Water out · 17 of 21
Bad Smell After a Cycle
A drain smell that meets you when you open the door, worst after it has stood a day.
| What you can see | What it usually is | Whose job |
|---|---|---|
| A smell that hits you the second the door opens | The filter is holding a layer of soft residue that every wash simply rinses over | Yours to lift out and rinse |
| A drain smell present even when the machine has not run | The hose has no rise in it, so the waste line is venting straight into the tub | Ours |
| A sour note on the short programmes only | The quick settings move less water and leave more of it sitting in the bottom | Yours — use a longer programme |
| A smell that returns within a day of cleaning | Something is trapped below the filter, where rinsing the filter never reaches | Ours |
Smell is a plumbing question rather than a cleaning one. Whatever the filter holds passes through the same water twice, and whatever is left lying in a flat hose keeps breathing back into the tub. Viking Repair Denver works it from the filter outwards on (303) 729-0972, starting with the parts anybody can reach.
Nothing inside a dishwasher stays dirty for long except the filter, and nothing stays wet between cycles except the hose. Between them they account for almost every smell the machine gets blamed for.
Why the run holds what the wash leaves behind
Every cycle ends with the tub empty and the hose full, and how much of it stays full is decided by the shape of the run rather than by the appliance. Where the hose lifts before it drops, the water sitting in that rise seals the drain side off from the tub, and the kitchen never hears from it. Where it lies flat the whole way from machine to stack — which is how a great many downtown conversions were plumbed — there is no rise to seal anything, and the tub is simply the open end of the waste.
What comes out and what gets looked at
The filter comes out, gets rinsed and gets inspected from underneath, because what collects below it is the part rinsing never touches. The bottom of the tub is cleared by hand. After that it is the run: where the hose leaves the machine, whether it rises at all, how it is clipped and where it joins. A hose that has slipped down out of its clip is a ten-minute fix that ends the problem for good, and no amount of scrubbing the inside of the tub would ever have got near it.
What to try before anyone drives over
- Take the filter out, rinse it under a hot tap and smell it on its own. If that is where the smell lives, you have found it in two minutes.
- Sniff at the plughole of the sink next to the machine. The same smell at both ends puts it in the waste rather than in the dishwasher.
- Leave the door ajar overnight and see whether it has cleared by morning. Air in the tub tells you the water is the problem, not the plastic.
That is as far as it goes without tools. If it is still wrong, call Viking Repair Denver on (303) 729-0972 and say whether the sink plughole smells of the same thing — it is usually enough to know which part is coming on the van.
Every symptom, grouped by what you can see Water in, water out, cleaning, power and the door — the whole library on one page.
Clifford Nakamura
- Written
- On the van
- Service technician — controls and intermittent faults
- Years at it
- 22 years in the trade