Kung Fu Maintenance talks about some common causes and repairs for dishwasher overflowing leaks at the front of the appliance or water not filling repair video.
Dishwasher Overflowing
OK. So if your dishwasher was leaking from the front. Right here. You’ve seen water coming down. It is usually this float cup switch so just want to show you. There is usually a Philips screw. Some models don’t have a screw. This one does. I already removed the screw and you can see all this. It is just soap scum built up. It looks worse than it is but anyway I will clean all this out.
Just going to show you how to clean this out. Pretty sure you could figure it out. But anyway I just take a flat blade knife and than just run it around the inside here and get the worst of it. Get the worst of it off there. It being soap and all you would think it would be pretty easy to clean off but it is not that easy. Could be easier but it is what it is. So anyway I knocked most of it off there. All the rest I am going to clean off with a sponge here.
Clogged Dishwasher Float Cup Switch Cause Of Overflowing
Usually I will kind of wrap a rag around my knife and than rotate my knife inside there with the rag on it to clean the residue off. Let’s see if I have a rag. I have a sponge. OK I have a rag so that is a little better, Show you this here. Anyway clean this all out.
Dishwasher air gap cleaning tools https://amzn.to/2QTiCVR (Amazon Link) work really good for this.
Put everything back together. Test it again on the fill cycle. Make sure it doesn’t leak on the front of the dishwasher. Make sure everything drains properly. And you are all set there. To put your dishwasher back in order and stop the overflowing.
There is one other spot that can cause a leak here and that’s these door gaskets down in these corners here. One and two. One on each side. Occasionally these need to be replaced. I’ve also seen sometimes where someone had like a fork sat in the corner of the dishwasher and that caused a leak but anyway.
If your dishes are coming out spotty what you want to do is add some Jet Dry. You wouldn’t think it has that much of a difference but it really does. Adding jet dry about once every three months. That will keep your dishwasher working better. It helps the water run off of the dishes a lot better. Sort of like water off of a ducks back. It just allows the water to collect and run off in the proper way so that it is not going to leave a whole bunch of spots on your dishes and your glasses and all that kind of stuff. Anyway that’s a bit about dishwasher maintenance.
Kung Fu Maintenance shows how to reset a bottom door trim and access panel on a dishwasher.
Dishwasher Bottom Access Panel Reset
OK. When you go to reset the bottom trim pieces on these dishwashers panels the bottom piece goes in first. You can see where the screw holes are here and here. Than your top piece. This one has like these retainer plastic screws that hold the top piece and you can anchor the top first. Like so. Which you can’t even see. Sorry ’bout that. Right here. OK and than on the other side. Same thing. OK and than on the bottom portion you just have to line it up so that the screw passes through the top part and the bottom part. Like so. Very easy. I got some house cleaners coming. Clean this stuff all up. Clean this place up a bit. Man. It’s pretty dirty. There we go and that’s how you reset the bottom trim pieces.
Kung Fu Maintenance demonstrates how to stop dishwasher from flooding water from sink counter top air gap when running plus draining.
The air gap– so just advance it to the next cycle. There it goes. Oops, and it is leaking from the air gap. Sometimes I can unplug these by blocking the top, and sticking my hand down, and feeling to where the garbage disposal line is. So it will shoot out of the top when I do this. But sometimes I can get it to clear out. But not this time.
We’re going to need a special tool there to clear that. You can see where it drains into the disposal, right here. Anyway, I’ll clear that all out, and get going. So our dishwasher is clogged here, and we need to unclog it. What I’ve got is this. It’s like a really long bottle brush, an air gap cleaning tool.
Dishwasher Air Gap Blockage Check
It extends and pushes down through the air gap. What you do is pull the little cap off here. Some of these will have a screw on type, and you can unscrew those. For this particular kind, you just squeeze, and then pull. You just press in the two taps here, and pull it out.
And it’s a good thing we’re doing this. If we look up top in the air gap, look at all that stuff that’s stuck in there. So this is kind of gross, but it’s got to be done. Anyway, it’s like chicken bones. And it’s all hanging up the dishwasher, keeping it from draining properly. So now I’m going to run the air gap tool down through the line.
