When the dishes you take out of the dishwasher, AFTER running it, are dirtier than the dishes you put INTO the dishwasher, then you know there’s a problem.
Our dishwasher seemed to be getting worse and worse – leaving little bits of stuff on the glasses usually, and more and more IN the glasses. Bits of things like flax seeds, grain hulls, small splintery-looking things, unknown crumbs, and crunchy things.
I topped up the rinse-aid dispenser. Still didn’t help.
So late Sunday night, which is of course the most convenient time to do it, I started taking the dishwasher apart to clean things out inside.
I had to get out the funny tools to get part of it taken apart – some kooky star shaped screwdriver was needed to take the filter cap off as well as the center round thingy that the swirly arm sits on top of in the bottom of the dishwasher. (Take note of these technical part names – you may need them someday yourself!) The top spinning arm just popped off easily. BONUS!
Once I had the filter cap off I needed to clean the filter screen. At least, I was pretty sure it was a screen at one time, except that now it had about 6 holes instead of 200. Hard water and ‘gunk’ build-up made it more like a cap than a screen.
My trusty old toothbrush (not my own personal toothbrush but the one I use to scrub things other than teeth in the kitchen) and some regular dish soap worked to get the thing clean. I thought I might need to soak it in vinegar or something for the hard water deposits, but it was not needed.
Then, on to clean out the spinning arms.
Um….. how do you do that, exactly?
Yah, it was tricky. It required some toothpicks, wooden skewers, lots of hot water, and quite a bit of banging.
It turns out, someone (not pointing fingers….) had put a jar with the label still on into the dishwasher, and the label (paper with plastic backing) had gotten ripped into little and larger pieces, which then went through the system and into the spinning arms, thus clogging or seriously blocking some of the water spouts in the spinning arms.
Not to mention the flax seeds and grain hulls and small splintery-looking things that were also stuck inside some of them.
And, of course, the hard water deposits.
The best discoveries were the hard water deposits which had calcified bits of the label paper together with the flax seeds to make aggregate conglomerate very hard pieces of something similar to ROCKS and lodged themselves in the ENDS of the spinning arms. This is where the banging came in.
My sweetie came in to help me somewhere around when the banging began. I think he was concerned about said banging, not being exactly sure what was going on, but was happy enough to pitch in and help de-goo and un-gunk the dishwasher with me.
He worked on the center round thingy in the bottom of the dishwasher while I picked and poked and worked to get the bits out of the spinning arms. (Have you ever tried to get a guitar pick out of the inside of a guitar? It was sorta like that once I got the bits loose, because then I had to get them OUT….yah, like I said, tricky.)
Sweetie found some of his own grossness underneath the center round thingy – a 4-legged ‘stand’ of some kind that had this gummy sticky stringy label paper all wrapped around it, plus another filter screen that was less filter and more gunk. He was more impressed with it than I was – I was just grossed out!
Well, about an hour and a half after the venture began, we started putting it all back together.
Thankfully, we had no left over pieces, though we had quite a collection of treasures in the wastebasket.
We’ve run it a few times since then – and there have been no leaks or clunks or anything, so I guess we got it back together correctly. And the dishes have been TONS cleaner. WOW! No flax seeds to have to wipe out of the inside of my milk glass – AMAZING!
I think I’ll need to pull off the spinning arms again, and do a bit more work on them, in case more stuff has gotten loose and found it’s way into the arms.
The flax seeds come from either the cereal we eat or the bread, as do the grain hulls, and probably the splintery-looking things too, though I can’t be sure. So we have been VERY clear with the children that they really really DO have to rinse off their dishes before putting them into the dishwasher, and NO jars with labels on, either!
Either that, or next time they are cleaning out the dirty dishwasher.
*** Join me in the weirdness… I KNOW you’ve encountered SOMETHING weird somewhere this week!! Leave me a comment and tell me all about it! ***
