How a Dishwasher Works

Hi, I’m Josh from eSpares and in this video I’m going to be explaining to you how a dishwasher works.

Dishwashers are quite a common fixture in many modern households nowadays, so it’s always good to understand how they work in case you start to experience problems with yours. This is an integrated dishwasher but they all work in pretty much exactly the same way.

As I open it up, the first thing we can see is a timer on the side and this allows us to select the intensity of the cleaning programme according to the load that we’re filling the dishwasher with.

Further along is a delayed start programme, not all dishwashers have this but this allows us to start the dishwasher cleaning several hours after we’ve turned it on, and here we have an on/off switch.

Water is allowed into the dishwasher through a valve at the back of the appliance and it then fills up to a very shallow level in the bottom tray of the dishwasher. Here we have the filters and I’ll just take these out.

Underneath the filters is a pump and this pump draws water in and redistributes it to the bottom spray arm here and the top spray arm here. Water pressure builds up inside the spray arms and this is what pushes them round.

Also in the bottom we have a heating element and this heats the water up and is also used in the dishwasher’s drying cycle.

Here is a water softener which is filled with salt and this is used to soften any hard water and allow detergent to work more effectively.

Here at the front on the inside of the door is both a detergent dispenser and a rinse aid dispenser.

It’s important to note that many modern all-in-one detergents include both rinse aid and salt, so you may not need to add these separately, but if you do, we add the rinse aid here and we can change how much rinse aid is used in a cycle by adjusting the selector accordingly - and that's it.

Spares for dishwashers and other appliances are available on the eSpares website. Thanks for watching.