And when you pull this back out, you want to avoid splatter and stuff with it. But basically, this will push all the way down. And we may be able to see it come out, into the disposal, here. Let’s see if I can shed some light on it, here, so you can see better.
Anyway, it’s just long enough to poke into the disposal, right there. Anyway, when I pull it back out, it’s going to be all covered with a bunch of gunk. Up on top, you kind of shield it with you hand, or block it with a rag, or do whatever you’ve got to do to keep this from getting all over the place. Pull it out, nice and easy. There we go. And we’ll rinse that all off.
Now, inside here, where it empties into the disposal, I can feel a small ridge around the disposal, itself. So let me show you how to clear that up. And basically, we’re going to remove the line from underneath. And what happens on these garbage disposal installs– you can see my other video on how to install a garbage disposal, for one of the most often missed steps.
When installing a disposal, let me show you, here. We’re going to remove the top clamp, and pull the disposal hose off. Now if your disposal’s really old, this may not be worth it, because it can crack right here, when you go to pull it off. But if it’s not too old, just kind of gently pull this off.
OK. we’re going to look inside here, and make sure that’s all clear. But where we’re looking is right here. And I’ll try to show you the ridge. Maybe I can just overlay another video, and show you the ridge there. And it’s there. Oh, let’s see. I think I need a better flashlight. OK. Let me show you from the flap, here. There we go.
OK. Can you see the little ridge, all the way around outside? Well, as your food goes in there, all of that’s going to be hanging up around there. So what I’m going to do is take the flat blade of my knife and then just take that ridge right off, just by going around the inside of it, right here, all the way around, until it’s nice and smooth.
I think that’s it. It’s really easy, but it really makes a difference, because that ridge, there, really allows food and stuff to hang up on it. I can still see a tiny bit, up on this left side. I’m going to try to get that. You can go through this with that. OK.
And now, looking through there, you can see how it’s all clear. So now there’s not going to be any place for food and debris to hang up, as much. And that will keep things all clear. So this kind of like the ultimate preventative maintenance step of your dishwasher is keeping that line clear.
When you tighten this on, you don’t want to tighten it down too tight. Just snug is good. It can crack where the garbage disposal seam is. It goes right across that spot. So that’s something else you want to be aware of. OK. Now we can test out our– well, now we can put our disposal back together, our air gap back together. Put this cap back on.
Again, it just squeezes. Some of them, you will have to look at this particular direction. This one goes– this one can actually go either way. Make sure it’s snapped into place. Set our air gap cap back on. Get my flashlight out of the drain. And now we’re ready to test it out. So, here it goes. Turn the dishwasher on. Latch it closed. And it looks like this one’s missing some screws, so I’m going to need to mount that to the cabinet better, also. But it’s in there for testing purposes.
So you can hear, now, it’s on its fill cycle, and once that fills, I’ll just advance it to the drain cycle, and we’ll take another look, and see what happens. And it can be some pretty nasty stuff. So it’s a good idea to wear gloves for when you do this. OK, fill cycle is filled. So we’re just going to advance the timer to the drain cycle.
And take a look at our air gap. Everything’s going good. Looking down in our disposal, you can see it draining out like it should. We’ve got a lot of soap residue, it looks like, in there. It would be a good idea to run the disposal. That’s good. You can also check down here for any leaks, make sure everything is good there. And it is. We’re all set there. No more flooding.
Kung Fu Maintenance shows a dishwasher install that needs an air gap but sink does not have hole how plus why to tie up drain line.
OK. Every once in a while you run into a situation where you got a sink and installing a dishwasher, and you don’t have an air gap. What can you do? You know, an air gap’s pretty much necessary, because the dishwasher runs into the garbage disposal or into the sink, and you don’t want bacteria from the disposal or from the sink drain to wind up going down into your dishwasher.
And this dishwasher, I still need to mount. It’s got the mounting screws that need to go in the top here, and a bit of adjustment, just to make everything line up properly. Adjust the feet, and make everything good here. This one’s just been set in place.
But as far down below, let me show you what we’ve got going on. Oh, man. And the drain line has just been set in place. So we need a clamp there in order to clamp that on. So we can’t run this yet.
