Warning about dishwashers for cleaning phone parts

[Phonesrfun]

This time I broke my dishwasher!


I ran a 500 shell and all the plastics through the dishwasher and the clear plastic plungers I placed in the silverware holder in one compartment that has a little lid that supposedly made it so the plungers could not come out.  Well, somehow they did come out.  When the load was done, I fished one plunger out of the mechanism in the bottom of the dishwasher, but I could not find the other one.


I Shrugged it off.  Then next time we ran the dishwasher, it made an awful grinding sound.  It continued for the next couple of times.  Finally I got brave, and looked up some do it yourself dishwasher repair on Youtube and dug into the machine.  A couple hours later I found the ground up piece plus a few other screws from probably some other cleaning attempt.  Got it all back together.  So the moral of the story is to make sure you don't loose track of small pieces in the dishwasher!


Now I can add dishwasher repairman to my repertoire.  Move over Maytag Man!

[twocvbloke]

Makes me glad the Bosch dishwasher I have has a craptrap (as I call it!) to catch stray detritus before it goes through the pump... 

[TelePlay]

For years I dealt with this in the area of hospitals tasked with washing and sterilizing everything used for procedures, and cleaning them afterward. They have many very small and very, very expensive parts that can easily get lost in their high pressure "dish" washers if not contained. For example, a one 1/8" diameter stainless steel fluted headless nail about 2" long that runs $300.00 each (yes, 3 big ones) is easily blown out of an opened screen pan into the drain area.

They used stainless steel sealed wire baskets to contain the small parts during cleaning. Pictures of those are below. Most of these are over $100 each. Hospital washers have a screen over the drain to catch "lost" parts and a screen on a kitchen dishwasher would just cause more problems, food build up issues.

I found a relatively cheap version Mini Parts Cleaning Basket at an industrial supply site, the first image below. $18 is cheaper than a maintenance call, or a new dish washer . . .