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Burning up the Dishwasher
One Saturday, in February of 2007, while I
was at Wal Mart with my wife and kids, I got a call from my mother.
She told me that the kitchen had flooded. She said it had come
from the dishwasher. It wasn't full of water inside, and the leak
had stopped when she turned the dishwasher off. She had already
started trying to clean it up with towels, but wanted me to bring home a
mop. I told her that she shouldn't have touched it, because it
could have been electrified.
When I got home, I uscrewed the dishwasher from the
countertop, and pulled it out far enough to see what was going on.
After a careful inspection, I saw a very slow drip at the water inlet
valve, but nothing that would account for the amount of water on the
floor. I had my mother turn the dishwasher on, while I looked
underneath it with a flashlight. As soon as it started running,
the leak became very apparant. It was in the coupler between the
motor and the spray tower.
We cleaned up the water as best we could, and since it
was right around noon time, my wife began getting lunch ready for the
family, while I went to the computer to do a search on the
internet and find out how much the replacement part was going to cost.
After a short bit of looking around on the internet, I discovered that
there were three different versions of the part I needed. I
couldn't find any way of telling which part my dishwasher used other
than taking it apart.
This is where things start to go wrong. My
dishwasher was directly wired into the wall, so there was no way of
unplugging it. My wife was using the microwave, and the stove to
cook lunch. I didn't want to disrupt her, so turning off the power
was out of the question. Instead of waiting until after lunch was
ready, I decided to get to work while lunch was being prepared.
That meant that I had to work with the power turned on. That was
probably my first really wrong decision of the day.
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