But if you don’t have an air gap, what you can do is tie up the drain line. We don’t want that drain line to just go straight in like this, because gravity can draw the water back in, and especially from the drain. Now, there’s a couple considerations here.
This one, I’ve got a pull-out faucet which allows this to pull out, and it’s going to pull that out. So we don’t want that to bump into our drain line. So that’s a consideration there. So we definitely want to position this in a spot that that’s not going to happen.
So what I’m going to do here is take the drain line back to right here on the disposal. And again, what that’s going to do is make a loop that comes up and over. And it will never fall off, because what I’ll use is I’ll use this military grade cable tie right here and tie this puppy up.
Again, we’re just kind of creating our own little trap here. And we’ll leave it loose enough so if we need to do something different in the future, we can. But as you can see, I’m just going around here, taking my cable tie, and tying it up. There we go.
That’s really all we need, again, leaving enough room so I can do something different in the future if I need to, and do what we want it to do. And we’re all set there. And this, I can just cut this off, and I’ll leave myself a little room, just in case I wanted to tighten it up at all, or whatever I needed to do.
But easy enough. If I ever had to replace this, this screw comes loose here. Not a big deal. Everything’s good there. That’s one way around it, if you did not have an air gap.
This is a stainless steel sink, and cutting through here, you know– what you want for this is a four-hole sink so you can install a air gap, and that’s the ideal situation. But anyway, this is a way around it, if you did not have that.
So now, hooking up the dishwasher here, what we need is a clamp to clamp it on there. And these usually have different sizes to trim to, this part here. This one, I think we won’t need to trim that. We’ll just put it straight on there.
Get my screwdriver set up here, and I’ve got my clamp here. I almost wish I had one size larger clamp, but that’s going to do it. There we go. That’s got a clamp coming there. I’ll just tighten that a nice quarter-turn past tight.
We’re good to go there. And move our deals in over the top there. Now we can test-run it. Make sure nothing’s going to leak on us. Got the hot water line open.
You can see, on the hot side, my particular setup is a 3/8 to 3/8 around here. OK, and that feels a little bit loose. Pays to check these things out. Yeah. This thing’s definitely loose.
OK. And the water is on there. So now, we can fire up the dishwasher, this new dishwasher here. OK. Just going to put it ahead, latch in. Going to listen for the fill cycle.
There it goes. While that’s filling, we’ll just feel back there, make sure we have no leaks. Underneath here, make sure I see no water dripping underneath there. Could take the pan off, but I think I should be able to tell. Oh, yeah.
No, we’re nice and dry, so that’s good. Most likely, I’m going to need to adjust the feet anyway. And this is only just set up there. But for now, just checking to make sure our drain cycle does what want it to.
And we’d want to make sure that water stays, actually, in this loop, down to about here, because we don’t want the water to back up into this dishwasher line. OK, so I’ll just advance it to the drain cycle, and if anything goes wrong, then I’ll just open the door back up here.
There goes the drain cycle. You saw the water shoot up and over, right through the disposal. You want to look for any leaks here. Everything’s nice and dry there. And check it all the way back here, make sure everything’s good. And it is.
OK. And the water emptied out here. It actually seems like it siphoned all the way through, so it’s not really what I want it to do. So I’d like it to leave water in the hose, up to this point here.
Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. I’ll advance it to the next fill cycle. You can hear it go there. The main thing is, we have no leaks.
And again, we’ve got our water line looped up and over, and tied up. And what I could do is attempt to raise that line up even a little bit more. I’ve got it tied there, but I can always tie it up higher. So let’s see how much room that I’ve got here.
Now once again, I’m just trying to tie that up about as high as that can go. There we go. I’ll just loop it into the sink like that. And my hope is that would create a little trap. It won’t be quite an air gap.
OK. So I’m going to put it ahead to the drain cycle, and you’re going to see the water jump to this spot here, cycle through. Here goes. We’re going to watch for it when it stops to see if it’ll keep water in the line there. There you go.
Hopefully, you saw that go through. And we’ll wait until the water stops. There, it’s stopped now. Again, it came up and over. I do believe it left more water trapped in the line this time. That’s good.
