Standing Water in a Kenmore Dishwasher: the Path It Could Not Take

Kenmore dishwasher not draining water: one path, five places it stops

Three different companies built the dishwashers wearing this badge — Whirlpool for the 665, Frigidaire for the 587, Bosch for the 630 — and they report this condition in three different ways. Whirlpool's machines pair an F number with an E number and label it a long drain. Frigidaire's use an i number. On machines with no numeric display at all, the Clean light flashes the code instead.

Underneath the notation, the plumbing is the same on all of them, and so is the order of work.

The filter, and why it is first

The filter is a cylinder standing in the floor of the tub with a flat screen underneath it. It is designed to be lifted out by hand — no tool — and washed in the sink. Every one of the three manufacturers describes it in the manual as an owner's job.

A great many of these have never been out. In a decade the mesh seals with a film of grease and starch, water stops passing through it, and the machine cannot move enough water to drain in the time its control expects. That is the commonest cause of this complaint by a wide margin, and you have just fixed it yourself.

The sump, which you can only see once the filter is gone

Underneath sits the sump and the pump inlet. This is where the things that are too big for the filter end up: a shard of glass from a broken tumbler, the label off a jar, a fruit sticker, a small bone.

Any of them stops the pump dead. A pump straining against an obstruction sounds exactly like a pump failing, which is why quite a few perfectly good pumps get replaced.

The hose, and the loop that stops siphoning

Behind the appliance, the drain hose has to rise to a high loop before it drops to its connection under the sink. That loop is not decoration — it is what prevents sink water running back down into the dishwasher.

Two things go wrong here. The hose gets kinked when the appliance is pushed back into its opening, and the loop gets lost when somebody reroutes the plumbing. The second one shows up as dirty water appearing in a clean machine, which reads as a drain problem and is really a backflow one.

The two that are not the dishwasher at all

The air gap. The small chrome cylinder on the counter beside the tap, where kitchens have one. It packs with residue, and when it does the machine cannot push water past it. The cover twists off and the cap lifts out, and the blockage is usually visible immediately.

The disposer. Two versions. A disposer full of waste is a blocked drain, and running it for thirty seconds clears it. And a disposer fitted after the dishwasher arrives from the factory with a knockout plug sealing the dishwasher inlet — if the installer left it in, the dishwasher has never been able to drain and never will until somebody takes it out.

That second one accounts for a real share of dishwashers described as broken from the day the kitchen was finished.

What is left for us

The pump itself, the drain valve on machines that have one, and the control that decides whether the pump runs at all. A pump receiving no signal looks identical from the kitchen to a pump that has failed, and telling those apart is a measurement rather than an opinion.

By the time we get to that, everything cheaper has been ruled out — which is the point of working in this order rather than starting at the expensive end.