A Grinding Maytag Dishwasher: Glass, the Pump, or Nothing at All

Why is my maytag dishwasher making a grinding noise is a question with three answers that cost wildly different amounts, and the thing that separates them is not what the noise sounds like. It is when it happens.

Why is my Maytag dishwasher making a grinding noise? Three noises, three moments

A dishwasher does two mechanical things: it pushes water around the tub, and it pushes water out to the drain. Those use different pumps, they run at different points in the cycle, and a noise belongs to one or the other.

At the drain, for a few seconds. The drain pump runs in short bursts, hardest at the end. A grind confined to those bursts is something hard sitting against the impeller — glass, a fruit sticker, a small bone, occasionally a bottle cap. This is the cheapest version and it is often free.

Through the whole wash. The wash pump runs continuously while the machine is washing. A grind that lasts as long as the wash does belongs to it, and that is a genuine repair rather than a removal.

Whenever the arms are turning, with dirty dishes to go with it. That is not a pump at all. It is a spray arm striking something in the rack, and the proof is that the load also comes out badly cleaned, because an arm that cannot turn is not spraying where it should.

The filter, and the space underneath it

Start here regardless, because it is free and it takes ten minutes.

The filter twists out by hand — no tools, and it is designed to be removed. Rinse it under a hot tap and look at what comes off it. Then, and this is the part people skip, look into the sump underneath with a light.

The filter catches what it can. What gets past it lands in the sump, and the sump is what feeds the drain pump. Glass chips in particular are small enough to pass and hard enough to do damage, and they sit there quietly until the pump picks one up.

Most of the cheap version of this complaint is resolved in that ten minutes.

Why glass makes it worth doing soon

A dishwasher that grinds at the drain and still empties normally is not an emergency. It is, though, on a clock.

Glass against a plastic impeller and housing does what you would expect over a few weeks of daily cycles: it wears the surfaces, and once the clearances have gone the pump stops moving water properly whether the glass is still there or not. At that point a removal has become a part.

So the honest advice is not to panic, and not to leave it a month either. Take the filter out this week.

When it is the wash motor

A grind through the whole wash, with the dishes coming out reasonably clean, is the version that needs somebody. The motor is doing its job and complaining, usually because a bearing has worn or because something small is caught where the impeller runs.

This is a real repair and it is worth a straight conversation about the machine's age. On a dishwasher of six or seven years it is generally worth doing; on one of twelve it deserves the same arithmetic we would apply to a washer bearing, and we will say so rather than quote it and leave you to work it out.

The one that is not the machine

A kitchen sink and a dishwasher very often share a waste pipe, and a disposal with something still in it makes a noise at exactly the moment the dishwasher empties into the same line.

Run the disposal for thirty seconds before the next cycle. If the noise goes, it was never the dishwasher, and you have saved yourself a call.

Where the objects come from

Almost everything we take out of a Maytag dishwasher pump arrives the same way. A wine glass chips against a plate on the way into the rack and nobody sees the fragment. A produce sticker floats off a pepper and slides through the mesh. A chicken bone that looked small enough gets scraped in with the rest.

None of that is carelessness, and scraping rather than rinsing is genuinely the right way to load these machines — they expect some soil to work against and a completely pre-rinsed load can wash worse. What they do not expect is glass, labels and lemon seeds, and those three account for most of what we retrieve.

The practical version of that is a habit rather than a rule: look at the sump every couple of months while the filter is out, and check the rack after anything breaks in the kitchen.

What to tell us when you book

When in the cycle it happens, whether the machine still empties, whether the dishes are coming out clean, and what came off the filter when you rinsed it. Those four between them name which of the three this is, and that decides whether we arrive with a pump or with a flashlight.