An Appliantologist in the forums ran into a bE error on an LG dishwasher, which perplexed him. In his words:
A bubble error would seem to indicate oversudsing, but our tech said that wasn't the case.
Fortunately, Brother Slav had the answer for us:
Turns out, this so-called "bubble error" can mean all kinds of problems that have nothing to do with suds, such as a leveling issue:
Or a problem with the pump:
You can check out the full list of bE error code
Are the dispenser heater and fill tube heater in series or parallel? Or perhaps they're neither?
BONUS QUESTION: If both heaters have 6.3 kohms of resistance, roughly what resistance would you expect to read from pin 1 to pin 2 of the connector?
Sound off in the comments!
A tech here in the Appliantology forums ran into a Whirlpool dual-evaporator refrigerator with a frozen fresh-food evaporator, and it caused him to ask the following question about troubleshooting it:
Sounds like a fun challenge -- let's figure out how much testing we can get done in a 30-minute service call.
The name of the game when it comes to saving time is keeping disassembly to a minimum. All of our troubleshooting techniques will either require no disassembly, or they'll
In a topic right here at Appliantology, a tech encountered a perplexing issue with an ice maker that wouldn't make ice. His diagnostics were as follows, in his words:
The E5 error code does implicate the ice maker thermistor, according to the tech sheet. So, our tech proceeded with the following repair:
And so he was left for a bit of a loss -- that is, until some helpful techs pointed him in the right direction on Appliantology.
In particular, Daniel A gave him some great ins
A tech here at Appliantology recently ran into a dryer that would not start. As he explains in his post:
After he's already changed the start switch, what could be the problem here?
Well, as several techs in that topic helpfully pointed out, even if you replace the start switch itself, there is a common failure of the plastic button itself that prevents the switch from being actuated.
As esteemed Appliantology brother Rhubarb Tau explained:
Here's a picture of what that
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Let's take a look at the interlock switches in a Kitchenaid microwave-oven combo unit with a simple question to answer: which of the microwave interlock switches should be closed when the door is closed, and which should be open?
Here's the schematic for this model with the switches in question circled:
Should be simple enough to find the answer to our question. In fact, most schematics worth their salt tell you the state the unit is in as shown. Ours has just such a note:
How do you troubleshoot a dryer that heats all the time, even when a cycle isn't running? That's exactly the scenario that a tech here in the Appliantology forums ran into, and even after replacing the timer multiple times, the problem persisted. Let's get to the bottom of this.
Here's the schematic, with the heater circled in green.
Something important to note about this dryer: it's an old-school dryer with a mechanical timer. No electronics in sight here!
What we need to f
A tech in the Repair forums here at Appliantology was trying to troubleshoot an inop evaporator fan motor, and he had some trouble figuring out what to make of his measurements.
Let's take a look at the schematic in question and see if we can clear up the confusion.
Oh boy, that's a tangled one! I've circled the refrigerator evaporator fan motor in question.
We can tell a few things about this fan immediately. The Vcc and GND designations show that this is a DC fan motor. Vc
A tech here in the Appliance Repair Tech Help forum recently ran into a conundrum: the range he was working on had an open bake valve, but there was also no voltage going to either the bake or the broil valve from the DSI control board. So is this just an issue with that open valve, or does the board need to be replaced as well?
To find our answer, let's first look at the schematic for this range.
Circled, from left to right, are the bake and broil relays, the bake and broil valv
I wanted to highlight a recent topic in the Appliantology forums because it showcases a few good teaching points -- and because it had some fun pictures.
Here's the initial setup that the OP gave in his post about an electric dryer:
There's a very important tidbit in there: someone other than the tech did work on this previously. Maybe another tech, maybe the customer -- we don't know. We'll circle back to why that's so important.
The OP continued:
So, over the course of
Take a look at the defrost circuit on this Whirlpool refrigerator:
Looks pretty standard -- there's just a defrost heater and a defrost terminator in the circuit, and voltage is supplied to the circuit by the control board.
But what is the purpose of the wire marked in green that tags off to J1-3?
If you look closely, you'll see that that pin on the control is labeled D-SENSE -- so that's a sensing line. This means that the purpose of that wire is to give the control board i
An interesting topic came up here in the Appliantology forums a little while back:
The tech was working on an electric dryer that was DOA -- no lights, no response to button presses. He put his multimeter to the LoZ setting (as you should always do when making AC voltage measurements!), and he started checking for the power supply to the appliance at the terminal block. Here's what he got:
L1 to N: 0 VAC
L2 to N: 120 VAC
L1 to L2: 20 VAC -- and while the meter leads are held
You would think that there wouldn't be a lot going on with an oven's convection fan motor -- and you would be wrong! This Viking convection fan has a number of interesting elements in its circuit that we're going to explore in this post.
