I’m a few nights in to living at a new place. I still don’t have much, just one table, a couch, a bed, one suitcase full of clothes, plastic utensils, and no chairs. It’s a bit of a shake up to living at my parents place where I had basically anything I wanted or needed and I didn’t have to worry about things or how they ran.
While now I do have to worry about how those things run. There’s no maintenance guy who has my back and I can’t blissfully be ignorant of these things. They are my responsibility. One of those things is my dishwasher. It’s got about an inch of standing water in it after it runs through the cycle. It’s something I need to fix. I don’t know how to fix dishwashers.
I spent parts of the day googling “how to fix standing water in dishwashers,” thinking that would guide me to the correct solution to my problem. I learned that it could be the grate or discharge tube. They could have food particles lodged in there, which would back things up.
On a note I got from the city inspector, it said that “Dishwater discharge must be properly connected to drain system, secure drain line to loop up and touch underside of counter top.” I really have no idea what that means.
But I thought I’d tinker around down there to see what was going on. I’m no handyman by any means, but I can make my way around a socket wrench set… that is, if I had one.
The thing about this dishwasher is that it hasn’t been used much, err… it hadn’t been cleaned much. I unscrewed the footplate (i learned that new word!) and checked out the guts underneath. I thought a rabid rat or some mutant cockroach would attack me. It was full of cobwebs and food crumbs from probably 1998. I tried moving the dishwasher out of its cove, but it wouldn’t move easily. It was kind of stuck in there. So I’d have to put my hand in there to see that everything was connected properly. It was and somehow I survived with my hand.
I then tried unscrewing the filter within the dishwasher, but it was having none of my fooling around. I had to run to my neighbor’s (Joel and Heidi!) place to borrow a ratchet set. Even then after trying for about twenty minutes, the screws weren’t moving around.
A thought came to me in the middle of the process that I might not need to actually be doing any of this at all. When I first hired an inspector, he ran the dishwasher and then we shut it off before we left, not allowing it to complete a full cycle. So it could have theoretically not drained. I ran it again after putting everything back together. I waited on the couch, exhausted. About 90 minutes later it stopped and I checked… nope, there was still water.
I’m definitely not a handyman genius, but I’m learning. I guess you got to start somewhere.
No comments:
Post a Comment