You know, it’s tricky to tell exactly. But at least we got a better chance of a seal there. It’s also possible that it completely siphoned up and over. You know, really, the best way is to have an air gap installer install an air gap.
Again, this is just a measure for doing what you can if you did not have an air gap. But sometimes, all you can do is make it better. You can’t necessarily make it perfect. So this is just making it better. And I suppose the other thing you could do would be, install an air gap inside here, but if it ever overflowed, it’d be overflowing inside here, which is not really a good situation.
Yeah, this is about the best I think, we can do, tying up the uh– Anyway, our dishwasher is hooked up. No leaks. Now, all I got do is mount it up to the cabinet.
And this is a good temporary measure to keep any back-up from going into your sink. By putting the line higher, if you did have a sink backup or something like that, it just makes it a lot less likely that it’s going to go up and over, and back into your dishwasher, especially as, you know, the line’s higher. This is not a perfect situation.
I’m going to go ahead and order a drill bit for drilling through here, special drill bit. Couple ways to do it. You can search on YouTube or eventually, I’ll try to make a video, and put it up, drilling for an air gap. So you can convert this over to have an air gap. But at least this is a temporary measure for now, just to make it better. We’re good to go.
And that’s the dishwasher. And we went ahead and mounted, added the screws to the plate here, so that everything is nice and secure. Good to go.
If your dishes are coming out dirty and you made sure that you added a rinse agent. See this one’s got a rinse agent, and using the correct kind of soap. You’re running your hot water first. Check the air gap to make sure that’s clear– which I’ve already done– and the disposal drain line.
And then you want to check inside the sump. So what I’m going to do is vacuum it out. But you want to be careful in there because odds are that someone breaks a glass and there’s glass down there. And you can’ t really see it. And that’s most often the cause of this not draining properly.
Clean this out back here. Let’s do those two screws down here. And it’s normal that it keeps the water in there. It keeps water in there to keep the seals wet, prevent them from drying out and cracking. So you’ll see a bit of water in the bottom. And downside here is a second cover. I’ll pull this out. And, again, be careful if you stick your fingers in there because a lot of times it’s broken glass down in there.
It has a little metal piece that spins. And this one seems to have some debris that’s stuck to it. I’m trying to pull that off now. And that acts so it spins sort of like a garbage disposal to grind stuff up. But it’s got some pieces of plastic or something down around it. So that can be part of the cause.
Pull all that stuff off of there. I still feel quite a bit more here. Fortunately there’s no glass down here. And I’m spinning the little piece of metal. It’s like a little metal hook that spins around to grind up smaller food particles.
You want to brush off most of the bigger food particles. Get rid of all this debris here. But it will grind up a tiny bit. I’ll get my wet dry vac in. Here comes the noise.
We’ll actually be able to see the little metal part I was telling you about. I’ll have to peek down in there better myself. There’s this darn piece of plastic that’s wrapped itself around this part here. Not the easiest spot to get into here. It’s all clear there. Now we need to test it out, make sure the thing is cycling properly here.
And I think I will wait to put the screws back in. Test this out here. More things for you to run your dishwasher. It’s a good idea to let the hot water run for a little bit. And that way the water heats up and when you start your dishwasher it’ll be filling with hot water. It does have it’s own heater. But it’s still a little bit better to start with hot water.
Letting it fill up there. Getting hot now. And we’ll listen to the fill cycle. We’re gonna advance it a little bit. There it is. That’s the fill cycle. Once we finish this fill cycle we will push it ahead to the drain cycle. Now it’s gone through the fill cycle. And we’ll make sure everything’s– oh yeah– it’s spraying good. The water’s pretty scummy.
Now we’re ready to advance it to the drain cycle. And we want to make sure there’s no water spurting out of that air gap. And make sure everything’s going into our disposal. It all seems proper. This is going to work just fine. Little plastic pieces have gotten ground up inside there. So I’ll rinse this all off, put it all back together, and we’ll be good to go.