1. Is that a 240 VAC power supply for a fan motor? Turns out that you can actually run a fan on 240 VAC if you want to (and if the fan has the proper specs for it). There are even certain benefits to doing so.
2. Not just one, but two capacitors in the
These aren't your grandma's ignition systems -- these are systems that use a DSI (Direct Spark Ignition) board, and that means you've got algorithms involved.
If you want to troubleshoot a DSI system, you need to understand this algorithm -- it's how the board thinks. Is the DSI board not sending any voltage to the electrodes? Well, it might just be in lockout mode after a failed ignition, meaning the problem lies elsewhere than the board. You can't troubleshoot a system if you don't know h
Be warned: this week's troubleshooting scenario is somewhat chilling...
...or maybe not, since the problem is that the ice dispenser isn't working. In fact, the entire fridge shuts down when the ice dispenser is activated. How can this be? Well, in this recording from one of our biweekly Live Dojo workshops, we go over the relatively simple cause to this strange issue.
Loading down is the culprit here. That's when a faulty load grounds out the control board's DC power supply, causing a
More than any other AC load, motors are all about amps.
What do I mean by that? When you have a motor that is misbehaving, the best, most informative electrical test you can do by far is amps. And one of the worst mistakes you could make is to just rely on ohms when testing a motor.
In this recording from one of our biweekly Live Dojo workshops, we go over several different aspects of troubleshooting motors.
Thermal controls are the first order of business. All AC motors have an i
We had an interesting discussion at our most recent Live Dojo workshop! This dryer only runs when the push-to-start button is held down -- a relatively simple problem, but troubleshooting it requires us to understand the entire motor circuit and how it works on startup.
We began by using Ten-Step Tango to orient our troubleshooting, identifying our Load of Interest and analyzing its circuit.
This led us to examining how the start switch works, which includes some interesting components
Inverter compressors can run really smoothly and quietly these days -- so quietly that it can be hard to tell if they're running at all, let alone if they're running properly. So if our ears and hands can't tell us what's up, what do we do to test these compressors?
Time to apply our brains and our meters: we're going to use the schematic and some simple electrical measurements with our ammeter and our multimeter to know if the compressor is running.
Step 1 is to use the schematic to
We make a big hoopla here at Appliantology and Master Samurai Tech about Ohm's law: the set of simple formulas that describe the relationship between four key principles of electricity: volts, amps, ohms, and watts.
Friend of the site Aaron Wilson explains just how much of a game changer it is to understand this relationship in this short video:
So why exactly did Aaron find Ohm's law to be such a revelation? In what way did it help him see the code? To answer these questions
One of the best things we can do to sharpen our skills as techs is to learn from other techs' experiences. There are a number of ways to do that, but the way that's both most convenient and lets you learn from the greatest variety of techs is searching the tech help forums here at Appliantology.
Appliantology has been on the web for 20 years now, and over that time the site has amassed a library of technical knowledge that is unmatched anywhere else. As a member of Appliantology, all of th
At ASTI 2025 in Orlando, FL, I had the honor of teaching a class on reading schematics and troubleshooting using Master Samurai Tech's patented Ten-Step Tango troubleshooting technique. During that class, we did diagnostic workshops on a number of different scenarios, all of which were taken from right here at Appliantology. For those of you who couldn't make it out for the convention, let's run through one of those scenarios here.
We'll be running through the steps of the Tango, but for th
The temperature sensors used in ovens, which are devices called RTDs, don't vary too much between brands and models. There's something of an industry standard for RTD specs that you can generally rely on, even when you aren't given the specs explicitly.
However, Frigidaire has left a booby trap in the form of an RTD with unique specs in some of their ovens. What's more, this difference isn't even properly reflected in some of their tech sheets. They've got incorrect specs!
Want to know
When you're working on an appliance that's DOA (no lights, no response from the UI), your first troubleshooting priority is to identify where the power supply is missing.
Is it just the UI that's not getting power? Or is the main control board not getting power? Is there even power at the outlet it's plugged into?
These are the questions you need to answer before anything else, and you're going to answer these questions by taking measurements with your meter. However, there are right a
At one of our recent Live Dojo workshops, a tech shared an interesting problem he had encountered.
He was called out on a GE wall oven where the upper oven lights stayed on all the time, and the door lock wouldn't activate. He investigated further, discovering that when he opened and closed the lower oven door, he heard a relay click as the light turned on and off — but there was no such relay sound for the upper oven.
Presuming this meant a stuck relay on the control board, he went ah
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By Rhubarb Tau in Rhubarb Tau's Sloggy Vlog Blog Bog5 comments