Homeownership +1

Quick entry to say that I successfully fixed a broken major household appliance and feel my homeowner credibility has consequently been boosted.  It was a pretty simple fix but this may actually contribute to an inflated sense of competence because I had all the correct tools and knew what to do for each step.  If you don't need further details on this mundane occurrence, I'd suggest not reading further.

On Tuesday I was working in my office (at home, I don't have a school office during the summer) and heard a very substantial "THWACK" sound from the other side of the house.  I went looking for the source, figuring the cats had just knocked something BIG over or down somehow, but the cats weren't running away and looked pretty innocent, so I put that theory aside for a moment.  I went through all the rooms looking for the victim but didn't find anything and eventually thought to myself "Let's hope I never find out what made that sound".

That lasted about two hours, when I opened the dishwasher, when problems became immediately visible.

 A full load of dishes covered in very fine powder, presumably detergent.

 Not ready for use.

The problem was easily visible - the heater sheath had exploded and thrown heating coil out into the tub.  Examination of the rest of the sheath showed considerable rust - my theory is that at the part that exploded a pinhole leak developed, water touched the element, thermal stresses tore it apart, and then steam overpressurized the sheath and deformed the surrounding section outward from the initial point of failure. This failure was fairly disheartening after the microwave gave up the ghost last week, though it should be admitted that both appliances were quite old and in generally crappy condition prior to failure.  I'm just waiting for the stove and fridge to die on us in sympathy now, to complete the failure of everything in the kitchen.

 I had confidence that this was the problem.

Fortunately, the easy-to-diagnose problem also had an easy fix.  I looked up the model of dishwasher, found the part number for the heater, and located a spare on Amazon for $37 shipped.  Powering off the dishwasher was more interesting as they'd wired it directly into the circuit instead of using a plug and outlet.  This meant we finally spent the time to figure out the circuit breakers, the labeling for which was misleading at best.  The one labeled 'front room' was actually the kitchen, and one of the two labeled 'kitchen' ('east kitchen' actually) doesn't seem to be connected to anything at all.  Other discoveries of note include the fact that my office is on at least two different circuits, one for the outlets and one for the light.  

After confirming that the dishwasher was unpowered with my live-circuit-checker (correct tool #1) I used my headlamp (correct tool #2) to see into the service area, where I determined that I would need to remove two hex nuts securing the heating element from the bottom.  I used an adjustable crescent wrench to get an approximation of the size of the nut, then selected a half-inch hex socket with extended body and quarter inch drive to do the job (perfectly correct tool #3 - I had just bought a three-hundred-socket set the week before and was very pleased with myself to have precisely the correct socket on hand).  Access was still troublesome, but I'm pretty sure removing the old heating element, putting the new one in, and putting the whole thing back together took about as much time as I'd spent the night before hand-cleaning the load of dishes that were covered in detergent and the ones we'd dirtied since then. 

I'm glad I didn't just throw the whole thing out and buy a new one - it would have been more work!  All in all, a fairly minor and uninvolved job but I am far too pleased with myself about it and Ana said I had to take pictures of it so I figured I'd put it on the blog.  

The microwave I've been avoiding dealing with so far - we had our convection/microwave oven from Japan set up already so we switched to using that one.  I'm less sanguine about repairing the broken one and I don't want to replace it so I'm firmly to "stall" on that front for the time being.  I really don't want to start replacing stuff in the kitchen because that project will inevitably descend into my ripping down to the studs and replacing everything everything everything in there with better stuff, which I have not the time nor the money for. With the dishwasher fixed "stall" remains an option I may exercise for some time.