Maytag dishes come out dirty or gritty

Three checks in the right order

Run the kitchen tap hot until it is genuinely hot, then start the dishwasher — a machine that begins with a tub of cold water spends half its cycle catching up and never quite does. Next, spin both spray arms by hand. They should turn freely and every hole should be clear; hold one up to the light and look through the holes, because scale from this water closes them gradually. Third, take out the filter and rinse it. If dishes are gritty rather than filmy, that filter is the likeliest single cause on the whole list.

What it usually means, by the kind of machine

One complaint, several machines. This maker still sells a top-load washer with an agitator alongside one without, a front-loader, and a stacked pair, and it sells the same oven as a range and as a wall unit in gas and in electric. The behavior you can describe is identical on all of them; the first hour of the repair is not. A front-load washer has a drain filter the owner can open and a top-loader has nothing to reach from the front, and that single difference decides how the same afternoon goes.

• Front control — Cycle options live behind buttons on the front edge and it is easy for a heavy cycle to have been switched off without anybody noticing. Worth checking what setting the machine is actually running.
• Top control — Same machine, and the same first three checks. The one addition is that a top-control panel is easy to press with a hip while loading, so an unexpected light cycle happens more often here.

Which dishes tell you which part

The pattern is the diagnosis. Poor cleaning that is worse on the upper rack points at pressure reaching the top arm. A single quarter of a rack coming out dirty points at a blocked section of one arm or something obstructing its rotation. Everything equally poor across both racks points at temperature, detergent or the filter — and those are the three an owner can address without anybody visiting.

Scale, quietly

The water in this region leaves a deposit, and dishwasher spray arms are where it shows first. A machine that cleaned beautifully for six years and has slowly declined has usually lost half its jets rather than any part, and clearing them restores it. That is worth knowing before a working machine gets replaced.

Habit against repair

Three of the five causes on this page are things anybody can change this evening, and we would rather say that than book a visit for a machine that is working. Hot water at the start, a spray arm that turns freely, and a filter that has been rinsed will restore a great many dishwashers to how they washed when they were new. If all three are genuinely in order and the dishes are still poor, then it is a repair, and it is a specific one rather than a guess.