One water drips from the front usually caused by a clogged float switch. 0:22
Two is water spilling out of the counter top air gap most often caused by a clogged air gap drain line. 1:42
Three is a clogged drain line usually at the air gap itself. 2:31
Four is a soap cover that won’t work caused by a detached spring. 4:00
Five is a dishwasher motor that hums but doesn’t start caused by a stuck impeller. 4:47
00:10 Alright
00:15 time to cover a bunch different troubles on this day
00:18 with dishwashers
Clogged Dishwasher Float Cup Switch
00:22 Water dripping from the front here dripping down
00:27 sometimes leaves a calcium deposit or you see water spilling from there
00:32 most often is a stuck float preventing the switch from turning off
00:35 this particular model has a float cover
00:40 with a small phillips screw in back that can be removed
00:43 Most often it is just soap residue, soap scum just piles up inside there
00:49 and it’ll appear worse than it really is but it is usually just soap scum remaining
00:54 So look here I’m not sure, this one may not be leaking how I was explaining but
01:01 yes, look at all the soap scun under here well this
01:07 small cup floats up as the washer fills and enables this tiny switch here sets off that
01:15 tiny switch and that’s how the washer learns
01:17 well that’s how the dishwasher engages to stop the water fill cycle
01:23 moving on we need to clear all this scum off there
01:27 and that is the way you remedy that problem
01:30 I am going to clear this all out because I’m getting the place ready
01:34 this way
01:36 when somebody lives here
01:38 they don’t recieve a surprise when they first use the machine
01:42 Right here on the dishwasher is the air gap
01:46 if you notice water
01:48 spill out of the air gap
01:51 this shows
01:52 the air gap to garbage disposal drain line
01:55 is clogged from the air gap
02:00 below here you can see the flexible plumbing going to the garbage disposal, this is
Dishwasher Disposer Drain Line
02:05 the air gap to disposal drain line and this gets plugged up with debris and junk so you need to
02:09 unscrews the clamp and clear out this line or replace it
02:14 either way and for stubborn clogs you can connect it to
02:18 a hose faucet and just flush it out, to clear it out
02:22 there’s another method also using a long brush
02:25 push it down
02:27 inside the line
02:28 take off this cap first
02:31 Now if your dishwasher would not drain
02:33 this would be a good time to look inside this cap to
Dishwasher Air Gap Blockage Check
02:37 many times there is
02:41 put this down so I can use my other hand on it
02:42 next you just press in these two side clips and than just pull the cap right up
02:47 I not sure you could see that but there’s a chicken bone down the line
02:51 many times if you’re disposal drain will not drain
02:55 it is time to have a look here
02:59 and
03:01 in order to remove that chicken bone to float up I am going to pour some water down there and try float it up to the top
03:11 maybe it will float up when the line is full
03:15 Perhaps it is light enough, I have seen it with parts of plastic and such
03:20 It is filled now
03:26 but no it isn’t going to float up here for me but if it was a plastic toothpick
03:42 or something like that ocasionally you can get it to float up so now I will need to do run this through the drain cycle for a split second and it is going to shoot water up and out but I need to launch that out of there
03:55 so I will come return to that afterwords I just wanted to show you all a lot of different sources of trouble
03:58 in dishwashers
04:00 Occasionally here
Dishwasher Soap Dish Not Staying Closed
04:02 the spring for the soap dish gets
04:04 broken off, often they pop off
04:07 and you can take apart both sides of the door and than replace the spring, it is a bit
04:10 of a trick but you just search for a place, to find, to reanchor the spring for the latch
04:15 to
04:17 many times it takes a bit more adjusting to get it, let’s see
04:24 this one seems to be working alright, well it’s actually not very strong so this one appears, well maybe
04:29 the spring has popped off
04:31 normally it would
04:33 just open automatically when it rotates to the correct spot
04:37 yes this soap dish is
04:38 surely broke so that needs to be repaired
04:42 by resetting the spring
04:45 What other things can I share with you?
