(11-19-2023, 10:36 PM)vishnu Wrote: (11-19-2023, 10:04 PM)gmcenroe Wrote: We (well my wife did) bought a new dishwasher, the current one lasted 20 years which is phenomenal in 2023. We had to wait 3 weeks for the delivery, but they are coming tomorrow to install and take away the old dishwasher.
My dishwasher was probably around 20 years old when, for whatever reason, the thermal fuse blew. I just jumpered around it with an alligator clip, and it worked for a few more months, but then the whole power system blew. I've just been washing my dishes by hand ever since.
Oddly enough I just repaired my dishwasher about five months ago. It's a 2014 Maytag stainless steel tub model and it had a really odd behavior. I'm at only user and it was bought from Sears scratch and dent in 2015. It was acting very strange like it would sometimes run its drain pump for no reason and then you would turn it off with a button to say cancel drain then it would be off then a couple seconds later the board would turn it right back on again! But that just proves that both the control panel and the relay were in fully working order. After all if I can turn the drain on and off with the control panel and it responds to me then doesn't the control panel work?
I also found that some of the cycles are being cut short but the dishes generally came out clean but it would keep running the pump over and over and over to drain at the end of a cycle for quite a while. Luckily I noticed this within the first few uses and was able to save the drain pump from undo harm. There was also never any leaking.
We ended up having two separate issues one after the other while repairing it. I was trying to figure out for the life of me why the machine would act this way because according to the diagram there is no water sensor in this machine. The only sensor that deals with water is the float sensor and all that does is cut off power to the water solenoid to try to prevent overfill. It has nothing to do with the computer and it has nothing to do with the drain circuit. The computer has absolutely no knowledge of how high or low the water level is in this design. It works entirely off timing and jumping through a program in sequence with general timing. It also has a propensity to run the drain pump for a teeny bit of time while mixing in new freshwater when it first starts. Similar to a modern clothes washer.
I eventually used a trick I read to figure out whether there was a problem with my control panel or with the computer board because apparently whirlpools have an actually behavior when you disconnect their control panel and power them on. If your drain pump immediately fires on the computer is alive and isn't dead.
So I just removed the computer and tested all the capacitors. I replaced all the electrolytic capacitors but one of the capacitors was actually very out of tolerance and yet looked just fine. After replacing all the capacitors I put the unit back together but I had no ability to control it and the control panel freaked out and just blink the child lock at me.
It turned out that the control panel ribbon interface had corroded because of the drying cycle the design of it is very poor and there's two adapters from the native ribbon cable all the way to the native plug in the computer board. The crimp at the ribbon cable had corroded and turned colors as well as had heat damage from power being transferred over it. So it looks like when I removed my control panel I basically severed some of the lines even with gentle handling it because it was so crispy it was on its way out. All the buttons in the control panel worked before and I could turn cycles on and off before I had to remove the panel. This kind of pissed me off because the control panel was working and I was very gentle but this was already corroded and it probably had a matter of months left on its own before it had a connection problem.
Unfortunately you can't buy just a control panel and put it onto the plastic you have to buy an entire plastic top with integrated control panel. Most people wanted $300 dollars for this but I managed to find a distributor that would sell me a genuine new whirlpool part for basically $250 shipped after tax. So I went ahead and did that and the rest is history. Odd behavior went away and control panel works. I have considered taking the old control panel and chopping the bad spots on the ribbon cable and soldering wires directly to them as they are large copper tracks. But that project went by the wayside as I never needed to do it. But I was considering whether I should open it again and use some form of acrylic conformal coating and touch up the crimp connectors to prevent corrosion to begin with.
I also ran it through a test cycle once I could control the system and it came up OK as far as I understand how the control cycle works. If I had to bought a new computer and then also a new control service because of the corroded ribbon crimps it would've cost me almost as much as we paid for the unit. I believe we paid $700 back in 2015 and would have cost me a minimum of $600 not including someone's time if I didn't do it myself. I also put conformal coating back on the points I soldered on as the board has a very thin conformable coating on it.
One thing I did do is I ordered the relays that the control board uses. They're special as their sort of miniature and they aren't produced much anymore. I had to put the thing back together with the original relays and everything works and I purchased relays to replace them but I haven't done the replacement yet I was hoping that maybe during the depth of winter I would open it up and recheck the contact resistance on the relay to see how bad we are. But I've been the only user and I only use it every couple weeks so the truth is it probably doesn't even have 300 cycles on it. So to have those parts fail was kind of a disappointment. Only two of the capacitors were a known brand the rest were absolute junk. And it was one of the junk ones that went.
My theory is to why the original behavior happened is that I think the computer was actually restarting its program. I figured that probably one of the capacitors went that regulated its power and it wasn't a sensor issue with the computer making a decision it was probably the computer was rebooting or restarting its cycle and program over and over again at random times and so when you're in the middle of a wash cycle the program would restart which would cause it to drain early which would cause it to reset. If it keeps resetting it keeps trying to drain. Because the drain is the first thing it does when it starts up.
Given that all I had to do was replace the capacitors and this behavior went away I think all is well for quite some time. I otherwise like the machine and it has never flooded so that's been a huge positive to me and I've never had any kind of water event with it. I did obviously clean out the filter system and the arms and other stuff during my initial troubleshooting but obviously it doesn't do with the drain firing early but I found that out later because there would just be too much water left in the end of some of the cycles like big puddles of it. Even though it ran the heater because I saw it do it sometime in the cycle. So I assumed that something was just constantly interrupting the normal operation.
I'm actually really glad I was able to do this myself and had all the correct professional tools to do something like this. I had no charring on any of the connectors and no wiring issues and nothing that looked out of place nor any water leakage, as I previously stated. So I'd say it was a very manageable issue and because I don't use it very often I was able to keep it off-line for the 2 1/2 weeks required to do research, get the OEM Service manual for that entire series, and do a few checks before I decided what actually had to be.
Indigo2 Solid Impact R4400 250MHz IP22; 128MBytes RAM; HD Drive, Tape Drive, CDROM IRIX 6.5.22
NEED -> 