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.

Okay, what we’ll be doing in this article is we’re going to be trouble shooting this dryer for no heay. I’ve done this in a different article on a Whirlpool dryer, this is a GE dryer. Little bit different but the trouble shooting, you’ll see if you’ve watched to thgone over the other one, is exactly the same, and there are just a few little extra things in this one. But to make sure, we decided to enlist the help of our professional Austin appliance repair guys at Appliance Masters (http://austinappliancemasters.com).

So what you’re going to need, you’ll need a multimeter and you going to need a pair of needle nose pliers. If you don’t have a multimeter, an ohm meter, you can either really just check with resistance or continuity. I set mine to continuity and I just got to beat so it makes it really easy to know if you got it right or not.

So we’ll start off up here and these one here is the two wires going to and it’s going to be our high limit thermostat and you will notice, it’s little to see, there is one below it with four wires and that is an operating thermostat, unlikely that that went but we’ll check all of them anyway and when you’re checking this operating thermostat, you’ll notice it, two of the wires, further spread further apart than two of the others. The only one that you have to check are the two further apart for continuity, the two closer together, don’t worry about it.

So the way we do this is we always pull one plier and use needle nose so you don’t ruin the terminal, pull. And you have your multimeter set to continuity and then you just come up and we have continuity there, so that wants to go.

Now this is the operating one here, so we just going to pull one of that outside wires off don’t worry about those two middle ones and we got continuity there as well so that one is good too. And if you got a GE or a Hot Point or a RCA, something like that, it’s unlikely that the operating thermostats go, it’s usually this high limit thermo fuse. Here’s another one down lower, again, pull one wire, we got continuity there so it’s good.

Okay and the final thermostat is located up here on this blower wheel assembly and the tray here and this another operating thermostat. The two outside wires are spread further apart than the two others, so we only want to check the outer wires. Remove one wire; we got continuity there, so that’s good. Okay, so the next thing we want to do is on this burner tube here, this is where your burner assembly goes in, your igniter is down underneath and this is the radiant center, heat sensor, flame sensor, there’s several names for it.

What that does is it detects heat from your igniter and it opens up the dryer coils located, they’re located up here on the front. So what we want to do is just pull one wire and that’s got continuity. So this one is also good, flame sensor and everything looks good, so your igniter is located down here, now you want to know if that is glowing or not and you going to need this assembled so you can do that.

What you do is you just go ahead have you dryer assembled and before you get to have this all disassembled, you can reach in through the hole on the front here, so what you do is you unplug the connector from the igniter before you disassemble this, you stick your needle in here with its set to voltage and you want to check to make sure you got a 120 volts. If you don’t have a 120 volts coming to your igniter, you’re igniter is not going to be the problem.

If you have a 120 volts coming to your igniter and the igniter does not glow, your igniter is the problem. If your igniter does glow, the only thing that you have not checked is these two things right up in the front here and this come off really easily. There’s a couple of screws that hold this on, you will just see these little round things and they slide off this inner post and they’re called, dryer coils.

And a lot of times, your igniter will glow and your dryer may even light and then sometime you’ll think it warm and during the cycle what it’s doing is that you’re dryer is cycling on and off, it will shut off, it won’t come back on. Once these warm up, they seem to fail. There is a resistant check, you can put your ohm meter on here and  you can refer it to your tech sheet and will give you a specification but I found a quite a few times that they’ll test good as soon as the dryer starts running 10 minutes  into it, they fail, they stop opening.

So if your igniter is glowing and you’re not getting gas in there, the problem is in these dryer coils here. And roll, that’s all there is to trouble shooting a gas dryer. Thanks for reading.