04:47 On occasion
04:48 the impeller will freeze up
04:52 dishwashers, there are four screws holding the bottom trim plate
04:56 each brand impeller is a little bit different
04:59 this brand model has
05:02 a fan attached to it and you can just turn the
05:05 fan blades to free up the stuck impeller
05:08 Let me take out the four screws. Different types you will need to use perhaps a screwdriver
05:13 or two screwdrivers and use like wedges against the
05:17 motor impeller to free up the impeller
05:21 Keep turning it till it turns freely
05:23 You will feel it resist for a bit
05:25 than suddenly it will turn rather easily
05:29 This will most likely be somewhat nasty
05:30 under here
05:36 here is the sound insulation
05:38 helps mimimize the noise
05:41 the impeller
05:42 When you run the
05:45 dishwasher if you hear a humming but it doesn’t fully turn on that is
05:49 most likely the impeller froze
05:51 Disconnect power first for sure
05:53 next
05:54 reach down right back here and I’m not sure if you see it all that good but maybe if I can get my
06:00 flashlight on here to give you all a better view
06:09 place you in here
06:11 a tiny bit and
06:15 I am not sure if you can see the blades of the fan
06:17 there but I will rotate them with my opposite hand
06:23 many times if they were really hard to start turning
06:26 and than it will just free up and start to turn freely
06:28 It should turn nice and easy and that is the way you can free those up if they were stuck
Stuck Dishwasher Impeller Free Up
06:33 different types you will see the impeller shaft
06:37 right there and you will be able to rotate it
06:43 so that’s a bit concerning dishwashers there
06:45 some of the most often sources of trouble you will encounter maintenance wise
Just wanted to through a bunch of things today on dishwashers.
1) Clogged Float Cup Switch 0:22 2) Water Shooting from Air Gap. 1:42 3) Dishwasher not Draining 2:31 4) Soap Dispenser Door Not Latching Properly 4:00 5) Stuck Impeller 4:47
00:22 If you ever see water coming from right here running down. You can see like a calcium deposit or you see water dripping from that side. Usually what it is is a stuck float switch.
Now these float switches on this particular model have a little phillips screw back here that comes off. It is usually just soap scum. Soap scum just builds up inside there and it will look a lot worse than it actually is but it is actually just soap residue left behind.
So let me show you here. I’m not sure. This one is not leaking like I was saying but oh yeah! You can see all the soap residue inside there.
Well this little cup floats up as the water fills and engages this little switch here. Releases that little switch and that’s how the water knows. Well that’s how the dishwasher is told to shut the water off. So anyway we gotta clean all this stuff out here and that is how you fix that problem.
So I’m gonna clean this one all out since I am turning the unit. That way when someone moves in they don’t have a surprise the first time they use the dishwasher.
01:42 Up here on the dishwasher this is your air gap. Now if you ever see water spit out of this air gap it’s an indication of the garbage disposal drain line being clogged.
From the dishwasher air gap under here you can see this line going into the garbage disposal. This is our disposal to drain line and this gets built up with gunk and food so you got to undo the clamp here and clear this line out or replace the line. One of the two of and for stubborn ones you can hook it up to a hose bibb and just flush it out, clean it out. There’s another way to do it also where you can take a brush and run it down inside here remove this cap here.
Now if your dishwasher wasn’t draining that would be a good time to check inside this cap. Also often there is a, set this down so I can get my other hand on it. Anyways you just squeeze these two clips in and than just pull the cap right out.
Whoa!
02:47 I don’t know if you saw that but there is like a chicken bone down there. Sometimes if you’re disposal drain is not draining it’s time to check this here. In order to get that chicken bone to float back up what I’m gonna try and do is dump some water down inside there and see if it will float up to the top for me. Sometimes it will float right up when the line is filled. If it’s light enough. I’ve seen it with pieces of plastic and such. It’s full now but nope it’s not going to float up there for me but if it was like a plastic toothpick or something like that sometimes you can get it to float up.
So what I will have to do is just run this through the drain cycle for just a second and its gonna shoot water up and all but I’ve got to shoot that out of there.
Anyway I will come back to that later I just wanted to show you guys a bunch of stuff with dishwashers. Sometimes these 04:02 the spring for this gets broken off, often they come off and you can separate the two halves of the door and than reset the spring, it’s a little tricky but you just gotta get a place, to find, to reset that spring latch to. Sometimes it takes a little bit of an adjustment to get it.
Let’s see. This one’s working ok. Well it is not very strong so this one looks like possibly the spring has come off because it should only open automatically when it gets to the right point. Yeah this one is definitely broken. So that needs to be reworked to reset the spring.
