Do-It-Yourself Story

This is a 6 year old Maytag stainless tub model. I first tried cleaning the food chopper screen (also using the very helpful video on this site for that part), as it was totally blocked. That fix helped for a while, but then the top rack started coming out dirty again. Went back to this site and diagnosed the problem as a bad circulation pump. For only 20 bucks more, it made sense to replace the entire assembly. The hardest part of this job is seating the new assembly into the tub. Using soapy water on the gasket really helps, but you still need to push down quite hard. You must try to push all of the gasket at once- pushing on one side only makes the opposite side pop out of the recess. After about 30 minutes of struggle, I found that getting my body weight straight down over the assembly allowed me to push it all in at once. It's a tight fit. For this model, you definitely want to fit the bottom retaining clip first because of the interference of the heater coil plug- you'll never get it in if you do it last under tension. Some helpful tips are also to make sure to clean the recess in the tub to ease installation of the assembly, have plenty of dry towels handy to catch the drain water trapped in the old unit, and wipe clean all of the o-rings and recesses before reassembly, as a leak on any of these will dump water onto your floor under the dishwasher! The video on this site was incredibly helpful and I will return here for other appliance repair parts. The job is straightforward, but I set the difficulty at "4" solely due to the struggle to get the assembly into the tub. Otherwise, pretty easy. Saved me $400+ versus buying a new appliance and my dishwasher is essentially new again!