I have a Kenmore Ultra Wash Dishwasher. It will not start. The light above normal wash is flashing continuously. Any advice will be helpful.
Our warranty ran out 9 days ago
Thank-you in advance

photusEnigma

Wow!! THANK YOU THANK YOU THANKY YOU!!!!! (and the wife absolutely loves you all and offers a place at our thanksgiving table if you can find out where we live...and also says "I love this internet thingy!"). You've saved our turkey day as well! The pushing of the heated wash and heated dry buttons one after the other in rapid succession worked like a charm! May you all have a wonderful thanksgiving....and a working dishwasher to clean up after!

Jeffmo

I too have a Kenmore Ultra Wash dishwasher. I've had it for 15-months now and found mine in the same condition as described...clean light blinking...dishwasher not functioning.
I cycled between the two buttons and wahlah...it came back to life. All lights luminated, it went through some cycles and finished with a quick rinse. It was good to go just moments later. Thanks for this tip

yob2kanobe

I had this identical problem on my 2 yr. old Kenmore elite 665.17052400 a clean light that flashed repeatedly 7 times then off. I reset as above with the heated wash and heated dry buttons, however I then noticed a reduced flow from the pump so I dissasembled the lower arm and water inlet assy. to find it mostly plugged with foregin matter and some broken glass chunks. Upon removal of that stuff and reassembly my Kenmore now works as new! thanks for the heads up on the reset procedure.
Yob~

geeper

I think if you push the heated wash and heated dry buttom several times until all the buttoms light up this will fix your problem

L0gansm0mmy

Thanks for your response, geeper. We have since given the appliance to a friend & she had it repaired. All the best to you!

_PK_

I've newly registered on this site and I hope it is OK if I piggy-back my question in this thread.

I've just had installed a Kenmore Elite Ultra Wash Dishwasher and cannot for the life of me figure out how to run a rinse cycle. The manual, on multiple occasions, notes that a rinse cycle should be run -- it just never says how to do it. There is no button exclusive for "Quick Rinse"

Hope someone can help, Thanks

blatz

I paid $95 from F & F Appliance Doctors in San Diego to come out and reset the clean light. Stupid me didn't check the message boards first! (or at least look at the technical data under the machine! which also describes the reset procedure)

Anyway, my idiot light was complaining about the heater circuit when I looked up the code. I have a Kenmore Elite Stainless model. The manual does not describe the reset procedure - you have to take off the two screws to get to the front panel and inside there is a guide that gives more technical data.

So the appliance tech looks at the manual, resets it, collects his $95 and on his way. At first I thought this was the heater element going bad based on the clean light description failure in the manual and was calling around to someone local to see if they would sell it as I wanted it back online ASAP. Nobody had the element in stock so figured I would try to call repair places and see if someone had it. The tech convinced me over the phone that the heater element was not the problem and unfortunately I believed him.

So the point of all this ... rambling ... is that the flashing clean light is telling you that something went wrong. And of course it just came back on a day later after F & F left. So don't just reset it - it is not a fluke computer glitch ... something was actually wrong!!!

Thanks to Yob's tip about the dissasembly of the lower arm ... however ... on my model it is quite painful to do this. There were 4 holes used by the dishwasher to push debris into the chopper blade and they were clogged up with seeds and what looks to be picked garlic stems. So here is how to get at that clogged output drain ... this was not the problem with the blinking light BTW but it will help with efficiency and the extension of motor life and chopper blade which I understand is difficult to replace also.

Instructions:
1) Remove both racks ... top rack is painful - you will have to take the rear clips out ... they don't come out that easy ... press the tab under the clip to get it out
2) unscrew wash arm by turning clockwise (not the normal way)
3) take out this blue power wash doohickey
4) take out this grey u-shaped arm that runs from top to bottom in the unit. There are steel clips on top and in back ... unclip and turn the whole assembly clockwise ... now you can get it out
5) unscrew the 4 torx type screws to get out the plastic grate

Now you can see the gunk stopping up the chopper. Clean it out and put everything back.

Make sure in the future you are extra careful not to put any crap that might block this up again as it is a royal pain to get out the debris.

I paid $1000 or so for this dishwasher so not torqued enough to just replace it and I don't know if any other brands are better. This kenmore is really just a whirlpool.

OK ... so I did all that and the clean light is still blinking!!! ARRRGH

I decided to call up Sears service as I just noticed there was stuff covered under the two year warranty and didn't really want to call back F & F Appliance as they didn't really fix it the first time. In their defense the green clean light did go solid before they left indicating things were ok. I still think $95 was too high for this repair and they gave me that number w/o having an estimate in advance so I could have contested but didn't as they did do something ... whatever ... live and learn. So Sears came out and charged me $55 to tell me the heater element was indeed bad. The way to tell if the heater is bad is to run it thru the diagnosis cycle and then feel the element itself to see if it is hot. Taking out the unit to ohm it out is painful and only a secondary thing to try. If it doesn't heat up it is bad.

Of course Sears does not have the element in stock and I have to wait a week for them to install.

Just ordered another element on partselect.com 2-3 day shipping. Plan to cancel the follow up appt from Sears and return the element they ordered for me (which is taking a week to ship). You can also get this element on ebay for $28 with shipping so I will keep one of these on hand for the future (kind of like a spare light bulb).

According to the tech the old heater elements from dishwashers past were very durable. But thanks to Energy Star compliance the heater element is now less durable and will fail about every year or so with normal usage. Wonderful.

I also found this whirlpool video on another site that talks about the clean light blinking issue ... just google for it.

Note also that the dishes will be unsanitary at the end of a cycle where the heater is bad so be sure to wash those manually rather than putting them away like me.

Hope all this rambling helps someone. What a f&*(king pain.

supernutritionist

Sears totally rots!! What a scam, they will only tell you how to fix the dishwasher panel, if you are under a service contract! I think we should start a grass roots campaign to expose them!

blatz

I think any reputable appliance repair shop, Sears or otherwise should just tell you the reset sequence and inform you that if it keeps happening you really have a problem and need someone on site to diagnose if you can't yourself. It did come on for a reason - not just a fluke in all cases. But in my "about to fully fail" heater element it was on it's way out so got ripped for $95 and then another $55 for a re-diagnose. IE: the first time a reset gave the solid clean, the second time the reset just resulted in another blinking clean after the element fully gave out. The problem changed over the course of a few days. I suspect my issue might be pretty common.

My advise would be to just call up Sears first rather than a third party.

tgiunta

zrocket, you "rock". We had this same problem about a year ago and luckily our repair call was still covered under warranty. The Sears repairman came out, pushed the buttons in sequence, then left. In our case, he said the water entering the dishwasher from our hot-water tank was too hot. I lowered the temp on our hot water and the problem didn't occur again... until last night (hopefully the hot water thing will help someone else out there scratching their heads about the green light blinking again and again). My wife couldn't remember the sequence of pushing buttons, so I was all set to call "repair" this morning and eat $100. This site and all your responses saved me time, money, aggravation, and, most importantly the dish pan hands of having to manually wash an entire load-then some ;-). Thanks!