timer for our model costs $75. I was tempted to show Jenny just how efficient I am and order it online right then so that I’d have it fixed within a few days. Instead I decided to mull it over a bit since if you turned it past that spot it seamed to work correctly.

The next night I asked Jenny if I should crack open the timer and see if I can fix it. Smartly she asked for odds. I knew inside was a plastic ‘gear’ that had groves that turned switches on at the right time. Chance were that a tooth on that plastic gear was broken which is why it got stuck at that spot and it would be near impossible to fix. So I told her there was a 15% chance I could fix it, and a 50% chance I’d break it worse. She gave me the go ahead anyway. It turns out it was a more complicated (and interesting). There were actually 2 plastic gears that work like something out of Da Vinci’s notebooks. After studying it for an hour I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t broken. Yep that’s right.

We had never really paid attention to the dial on the dishwasher but it is supposed to ‘pause’ there for about 20 minutes with the dial not moving. So the next question is why the dishwasher was still running that day and why was it full of suds and steam? I suspect that it had a little bit of help from mischievous little Olivia.

But I still claim victory. I took it apart and put it back together and it works. Now I know my sister Lisa will take issue with my claim of ‘fixing’ the dishwasher, so to appease her I’ll only be claiming half of the price replacement timer, $37.53, for my wish list gadget fund.