Just wanted to thank this thread for giving me the juice to fix my dishwasher.
Quick back story:
2 months ago our dishwasher wouldn't drain the water in the bottom basin. The water would only drain by the emergency drain. Every time the drain cycle would run, it would make crazy cracking noises. It didn't sound legit. I took out all of the easy parts inside of the Dishwasher, by manually draining the water, cleaning out the filter, unscrewing what I could in the basin to see if anything was obvious.
At which point, I saw a broken pistachio in the water. Ugh. This meant more than one of these guys was in there, probably in the motor that drains the water. I broke down and called a mom & pop service repair. He came for the visit, spent two hours pulling everything apart, and finally got it working again. Cost me $150. That stung. Half of that cost was his time and he was SLLOOOOWWW. But since he had to completely tear everything apart I didn't feel like it was a *horrible* expense.
Speed up 2 months to last week. The dishwasher is now not draining again. Same deal, except there isn't the noise from before like something was stuck in the internal drain mechanism.
My wife tells me she accidentally had a piece of plastic go in the disposal, she ran it and that might be involved.
Because the service guy had a 90 day warranty on his labor, I thought I'd give him a call. He thought it might be a broken motor, but didn't give any guarantees about how his visit would be free. I scheduled him to come today (Monday). I had a 5 day wait until he was coming.
That's when I gave myself a face-punch. Maybe 3.
I figured, hey, this weekend, if I tear this thing apart and completely break it, no biggy, service guy is coming on Monday. BUT, there's a 70% chance I'm going to figure this thing out AND learn about the guts and operation of a dishwasher. And since we'll *probably* have a dishwasher in our family house for the rest of our lives, now's a perfect time to understand this highly used appliance.
Saturday morning spent 2.5 hrs ripping everything apart and totally found the pieces of plastic stuck at a junction in the drain tube. I reverse blew them out into the disposal, and BAM, problem fixed. And now I'm a dishwasher ninja. And cancelled the service call for this afternoon.
So yeah, thanks to this forum and the link posted above, I was able to figure this problem out and save $150+!!!