Whirlpool dishwasher is not cleaning the dishes

Spin the arms and look at the holes

Open the door and turn the lower spray arm by hand; it should move freely all the way around. Then hold it up to the light and look at the jets. Grit and hard-water scale block them one at a time, and a blocked arm leaves a clean pattern on some dishes and a dirty one on others. Pull the filter out and rinse it. Check that nothing tall in the lower rack is stopping the middle arm from turning — a cutting board or a baking sheet in the wrong slot blocks the spray for the whole upper rack, and that alone explains a lot of these calls.

What it usually means, by the kind of machine

Whirlpool sells one appliance in several forms — a top-loader with an agitator and one without, a front-loader, a stacked pair, a laundry tower and an all-in-one; a vented dryer, a ventless one and a heat pump — and the same behavior points at different things on each of them. A top-load washer has no drain pump filter to open and a front-loader does, which is the whole first hour of the same complaint on two machines.

• With a display — Will tell you about the heat and the diverter directly. FA E4 is the diverter valve, which is what sends water to one spray arm or the other.
• No display — Reports through the Clean light in two bursts. A flashing Sanitize light is its own message — Whirlpool's wording is that the temperature needed for sanitizing was not reached.
• Portable — Takes water from the sink faucet, so the temperature at the tap is the temperature the machine gets. Run the tap hot before starting one of these.

Two problems that look identical from the front

Dishes that come out dirty and dishes that come out cloudy are almost never the same story. Food debris left behind means water is not reaching or not moving: an arm, the diverter, the pump, a filter. A white or gray film means the water is reaching everything and leaving something behind: mineral content, detergent, no rinse aid. In much of South Florida the water is hard enough that film shows up on a perfectly healthy machine within a few months of somebody stopping the rinse aid, and we would rather tell you that than sell a pump.

Heat, and what the Sanitize light is really saying

Whirlpool's own wording is that the sanitize indicator flashes when the machine detects that the temperature needed for sanitizing was not reached. That is a measurement, and it is a useful one even when nobody cares about sanitizing: if the water never gets hot enough for that, it is not hot enough to lift grease either. On a machine that flashes it every cycle, the heating circuit is worth reading before anything about the spray is touched.