My dishwasher will not complete the cycle. It gets halfway through the wash cycle and then the green finish light starts flashing. We thought it was the heating element and replaced it but that didn't fix it. We have tried the button sequence normal wash - heated dry and it will reset but that doesn't work all the time either. What else can we do.

Thank you

Lauren Frauenknecht

The first thing you can do is go to Home Depot, Lowe's, or Radio Shack and buy a good digital multimeter. If you plan to do much work on your home you should get a "clamp around" meter that will measure amperage so you can check circuit breakers and the amperage of different components safely. I bought a nice one at Home Depot at a low price, but you can find good Fluke meters at pawn shops that have a fork instead of a set of clamp jaws and it's the best kind. A clamp meter will do everything. Then, you need to learn to use it, which is very easy. You could have checked that element with the "ohm" meter setting by turning off the power and removing one wire from the element and reading from each terminal. If you got a reading like 50 ohms, for example, you would know that the element was good. The element has absolutely nothing to do with the dishwasher going through a cycle, though. With a meter you can check different parts to see if they are good before buying new ones and testing that way, which never works because you can buy bad parts, too. If you have a meter you will know what's bad instead of playing an expensive guessing game. Appliances have too many parts to just guess at it. You can replace every part in a dishwasher and still not fix it. Especially when it's just a corroded terminal, which is what your problem is most likely. You should have a wiring diagram attached to the dishwasher. Look at it and you will see safety switches that look like (-|/|-) which is a set of normally closed contacts. Normally open are ( -||- ) a set of contacts with no line through them. You will see a section on how to read these diagrams in one of the books below.
Here are the manuals you need: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8010163/Whirlpool_Kenmore%20Dishwashers.zip
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8010163/Whirlpool%208178741%202008%20Undercounter%20Dishwa sher%20Service%20Manual.pdf
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8010163/How%20to%20use%20Test%20Equipment%20Service%20Manu al.pdf
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8010163/How%20to%20Diagnose%20and%20Fix%20Everything%20Ele ctronic.pdf
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8010163/Whirlpool_Dishwasher_Service_manual.pdf


(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8010163/Whirlpool_Dishwasher_Service_manual.pdf)