What else can I show you?
04:47 Sometimes the impeller will get stuck. Dishwashers, there is four screws that hold the bottom trim plate on and each type of impeller is a little bit different. This particular model has like a fan connected to it and you can just turn the fan blades to unstick the impeller.
Let me remove these four screws. Other kinds you will have to use like a screwdriver,like two screwdrivers, and kind of wedge it against the motor impeller in order to free up the impeller. You just kind of keep turning it until it gives. You’ll feel it be like really tough for a bit and than all of a sudden it will move really easy.
This is probably going to be a little nasty in here. Got our sound insulation here keeping the noise out or in.
The impeller, if you had turned the dishwasher on and you hear like a humming but it’s not kicking on, that’s usually your impeller stuck.
Make sure you turn the power off and than reach right back here. And I don’t know if you can really see it that well but let me see if I can get my flashlight going here to give you guys a lookie loo.
Put you inside there a little bit and I don’t know if you can see the fan blades there but I’m going to turn them with my other hand. Anyway sometimes if they were like really hard to turn at first and than it will just give and it will spin freely. It should spin nice and freely and that is how you can unstick those if it was stuck.
Other kinds you’ll see the impeller shaft right here and you’ll be able to turn it.
Anyway that is a little bit about dishwashers there. Some of the most common things you will come across maintenance wise!
Today I got a tip from a mechanic. A helicopter mechanic in the army. How to remove a stripped screw.
You will want to make sure to clean off all the residue after making the repair because the mixing of chemicals (this with dishwasher soap) or product can be dangerous and or corrosive to plastics.
Okay today I have got stripped screw and I have got a dishwasher spring and I can’t get the screw out. Well maybe I can. This one. The screw is just stripped. Try my drill and it is not coming. I wanted to show you an old trick a guy that was a helicopter pilot in the army showed me. So this is a good army trick. What you want to use is some Ajax or Comet and going to get the tip of my screwdriver wet and than just dip it in the Ajax. Okay I am just going to dip it in the Ajax. It is going to coat the tip of the screwdriver and we are going to insert that into the hole. Than we will be able to twist the screw out no problem.
This was an old helicopter mechanic trick. So anyway now I can replace the stripped screw with a worthy screw and be done with it. But I thought you might like to know that trick. What the Ajax or Comet does is it fills in the voids in between the spaces and gives enough gripping power to grip the screw so that you can take it out.
So thanks to my friend from the Army who gave me that trick. I hope it helps you out someday. Useful in a lot of situations when you have got a stripped screw that you can’t get out.
This one is for a dishwasher spring so you can check out my video on that on how to fix a dishwasher soap dish that is not closing. Just all I had to do was reset the spring.
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Kung Fu Maintenance demonstrates how to fix a high rise faucet that is leaking from the neck and explains the importance of using a high temperature faucet grease to make the repair last for a long time.
Today I’m going to be showing you how to repair a leaking high-rise faucet. It’s showing it’s leaking at the neck here. See all the water coming out? That’s not right. It’s going to be leaking down below, and we don’t want that. Anyway, for this repair, we don’t need to turn the water off. If you have a single handle faucet, for that type of repair you would need to turn the water off. A lot of times, this one you can do by hand, this one here. Just turn it out.
If you did need to use a pair of channel locks, you’re going to want to protect your jaws with tape like so, to prevent marring the neck here. You also could use a strap wrench for this, which is a lot better than channel locks. Because channel locks could deform the neck if you were to squeeze it too tight, it could deform or reshape the neck as well as mark it up.
But a strap wrench kind of grabs it, tightens down and you can cinch it down and turn it out. But anyway, this one we can do by hand. Inside here, there’s three O-rings, and these are the O-rings that we’re going to need to replace here. Now I already know my sizes of O-rings that I need, but if you don’t know what sizes you need, they do sell an O-ring kit. The stuff that I’m going to be using is pretty stinky.
It’s this faucet grease here, and if you get it on your hands, it’s pretty tough to wash off. Because it’s a high temperature faucet grease and it’s meant to not wash off with water. When you go to repair this, you’re going to want to wear gloves, and a good way to do this is to wear two or three pairs of these disposable gloves.
