My dishwasher leaves water in the bottom at the end of its cycle, either the Normal cycle, the Quick/Glass cycle or the Light/China cycle. The water looks clean. Running the Cancel cycle, however, empties the water. This started happening a few weeks ago.

I can't run the Cancel cycle after a wash cycle, because Cancel sprays water all over the clean dishes. My workaround is to put away the clean and mostly dry dishes, then run the Cancel cycle to remove the water. Once water is removed, it stays dry for days.

I suppose this means a new timer, huh? I managed to get the top front part of the door panel off, so I can see the old timer, but there's nothing obviously wrong with it just looking from the outside. Is the timer difficult to replace?

--Gil

My apology for taking so long to get back, but I had to wait until I could take my dishwasher apart.

Thank you very much for some excellent advice.

The symptom is not intermittent. The Cancel cycle will always drain it dry. The Normal, Light and Quick cycles will always leave water in the bottom. The water is clear or slightly cloudy, consistent with my assumption that it is the last rinse water.

After a wash cycle, the dishes are not fully dry, so we dry them with towel as we put them away. Then we run the Cancel cycle to drain the last rinse water. After the Cancel cycle has run, water does not reappear (ruling out a leaky incoming valve.)

Looking down into the garbage disposer with a flashlight when the dishwasher is draining, I can see water flowing in a strong, steady stream, so I don't think the drain hose is clogged.

Thanks for sending me the Tech Sheet. As you predicted, a similar sheet was inside after I removed the door front. The two Sheets differ in Model and part numbers, but both diagrams in the two Sheets seem to be identical.

I got the timer out and squirted Contact Cleaner randomly inside it, then put everything back. It works just as before: water left at the end of a wash cycle; Cancel drains it.

I noticed that the timer isn't made to be taken apart. It is held together by sheet metal tabs which were inserted into slots, then twisted off. I could get it apart easily enough, but getting it back together properly might be a challenge, as those tabs were broken off during assembly.

I notice a new timer is available on this website for $150. I realize that a new dishwasher is the best solution, but I've become intrigued with this problem and I'd like to take it a step further.

I am studying the diagrams now to understand their code, in hopes of verifying that the problem is, indeed, caused by a faulty timer. I am focusing on the schematic diagram. What appears to be the drain solenoid for the motor seems to be controlled by timer contacts 0B: Cam 0, bottom, connected via Pink (PK) and Red (R) wires.

Now I'm trying to figure out which pins on the Molex connectors would correspond to 0B.

What I need is a desciption of the mapping from cams to Molex pins.

Both the White and the Black Molex connectors have both PK and R wires, so that's no help. Studying the schematic, it seems that the top and bottom switches on the same cam always have one wire in common. Perhaps that's an artifact of how the timer is constructed: a "middle" contact is connected via the cams with either Top or Bottom or Both. The Black Molex has R and PK adjacent in a column, which seems promising, but the third color in the column is LBU, not BU as I would have expected from looking at timer contacts 0T for the Wash solenoid. So that theory doesn't check out.

This is supposed to be obvious, right?

--Gil

I believe the information is all here in the Tech Sheets, but I can't seem to decode it. The male part of the Molex connectors seem to be molded into the timer body, so I would expect the mapping from cam to pin to be rather straightforward. But a very simple mapping assumption (e.g., top/center/bottom on the three rows) leads to inconsistencies with the wire colors marked on the schematic (e.g., LBU instead of BU).

Thanks for verifying my hypothesis that the timer cam switches are SPDT with a common center. That will help my thinking.

I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually. It's not quite as hard as the NYT Crossword, now, is it?

--Gil

The diagrams use both LBU and BU, and they correspond to Light Blue- and Blue-colored wires going into the appropriate pins on the Molex connectors.

There are two Molex connectors: a black-bodied one and a white-bodied connector. Both of the two connectors each have an LBU, a BU, an R and a PK wire in different pins. So it is not enough to know the color of the wire; I must also figure out which Molex connector the wire goes to.

I think I'll take the door front panel off again and do some experiments with connectivity to try to resolve these designations. But that will have to wait until next week, owing to my personal schedule. Our workaround (using Cancel after each cycle) will have to do until then.

Thanks for the encouragement, Denman.

--Gil