If you live in California, a state that has the highest rate of home dishwasher repair complaints in the nation, then you’ve probably been affected by the problem.
I live in San Jose, which is midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. When I moved here in 2008, one of the first things I noticed was that dishwashers were leaking from the bottom. It happens to be a hot area for repair complaints, and this one was no different.
The problem is that dishwashers are not made of steel like your kitchen sink or your stovetop or your clothes washer and dryer. They’re made of plastic, which can crack if it’s overfilled with water. This has to do with how water moves through plastic, not just with anything that happens to be inside it at the time.
There are many possible solutions. One is a special kind of rubber gasket that can be fitted into a dishwasher’s hole before you fill it with water so that the leak stops right away when you turn it on. Another solution is installing a plastic valve on the bottom of the dishwasher that reduces its output when it fills up with water–like a pressure relief valve on your car. Another is a clip-on pressure regulator you can install yourself
A researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, has found that dishwashers manufactured by Whirlpool, Sub-Zero and LG in the US use an unusual type of seal that can start to leak refrigerator coolant. If this happens, he says, the refrigerator’s compressor overheats and fails.
He tracked down his leak after noticing that his wife had had to clean up soiled dishes for almost a year before she got a new dishwasher. He discovered that the seals on all three models (a Whirlpool Duet single-door model at $500, a Sub-Zero U2F triple-door model at $1,250 and a LG GSC10 model at $900) came from a single manufacturer: Hylex Incorporated of Lawrenceville, Georgia.
Somebody must have thought of it already. There’s a “dishwasher leaking from bottom” category on the Yahoo Answers website. A user named joseph wrote:
“my dishwasher has a leak, but it isn’t coming out the bottom, it just seems to slide around in there.”
“’cause its leaking from the bottom of the dishwasher and its not coming out, but i think im gonna need to get another one.”
The website has a short FAQ: “Is my dishwasher leaking?” It lists three possible problems. One is that water is dripping underneath the dishwasher; one is that water is leaking through the bottom of your dishwasher; and one is that you have a bad gasket or putty sealing lip.
The FAQ also says: “If you can’t find your leak, it’s possible that your dishwasher isn’t leaking at all. In this case you may want to contact the manufacturer for assistance.”
We don’t think of dishwashers as appliances, so we don’t imagine them to be prone to breaking. But in a real sense they are. They are exposed to the elements, and in the course of their lifetime they will get dirty and go through their cycles. They aren’t climate-controlled, and they do take on water.
Many of us have had a dishwasher that leaks from the bottom, and perhaps it’s not surprising that some of those leaks are at the attachments and seams between components. But it’s also possible that none of those leaks could have been prevented by anything you did or didn’t do.
The dishwasher is a complicated appliance made up of many parts. It is designed with a lot of redundancy: it has multiple pumps, motors, valves, seals and gaskets–all made to last for years. And yet there may be nothing wrong with any one of those parts. Maybe it was just bad luck that all those parts got worn in different ways at the same time.
I used to live in a house where the dishwasher leaked from the bottom. It was an expensive appliance, and expensive appliances tend to leak. And I tended to think that if you spent significant amounts of money on an appliance, it should work properly. But this was not so.
My dishwasher leaked from the bottom because when it was installed, the installer had failed to drill a hole for the drain hose. My husband had to drill this hole himself and seal it up with silicone caulk. The cailk was melted by the water pressure, so he used some caulking putty instead.
My dishwasher was still leaking from the bottom after all these repairs because my husband had neglected to install a rubber gasket at the base of the door. You see, if water gets into a dishwasher, it is a bad thing. A lot of dishes get ruined in dishwashers around here because they are full of water; or they become shrunken, wrinkled or discolored; or they release an overpowering smell; or whatever else you might expect when cheap plastic parts are exposed to large quantities of hot water. If your dishwasher leaks from the bottom, all those things will happen more often than usual.
You can fix my dishwasher’s
There is always a risk of something going wrong. There is no way of eliminating all risk. But if you are careful, and don’t rush things, you can minimize the consequences of mistakes. You just have to pay attention and make sure you don’t make them yourself.