The Maytag Dishwasher Filter Nobody Knows They Have

How do i clean maytag dishwasher filter is a question with a five-minute answer and a much longer explanation of why almost nobody asks it until something has already gone wrong.

How do I clean Maytag dishwasher filter? These machines were designed around it

Older dishwashers ground food up with a small chopper and sent it down the drain. That worked, and it was loud.

The generation these belong to went the other way: a fine filter catches the debris, the machine runs quietly, and the owner takes the filter out and rinses it. That trade is why a modern dishwasher can run in an open-plan kitchen while people are talking, and the manual says so on a page nobody reads.

The consequence is that the filter is not a service item. It is an owner item, like a lint screen, and it is the only part of a dishwasher that expects a pair of hands every couple of months.

The five minutes

Pull the lower rack right out so you can see the floor of the tub. Toward the back there is a cylinder wrapped in a coarse mesh.

Twist it about a quarter turn counter-clockwise and lift it straight up. It comes away in your hand — no tools, no force, and if it feels stuck it is usually grease rather than a mechanism, so dry your hands for grip and try again.

Underneath there is normally a flat plate with a much finer mesh. That lifts out too, and that is the one that actually clogs.

Rinse both under a hot tap. A soft brush for anything greasy. Nothing abrasive and no need for detergent.

Look underneath while it is out

This is the part people skip and it is worth the extra thirty seconds.

With both filters removed you can see the sump — the small well that feeds the drain pump. Shine a light into it. What collects there is glass chips, produce stickers, small bones, occasionally a bottle cap, and all of them arrived because they were small enough to get past the mesh.

That is the space that causes grinding noises and stopped pumps, and the filters cannot catch what is already in it. Picking it out with your fingers takes a moment and it is the single most valuable thing on this page.

Refit it properly

Everything goes back the same way round, and the cylinder has to turn and lock. Most of them click.

A filter sitting in place but not locked is worse than no filter at all, because the machine will happily pump debris straight past it into the pump housing while everything looks correct from above. If it does not feel seated, take it out and start again.

What it prevents

Two of the commonest calls we take on this badge.

Drain problems. A packed filter starves the pump and recirculates what it should have caught. The machine drains slowly, then partially, then stops with water standing in the tub.

Poor cleaning. The same water goes round and round carrying the same debris, which is where grit on glasses comes from. People change detergent, add rinse aid, run hotter cycles, and the answer was in the floor of the tub the whole time.

Neither of those needs a part when it is caught at this stage, which is the argument for the calendar rather than the call.

When it has genuinely never been out

On a machine that is six or eight years old and has never had the filter removed, expect the first one to be unpleasant and expect it to take longer than five minutes.

The mesh will be greasy rather than dirty, and warm soapy water and a brush are needed rather than a rinse. The flat plate underneath may be packed solid enough that it does not lift easily — work it rather than force it, because the tabs are plastic. And the sump will almost certainly hold something.

None of that is damage and none of it needs a part. What it does mean is that the machine has been washing in recirculated debris for years, and a good number of the households we do this for tell us afterward that the dishwasher cleans better than it has in a long time. That is not the filter improving the machine. It is the filter no longer preventing it working.

And what it does for the smell

A dishwasher in this climate is a warm, damp, enclosed box with food residue in it, which is a reasonable description of somewhere things grow.

Most of the smell complaints we get are traced to three places, and the filter is the first of them — the other two being the fold of the door seal and the drain hose loop under the sink. Clearing the filter regularly removes the food that everything else depends on, and it does considerably more for the smell than any amount of running vinegar through an empty machine.