In short, I consider it the most important appliance in the house (well, maybe the furnace is more important, but bear with me for a moment). The dishwasher actually fulfills the promise of modernity. Technology that saves us labor without the technology itself creating much of a hassle. We should have 20 hour work weeks at this point if it weren’t for capitalism’s thirst for blood and wealth, but alas, every technological advance just results in more work to be done and lower pay for the work that we do. In the 21st century, the dear sweet dishwasher (and maybe the microwave) saves us hours and hours of menial labor, and liberates us to do things like write this seemingly pointless blog post. This tried and true piece of machinery can now be had for low enough initial outlay that the ROI (return on investment) can be realized within a year (particularly, if you refuse to buy a new one and find one on Craig’s List that was thoughtlessly discarded as part of the feverish desire of our country men and women to drive themselves ever deeper in home equity debt to “update” their kitchen). We bought the first dishwasher from Craig’s List for a song (either $75 or $100, can’t recall exactly) when we first bought the house. It remained faithful and steadfast for 4 years, so at $25 a year I think we did alright.

Well, this post wouldn’t be here if the poor old bastard hadn’t died on us. Pretty common failure…no longer draining completely at the end of the wash.

So I cleared the drain (again)…no luck

Pulled the dishwasher out, removed obstructions from the hoses…reinstalled it…no luck

Diagnosis…drain pump failure…I’m not really set up here to physically apply 110v to the motor to test it, so I arrived at this conclusion purely by deduction (tried listening, but couldn’t recall how the thing sounded when it worked, which would have been crucial to determining a failure). A new drain pump motor would have cost about what we paid for it initially, so back to Craig’s List I went.

Faced with the necessity (and I mean necessity) to replace the dishwasher, why not get stainless to match the stove (and who knows, maybe someday the fridge could be stainless as well, instead of black, but only if it fails or an unbeatable deal on Craig’s List is encountered by accident). And thus the search began. I added a feed to my blertsfor it (using only “dishwasher” as the search term to make sure I didn’t miss any misspellings of stainless which happen frequently for some reason). Having gone a couple of days without a fully operable dishwasher, I was willing to spend up to about $150 for a decent used one. Fortunately, a decent stainless GE came up within 24 hours for $100…. woo hoo….

The catch, it was in Mountlake Terrace which is about a thousand miles north of here (well, 20 miles, but I-5 south bound into Seattle from the north is a trip with a permanent time multiplier of at least 3, and in my special driving in traffic mathematics 3×20 = 1000 because nothing drives me quite as nuts as going 35 mph on the interstates). Ok, the additional $10-15 in bio-diesel is worth it for a dishwasher. The F250 is only getting about 12-14 mpg in city right now, down from a solid 15 plus last year, and I’m not sure why (working from home, the truck is used sparingly, and hey it is basically carbon neutral when running on B99.9). We made the trip up to Mountlake Terrace (and discovered that the person selling it seems to be in the business of refurbing dishwashers, or he owns multiple properties he’s upgrading, or something neferious was going on based on the garage full of dishwashers we found there). I should note that even though we “took the map” we got lost because I heard the wrong house number and ended up about a mile away from where we needed to be. We loaded up the shiny new used dishwasher and we headed home. Upon arrival I immediately set about installing the new dishwasher and running it through a test run…

4 hours later it had not completed the entire wash cycle. Conducted some diagnostics, the dishwasher ran through the self test fine, but the self test can’t really test the thermistor since it doesn’t bring the water to full temp. So I did a little experiment with the meat thermometer and decided the heating element was not getting hot enough. The benefit of whatever strange dishwasher dealings were afoot in Mountlake Terrace was the fact the guy said to just give a call if we encountered any problems, so I did. The guy was great, said he would “find another stainless one” (at this point I’m not asking any questions) and to give him a call the next day to make sure he had one ready and we could switch out the bad one (having already run my tests and describing them to him when he asked about the behavior helped smooth the way I think). Quick thinking and I asked if he would be interested in taking the one with the bad drain pump off our hands (saves me the hassle of finding and paying a recycler to take it, and he seems to be a recycler, so might as well give it a shot). SCORE, he asks the model and says sure he’ll take it (it was a black GE Profile Performance and was pretty quiet and a good machine while it was working). So, the next day we go up to claim our mysterious replacement dishwasher…

