We have a whirlpool silent partner III dishwasher that is 2-1/2 years old. It has developed a very unpleasent odor (like a dead animal). We have tried several remedies... vinegar, bleach, baking soda, etc. The odor goes away for a couple of washes and then returns with a vengeance. We have even quit using our disposal just in case it is somehow related. Short of disassembling the thing (which I am not comfortable with) I am at wits end. Any suggestions?

If you are still looking for ideas, post back and I'll share my experiences with this model.

Please do... the condition stills exists.

OK. Hope this helps. By the time I finished all of these steps, odor was eliminated. I started with a thorough cleaning, including the following:

1. Remove the long flat plastic “tube” that runs vertically up the back of your diswasher. This requires the removal of two small screws and some jockeying of the tube. I found a lot of built up food residue behind that tube.

2. Check the sides of the trays that hold the dishes and clean any food that has built up. The trays are kind of a pain to remove, but it can be done.

3. Remove the spray arm from the bottom of the dishwasher and whatever else is there so you get down to the filter area -- there will probably be some nasty stuff built up in there. This sounds intimidating, but you just kind of go through it slowly with some simple tools. You will need though the correct type of screwdriver head -- not a phillips or a flat head, but one of those other star-shaped styles.

4. Now, here is the last area in the dishwasher itself that I found and it was really surprising. Look on the inside of your door at the bottom of the door. There are vents that run along the bottom of the door itself and mine were clogged with smelly junk. I scraped out what I could then took a water bottle and kept flushing water in and this rinsed a lot of crud out. However, I then found that there was a build up actually inside the door panel itself, again at the bottom of the door. You can actually sort of pry the plastic seam at the bottom of the door (from the inside) up a little and run your finger under there and you might feel some junk. I ended up removing the front of the washer door to get complete access to the crud.

5. I also took apart the pvc waste plumbing under the sink and cleaned it out. Theoretically, I suppose this should not have been causing the problem as those odors aren’t supposed to travel back to the dishwasher, but there was no doubt that the junk inside the plastic pipes generated the identical smell as my dishwasher.

6. Also, make sure that the hose that drains the waste water from the dishwasher is looped up as high as you can possible get it . That drain hose is in a loop, or should be, and the top of the loop needs to be as high as possible.

7. Last, make sure that if you decide to dig into the machine itself, unplug the power source.

8. When you do all of these things, you can follow the standard procedure of running either vinegar or bleach through the machine a couple of times -- I’m not sure which one is the best. I used both, but not at the same time.

9. This may be more work than you want to get into personally, but if you hire somebody to do it, don’t be surprised if they don’t know about the steps in #4. The guy I had come in and look didn’t.

Dead animal smell? CHeck for road kill, I had that happen to our dishwasher one time and it was a dead Racoon... Hope this helps, Jonas