Okay, what we’re going to being doing in this appliance repair today (brought to us by scottsdaleappliancemasters.com) is, we’re going to be checking the circulating pump and the drain pump on a dishwasher that isn’t working right. If your drain pump’s not working, you first want to check your high loop in your drain, and we have other videos that show you how to do that. But if you can hear a hum and you’re still not getting no drain and your dishwasher’s filled with water, or it’s not washing, we’ll check that circulating pump.
So the first thing we’re going to need to do is remove this toe-kick so we can get access to it. Okay, so we just remove these screws…pull the toe-kick out.
Okay, in order to check the drain pump and the circulating pump, in this particular unit, this is the motor right here…and this is what’s called the dual-purpose…this actually works the drain and the circulating, in one pump. And this switch here, flips a little lever, it actually moves a little ball inside that hose behind it…it moves it to either block that drain, or to block the circulator…so, what we first want to do is check to see if we have power coming into this switch here, to make sure that’s working.
The way we do that, is we take our voltmeter, and we just stick it in the two terminals, and then we’ll reach up and we’ll turn this on…and we should have power there.
Okay, so we’ve got power going into the switch and the next thing you want to do is you want to come up here to the motor…there’s two leads coming in…now, you may have four wires going in…which would mean you have a multi-speed motor on your unit…so, you’d want to check the variable speeds on it also…and we’ve got 120 volts going to this motor.
If you have a multi-speed motor, you can disconnect this wire here…shut your power off, disconnect this wire, and you can set your multi-meter to ohms, and you can check the resistance between the terminals and what that does is check the windings of the motor. And the readings that you should have on there will be located on your tech sheet…and the tech sheet is usually located behind the panel…sometimes they’re down here under this…behind the kick panel, but they’re usually behind the control panel…and you’ll find those readings in there.
If your motor’s humming, you’ve got power going to it…but it doesn’t kick on…you’ll want to check for obstructions in the drain pump…and you’d do the same thing for the drain pump, if you didn’t have this switch here, you’d have a separate drain pump…you can check that drain pump the same way…just checking voltage going to it…you’ve got power going into it, it doesn’t kick on…you’ve wither got an obstruction in it, or the drain pump has failed.
And the same with circulating pump, and if you’ve got variable speeds you’ll want to check the windings on the different speeds…you do that by doing an ohm test between the different windings…the different terminals on the motor to make sure the resistance value is within the specified limit that’s on the tech sheet. And that’s all there is to checking the motor and the drain pump.