Water in the Bottom of the Dishwasher: Four Places to Look, Cheapest First

Why is my Whirlpool dishwasher not draining: work from free to expensive

There are four places the water can stop, and they cost very different amounts to deal with. Taking them in order is worth more than knowing anything about dishwashers, because the first is free and it is usually the answer.

Before anything else, bail it out. A cup gets most of it, a sponge and a bowl get the rest, and ten unpleasant minutes makes everything below possible.

One: the filter, and what normal looks like

A small amount of water in the recess under the filter is meant to be there, keeping the pump seal wet. Water lying across the flat floor of the tub is not.

Pull the bottom rack out. In the floor of the tub there is a cylindrical filter that twists counterclockwise and lifts out, and a flat screen underneath that lifts away once the cylinder is gone. Rinse both under a running tap with a soft brush, nothing stiff enough to distort the mesh.

Then look into the recess they came out of. This is the step people skip. A shard of glass, a fruit sticker, an olive pit or a folded piece of foil over the pump inlet blocks the drain as well as a packed filter does, and it is invisible until the filter is out.

If the filter came out clogged, run the machine empty on a normal cycle before deciding anything else.

Two: the hose

The drain hose leaves the machine, goes under the sink, and ends at the disposal or the standpipe. Two things go wrong with it.

A kink. A dishwasher gets pulled out for a floor, a leak or a cabinet job and pushed back with the hose folded against the wall. This is the most common installation-related answer.

The high loop. The hose is supposed to rise close to the underside of the counter before dropping to the drain connection. That loop stops sink water running back into the dishwasher. A hose lying flat along the cabinet floor gives a machine that fills whenever the sink drains, which people report as "it will not drain" because the outcome looks the same.

Three: the air gap, if you have one

Not every South Florida kitchen has one. If yours does, it is a small chrome cylinder on the counter beside the faucet, and it is the most neglected part in the kitchen.

The cap lifts straight off and the plastic cover under it twists out. What is inside is usually a plug of the same material that was in the filter, and it comes away with a finger and a rinse. Five minutes, no tools.

A blocked air gap backs water up into the dishwasher, and often shows itself first as water spitting out of the chrome cylinder onto the counter mid-cycle.

Four: the knockout plug, and the machine that never worked

This is worth reading even if your machine used to drain fine, because it explains a category of complaint nobody ever solves.

A new garbage disposal comes out of the box with a solid plug molded into its dishwasher inlet, so it can be installed on a sink that has no dishwasher. Fitting one on a sink that does have a dishwasher means punching that plug out and taking it out of the chamber.

If that was never done, the dishwasher has been draining into a sealed pipe since the day the disposal was installed. The symptom is a machine that has never drained properly, and it is common after a kitchen refresh or a landlord's disposal replacement.

The related version is the plug punched out and left rattling around inside the disposal chamber, where it works its way back into the outlet.

Either way this is a plumbing job rather than an appliance one, and it is worth knowing before an appliance visit is booked. Nothing about the dishwasher is wrong.

What the machine may be telling you

Whirlpool publishes error codes for its dishwashers, and also the older way of showing the same information, as counted groups of blinks separated by pauses. One of the maker's own pages says explicitly that a particular blink pattern and a particular F-code are the same message.

Worth knowing: the four places above are not our invention. Whirlpool's own page for the dishwasher code F9E1 asks, in order, whether the filter has been removed and cleaned, whether the drain hose is kinked, pinched or clogged, whether the sink disposer is clear and its knockout plug was removed, and whether there is an air gap. Same four, same order.

Write down what you see exactly, including how many flashes come before each pause, and read the code before ordering anything against it. These machines have codes about water arriving as well as water leaving, and they are not the same repair.

One more from the maker's own documentation, because it saves calls: on machines with a colored status light on the front, a blinking light means the cycle has paused. Not failed. Close the door firmly and press start.