On the way up I-5 south bound is looking horrible. It was a Saturday I think, so we didn’t concern ourselves that much with the fact we were headed up there around 4pm (you do not want to get into the mess around here at drive time, particularly if you have worked at home for over 8 years, drive an F250, and detest going under 35 mph on the great american interstates). When we arrive at the blessed garage of dishwashers, our patron saint of dishwashers is not present. Not realizing that the house we are at is actually a duplex, I knock on the door, the wrong door, and a weary young man seemingly accustomed to this “wrong door” error points out the correct door (sneakily tucked around the corner from the garage) and tells me it doesn’t look like our patron saint of dishwashers is home because his big white truck is not present in the cul-de-sac.  At about the moment I leave the door, the wrong door, a car drives up and stops in front of the driveway. It becomes immediately evident that my truck is blocking the side of the driveway that belongs to the wrong door, so I scramble to move it over to the side of the driveway that belongs to the correct door of the duplex. As the driver parks in their now accessible parking space, they see fit to mention it doesn’t look like our saint of dishwashers is home since his big white truck is not in the cul-de-sac. I thank the person that heads to the wrong door with an arm full of fodder from the golden arches. Oh how the blood boils at this moment, I curse the freeway, the traffic, the decision to go to Mountlake Terrace for a dishwasher, the ground I stand on..etc…but optimistically attempt to give the saint a ring before abandoning all hope and returning to the fiery hell of I-5 southbound at 4:30pm on a Saturday.

Our saint, saint Maurice as happens to be the case, answers the phone and says he’s just around the corner and will be there momentarily. REJOICE! Our saint of dishwashers has not abandoned us, he is only running late (a condition I generally suffer from in perpetuity, so I understand being off the mark by a few minutes here and there, and I have come back into the fold and eagerly await my personal blessing from the dishwasher shrine that lays behind the garage door). Maya and I have already unloaded the two faulty dishwashers in anticipation of our blessing, and when the garage door goes up we catch a vision of glory on the workbench with the makeshift water feed dangling from the ceiling of the garage and attached with wire nuts to the open 110v wire that accompanies the dishwasher rehabilitation center Maurice has fashioned here in the garage. Our blessing as it turns out is a sweet ass Kitchen Aid (even the same brand as our stove) with (and this is just like 2 toy surprises in a cracker jack box) stainless steel interior tub. We do have to make a sacrifice to the dishwasher deities as this model doesn’t have quite as many buttons on the front, BUT it does have buttons (which I love, I have an inherent distrust for rotary knobs on appliances with the distinct exception of those for stove tops…any knob upon which the appliance timing is dependent is a nearly guaranteed first failure in my assessment). I try to hold my emotions in check though, we still need to install it and confirm it is working…I take major ground streets for the north of Seattle half of the trip, if I’m going to go 35 mph, I might as well see some new parts of the city as I go (and we did see some new parts, including Frank’s Door Store which Maya’s Dad has mentioned is a great place to get…well, doors).

We don’t stop at the door store though, important mission ahead and no time for lolly gagging about looking at doors we don’t need…

The install goes relatively smoothly (I have to do it twice, but I always have to do it twice and I can’t quite recall the exact reason I had to do it twice this time). In the first run I encountered a slight drip from the drainage hoses, but I believe that was related to a moment during the first install when the dishwasher kind of slipped off it’s special platform (Maya is 6’2″, and 36″ counters just don’t cut it, so in complete violation of all universal design principles we have 42″ counters and I love them because not only do they save my love’s backfrom stooping while she does her magic, but I find it a more convenient height as well) and took a hit on the under-side. I little wiggling here and there of the rubber connectors in the drain system seemed to fix up the minor drip. At some point I need to pull off the kick plate again and triple check that this situation has been completely remedied.

Parenthetically, as I’m prone to do, I should mention that we have serious water fears, it is a long story, but the short of it is that we had MAJOR flooding 4 days after we closed on the house as a result of the water company ignoring my request to ONLY turn on the water on or after a certain date since we were both out of town for the weekend. The request was in writing, so we were meagerly compensated (at the depreciated rate) for the damage and recovery, but a lot of stuff we had intended to do much slower and much later ended up having to happen right away.

It’s been about a month, no evidence of leakage (though I haven’t removed the kickplate yet), and excepting the fact that we realized too late that the dishwasher lacked a silverware basket (and I accidentally purchased two of them due to an internet connection freak out and slow order confirmation emails from the online store from which I bought them), the new dishwasher is working out alright and it sure is pretty (even on the inside).