Your dishwasher, when correctly installed, can give you years of uninterrupted hassle free washing and cleaning. Then one day you go to switch on your trusty dishwasher and nothing happens.

What’s the first thing you going to do to fix this annoyance. Well I guess you might find the answer right here on the appliance repair help site but don’t reach for the phone book just yet because this might be something you can fix your self.

I’ll explain. Modern day dishwashers like those manufactured by Bosch and you can include Siemens and Neff in that have a built in safety feature protecting the dishwasher against flooding. The technical term is ‘Anti Flood Device’. There are other manufacturers who provide the same features but for now I’m only going to talk about the Bosch type machines.

In the base of the dishwasher in the plinth there is a float switch. This is your ‘Anti Flood Device’. In the event of your dishwasher over filling, the plinth fills with water, the float rises and actuates the switch. On a Bosch dishwasher this switch will do two things.

Firstly, it will send a signal to the programmer device to notify there is a fault and output a message in the form of a code to some sort of display.

Secondly, the pressure switch acts as the water level indicator for the sump of the dishwasher so when the water level rises the pressure switch will activate the drain pump.

So before you consider throwing good money at new dishwasher, try doing a bit of fault finding your self and you might save yourself a ton of money.

Just a quick update to this ‘Dishwasher will not continue the cycle’ article. There appears to be a common thread in the comments below. Most faults can be referred to the fact that the Anti Flood Overflow device has activated. I have included an image here to show what the anti flood may look like in a Hotpoint DWF40.

You can see it here as items 17 18 and 19 collectively.

Let’s assume your dishwasher has over filled at some stage and with time the water in the drip tray has now evaporated, the float item 19 can have a tendency to stick and make the switch item 18 stay in an actuated state. This can give a false positive. Try to reset the float switch or check even that there is no water in this drip tray. When the float is activated it can cause the drain pump to be permanantly in a drain mode

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