You’ll see reason I do this is this stuff’s so smelly. What you can do is unwrap the glove, one of the gloves, in order to use your tools and not get the faucet grease all over your tool. Not get the faucet grease all over the outside of the faucet. This faucet is going to be in need of some cleaning afterwards anyway, but that’s another story.
The easy way to get these O-rings off is to use a small flathead screwdriver. I’ve got one in my Leatherman, so it comes in handy for this. And it’s just a matter of picking these off, fairly simple. If you keep them together, you can use that to size up your new O-ring to make sure you’re getting the right size. And all three of these are the same size, so you really only need to keep one together so if you needed to cut it, you could.
Not a big deal. Okay. One, two, three O-rings, another reason for the gloves there. Now what you want to do is coat this so that underneath it, it’ll have a coating of the faucet grease. This stuff can be a little tricky to get apart sometimes, and mine’s getting kind of old. It’s time to order some more faucet grease. So anyway, go underneath where your O-rings are going to go. Okay. Now we’ll slip our new O-rings on. Here’s the first one. Yeah, the gloves are going to make it a little tricky, but it’s what it is, job security.
There’s the second one, and number three. Now we’re going to coat the outside of the O-rings with the faucet grease. This is a high temperature faucet grease, so it’s not going to come off with hot water, and lubing this all around is going to prevent our O-rings from pinching up inside there.
Because if they pinch then they’re going to break, and then your faucet’s going to leak. Okay, now that we got that, this is the good time to go ahead and remove that outer layer of the gloves. We can dispose of those. Now we’re ready to put our faucet neck back together.
So we can slip this up, and then push it in all the way around gently, and then go ahead and slowly hand thread this in place so that we don’t get it cross-threaded. We can get rid of these, and we’re just going to hand tighten this down. Once that’s nice and tight…and now once that’s nice and tight, just hand tightened, we’re going to prove it and check for any leaks.
Now if we see any leaks here, then can use our channel locks to tighten it up a little bit more, but it looks like everything’s good here, no leaks.
So now you want to check underneath for any leaks, and you’ll need to remove your gloves to do that. I’m going to take these off now and check for any leaks down below. Now first, you want to take your rag, dry everything off. It looks like we’ve got a loose handle there also. I’ll show you how to tighten that up, it’s just an Allen wrench under here, it’s real easy, but that’s another story. I may put out another video how to tighten those down. I can try to put the link on the video here.
Going to come down below the sink and feel all around for any leaks. Now, you may have to dry everything off and check this the following day, as it was leaking before. So you probably have some water that’s still trapped inside there, so you’re going to have to just keep an eye on this, and do what you can to dry it out.
Then go ahead and turn the water on. If you see a flood of water, you know you’ve got a problem you’ve got to deal with. But if you’re just feeling a little bit of moisture from before, you’re actually okay.
An old trick is after you dry everything up below, is to put paper towels down, or toilet paper in order to check it. Wow, there’s something wrong here, someone skipped the air gap, that’s not good for the dishwasher. You don’t want to do that.
Skipping that air gap can make you really sick, because the air gap prevents the sewer gases from going into your food when it passes from your disposer, so you definitely don’t want to run it straight in like this.
This is wrong. So if you see this, you definitely want to install an air gap to prevent getting harmful bacteria and everything into your dishwasher. Anyway, that’s another story also. Anyway, if we have no leaks here we’re all set, good to go. One fixed high-rise kitchen faucet. Good to go.
OK. Here’s what we want for the cords when we are passing these through for appliances. For this particular one we drill a half inch hole. This part clamps on the cord and the cord gets passed through and you drill your half inch hole. Pass this through the appliance. Tighten the nut on and good to go. This just keeps the cord from rubbing against the sharp edges of any sheet metal that’s been drilled through, It also anchors the cord in place so that it won’t get pulled out. Most appliances such as dishwashers and garbage disposers will have a predrilled knockout and you’ll just want to use one of these to pass through. If you are not reusing the old cords. Sometimes you can reuse the old cord if it is in good shape having no breaks in the insulation. This is what you would add to a new cord or a new pig tail to make it safer and to anchor the cord in place.
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