Our Kitchen Aid KUDS01ILBS2 dishwasher will not start. There is water at the bottom that has not been pumped out.

We called Sears repair and he said it will cost over $500 for parts.

The area of the control board needed cleaning so I took it out and cleaned it up and the associated parts. That did not help. We went to the AppliancePartsPros California office (they sure have ample office space) and purchased a control board.

The lights in the control panel light up; everything seems to work in terms of the switches and lights. The cancel button turns off all the lights. The display never shows anything except dashes.

I am not sure I put everything back together properly. I realize that the door switch might be a problem. I see the forum thread "How To Check Dishwasher Parts For Continuity" but I have not yet used it; I will try it next. It has been about 4 years since I used a (VOM?) meter but I think I can figure it out.

Any other help will be appreciated.

Thank you, Simon.

I should have had more confidence in myself.

I took the switch out and tried to test for continuity (I think continuity means that electricity flows). The switch is difficult to get to switch and we were unable to get continuity. So then I tried putting the test leads into the connections for the switch. After a few seconds of delay, we heard something happening; probably the water being pumped out. So I assume the switch is a problem. So I will order a new switch.

We received the new switch just now. I installed it and now the dishwahser seems to be working.

Yes, I did check the latch and everything. In fact I tried to figure out how the latch (the switching mechanism) could switch the switch; I could not see how that could happen. Then I realized that the old switch was probably defective and that the switch part did not extend out like it should. So I tried to look at the picture of the switch in the product image and it looked like I was right but the picture is not very clear. When I received the new switch just now, my mother could see the difference; we both could see that the new switch obvioulsy extends out whereas the old switch does not. So that might be one thing for people to look for; that is, that the switch might be defective in that manner. It might help to improve the picture for the product so it shows more clearly what a good switch looks like.

I think the article in this forum describing how to test switches is good for explaining the general concepts, but it is not specific enough about specific parts to be useful to know about something like this. It was not clear to me what to do to test the switch, but of course part of the problem was that the switch was defective in a manner that the article does not anticipate.