The dishwasher saga

Spoiler alert: we finally repaired it!

Mar 04, 2023

I'm posting this almost a month late but...

We did it! After a month of headaches, I can PROUDLY say that Roger Hu and I successfully repaired our LG dishwasher!

For context, we bought this thing at a Black Friday sale in 2015... so it's really only just over 7 years old. And we didn't actually start using it every day until the last couple years. I also have become heavily reliant on it when volunteering to bring my zero waste party pack of my reusable dishes and silverware to gatherings.

We usually scrape and scrub the dishes before loading them into the dishwasher. But more recently, we found that dishes were still coming out dirty with crumbs on them. So I learned how to and swapped out the dishwasher filter in Jan -- first time in 7 years! Thanks Youtube (

)! I now realize that other brands make their filters much more easily accessible! And I also learned that companies expect you to replace or at the very least CLEAN the dishwasher filters every 3-6 months if you scrape, and maybe every 2 weeks if you don't scrape or pre-rinse at all!! Check your dishwasher manual.

Early January, our dishwasher started to stop mid-cycle and display a code "nE" error code which meant that the vario motor needed to be replaced. I studied Youtube (

), and convinced Roger that we could replace it. He saw how to undo the drain, unplug the electrical cord, and remove the dishwasher from the cabinet brackets (

). We agreed maybe this would take us amateurs a couple hours... it seemed totally doable.

We thought the hardware was on the back, but it was actually on the bottom! So after pulling the dishwasher out from the cabinet, we had to tip the dishwasher forward 90 degrees, face first on our kitchen floor on top of a couple towels, to access the hardware, including the old vario motor that needed replacing. Thanks to PartsDr.com (https://partsdr.com/part/4681ed3001d-diverter-motor...) and Amazon, we were able to confirm and order the exact part we needed in advance, and while it took a hot second to figure out how to align the pieces to fit perfectly together (long nose pliers are great), we finally got it on. We brought everything back upright. We even screwed the dishwasher completely back into the brackets thinking we were done.

When we plugged it in, and turned it on, it made a weird low hum noise. Uh oh. It didn't make that noise before! Roger did some troubleshooting by researching what different dishwasher noises could mean, and he concluded that our drain pump might need to be replaced. Ugh!

So thanks again to Amazon, we ordered a new drain pump. Waited about a week for it to arrive, all the while handwashing all our dishes. We even managed to host a couple zero waste parties at work, and got our team members to wash their own reusable plate and fork, which saved me from handwashing it all... Or worse yet, switching to disposables! Teamwork makes the dreamwork.

When our drain pump arrived, we found issues with the black o-ring or gasket which wouldn't fit completely on. We would do a test run, and water would go spilling out the bottom. So we ended up using the new pump with the old gasket from the old pump, and it fit. But the motor still made that weird noise as soon as we turned the dishwasher on. For one reason another, while staring at the dishwasher back and sides, we happened to see all this black moldy gunk in one of the parts that was supposed to fill in with water... called the inlet valve, with a float switch (

). On a Youtube clip, a gentleman said that this inlet valve often will get gunky over time, and it's good to clean it out... Otherwise your dishwasher can't tell when to stop filling or draining. One late night, I remember cleaning this thing out with a straw cleaner and shaking it to death with water and Dawn detergent. It took us a couple times to figure out how to put it all back together on the dishwasher, but we did it. Ugh, what a pain.

Almost home free. When we ran it again... it would complete the entire cycle BUT it leaked drops in the front throughout the entire cycle. Agh! WHAT NOW?! So we replaced the gasket on the unit (side-top-side), which was easy. And that still didn't fix the leak. So Roger, after hours of studying the dishwasher diagrams (https://lgparts.com/products/lds5540st), was convinced we had to buy a new dishwasher door because LG made the bottom gasket attached to the door. This bottom gasket wasn't something you could just easily access and just replace. So we looked at buying a new door (https://lgparts.com/products/4937dd1001n)... except we bought a used one off eBay to see if it would do. When we saw that it was funky and warped as heck, we had to return it. I convinced him to buy a new one from Sears PartsDirect.

While we waited for the door to arrive, I macgyvered a barrier from a plastic placemat and some string we had (thanks again YouTube

). This kept everything from leaking. But it still looked weird and we wanted to get this ultimately fixed.

The door arrived. We were so excited, we unhinged the dishwasher door and let it down. We started to undo the paneling, and then realized just tucked inside the unit, but beneath where the bottom door gasket would lie, was a 22" length strip of disintegrating FOAM. Luckily we live so close to Ace, because Roger left straight away and bought some weather stripping foam (as they recommended, who knew that it had to be "closed cell" foam). We cut a 22" piece and tacked that onto the bottom interior of the dishwasher unit. We put the door back together again. Ran it... yahoo!! It works now and doesn't leak a single drop!

Some things I learned along the way:

1) Handwashing dishes isn't the end of the world (it forces you to be aware of how many dishes you're pulling out of the cabinet and encourages you to wash right away or reuse dishes that aren't that dirty). Fortunately, I minimized our dishes over the summer, so we have reduced inventory. Less dishes overall mean that there's less that can pile up. Yay for minimalism!

2) My husband and I can take on a challenging task without killing each other (he's more the brains, and I'm more the hands) -- and it helps to praise each other as well as crack a lot of "that's what she said" jokes along the way;

3) I have immense appreciation for all the patience that engineers have, when they test, fail, test, fail, over and over again and just never give up until they reach success. I've always considered myself a fairly patient person, but when it comes to projects getting done, encountering the detours along the way can really test me!

4) Dishwashers aren't meant to last forever, and you need to really take care of your appliances and read the manual (find it online if you have to!). Replace the filters, pre-rinse a little or at least scrap/scrub off the crud on your dishes before loading them in, or else plan to replace the filters way more often.

5) Just from conversations with family and friends, most people don't want to repair things like dishwashers anymore. They'd rather replace it right away, like the same day! It makes me kinda sad, but I totally get it. Repairing dishwashers is hard! Companies should make their appliances longer lasting and make them more easily repairable.

6) I rediscovered an old dish soap block (from No Tox Life) under our kitchen sink, and was again impressed with how amazingly well it cuts through grease when handwashing dishes. I could confidently handwash peanut butter out of our food processor, or wash oily crud out of a plastic bag so we could reuse it.

The burning question... Would we do it again? Mm... Maybe. :). We now know a lot about our LG dishwasher (LDS5540st), and there's no way I would do it without my partner. Talk to me in another 7 years.

In the meantime, let's also lobby our elected leaders to make REPAIR more mainstream! France started a repairability index for electronics in 2021 and this is huge: https://grist.org/.../why-frances-new-repairability.../. If you want to make a difference, speak truth to power: https://www.repair.org/stand-up.

#zerowaste #zerowasteliving #zerowastelifestyle #sustainableminimalism #minimalmom #becomingminimalist #repair #LGdishwasher #RightToRepair #plannedobsolescence #circulareconomy