Dishwasher Repair · Bay Area

What breaks and what it costs

The number one dishwasher call is “it won’t drain.” Standing water in the bottom after a cycle. Usually it’s the filter packed with food, a drain pump impeller jammed by a piece of glass or a cherry pit, or a kinked drain hose behind the cabinet. On LG and Samsung that shows up as an OE code. It’s often a 30-minute fix once we open the pump chamber and clear it.

Next most common is “it runs but the dishes come out dirty.” That’s a clogged spray arm, a worn wash pump, or a water inlet valve that isn’t filling all the way. Then leaks: most are a tired door gasket or a pump seal weeping into the base pan. On Bosch, a base-pan leak trips the E15 code and the machine locks out until it’s dry and the leak is fixed.

Dishes coming out wet is usually the heating element, on brands that dry with heat, or on Bosch the condensation-dry or zeolite system.

Dishwasher repairs generally start around $250 plus parts. A drain or gasket job is at the low end. A circulation pump or a control board is at the high end, and that’s where the repair-or-replace question comes in.

A Dishwasher Pump and Sump Leak, On Camera

Brands we see most

GE and GE Profile. Drain pumps, door latch switches, and control boards. Common parts, usually worth repairing.

Bosch. The volume dishwasher in a lot of Bay Area kitchens. Quiet and well built, but costly to fix: the E15 base-pan leak (recirc pump seal), and on the Benchmark the Crystal Dry zeolite tank. Bosch builds the heating element into the pump, so a heat problem can mean replacing the whole pump assembly.

Whirlpool, KitchenAid, and Maytag. Same family, and KitchenAid is Whirlpool-built. Circulation pumps and burned-out control boards are the usual, both on the pricier side.

LG and Samsung. OE drain codes, control panels, and board-to-board communication errors. The electronics fail more than the mechanicals, and they’re expensive relative to a new machine.

Electrolux and Fisher & Paykel. The Fisher & Paykel DishDrawer lid actuator is the signature fault. We replace the lid motor and the seal together so it doesn’t leak again in six months.

We also service Thermador and other panel-ready, high-end built-ins. That deeper built-in work leans toward our sister site, adrium.

Repair or replace

Here’s the straight talk. A decent new dishwasher isn’t far above what a big repair costs, so once you’re adding a control board or a circulation pump you’re often spending most of the price of a new machine to keep an old one alive.

Brand matters. Samsung and LG are the ones we most often tell people to replace: control boards, panels, communication errors, and seal leaks, all common and pricey. Whirlpool and KitchenAid fail the same way, with pumps and boards. Bosch is better built but not cheap to fix. When the fault is simple, a clogged drain, a worn gasket, a bad latch, and the machine is otherwise solid, repair wins easily.

The $75 diagnostic is the whole game on a dishwasher. It tells us whether you’re looking at a cheap fix or a repair that approaches the cost of a new unit. It’s credited toward the repair, we give you the number before we do the work, and we won’t sell you a repair that costs more than it’s worth.