PSA: How to DEEP CLEAN a dishwasher

So, I was sitting at the kitchen table, helping someone with their schoolwork, and I kept noticing an unpleasant odor.  I finally traced it to the dishwasher.  Now, I have noticed the dishwasher smelling unpleasant before, and I have tried:

• sprinkling baking soda in the bottom of the dishwasher, along with adding a scoop to each wash load
• cleaning out the dishwasher by running it through an empty-of-dishes cycle with 1 cup of bleach, not letting it go through the drying cycle, and immediately running it through another washing cycle with 1 cup of vinegar (thanks to the expert advice of "The Queen of Clean")
• buying a cleaning product specifically made for cleaning out dishwashers

I have also noticed some n@sty-looking stuff building up in the corners of the bottom of the dishwasher, near the door, and have tried to (gag!) scrape it out to see if that would help.

WARNING:  I thought the "How to Take Apart and Clean a Toilet Seat" post was disgusting;  I WAS SO WRONG!  Having to deal with pee all the time anyway, I expected what I saw there, so I would classify that as "yucky".  When thinking about an appliance that has the word "CLEANER" in its name, I would NEVER have guessed the level of disgusting I was about to encounter!!  So, if you are lucky and your dishwasher doesn't smell funny, and/or you do not like gr*phic, disgusting pictures, you should DEFINITELY skip this post!  (And if you have a sensitive gag reflex, you cannot stand to clean n@sty, N@STY things, and you have tried EVERYTHING you can think of, besides taking the dishwasher door apart to clean it, and your dishwasher STILL smells bad, I suggest you BUY A NEW ONE!)

ALSO:  I am not any sort of official mechanic or dishwasher-fixer, so you may not want to try this at your house unless you are happy with the idea of buying a new dishwasher should your cleaning attempts go awry and render your current dishwasher BROKEN ineffective.  (Spoiler:  unlike the vacuum cleaner, the dishwasher DID function properly after I put the door back together.)

I didn't take any pictures of the dishwasher before I took the door off because I didn't realize that this was going to end up being one of those things I was going to write a blog post about in order to make myself finish the unpleasant job.  I had taken the inside of the door off once before, when I had been pouring rinse aid into the rinse aid spot and suddenly noticed it coming out of the sides of the door (I figured that I should make sure that nothing electric was wet).  It had been a simple matter of taking out the screws located near the edges of the door, and, unlike the vacuum cleaner, there were no wires anywhere that kept the top of the door from coming all of the way off. 

I recommend doing this job BEFORE you bathe for the day because you are likely going to want a bleach bath to bathe thoroughly as soon as you are finished if you can resist the urge to burn every dish in your house because you just cannot see how they could possibly be clean after what you have seen in the inside of the dishwasher.

For this job, the supplies I initially gathered were:

• a regular screwdriver
• paper towels
• disinfecting wipes
• garbage can close by for tossing the MANY, MANY dirty paper towels and disinfecting wipes

Upon further reflection, it would have also been a good idea to wear gloves (the stuff I was scraping out was VILE the disinfecting wipes dried my hands out quite a bit).

Once I started the cleaning job, I realized that I was going to need:

• an old toothbrush for cleaning small areas
• toothpicks and cotton swabs for the places the toothbrush wasn't getting
• baking soda and dish soap for getting the disgusting gunk to come off

Here come the pictures!  Avert your eyes now if you are like me and would rather live in blissful ignorance or denial really don't want to know what could be in your dishwasher. 

This is what it looked like AFTER I had finished cleaning.  In this picture, you can see some of the screws around the edges.  I took those screws out, then took off the plastic part of the door that is inside the dishwasher when the door is closed.

This is what the door looks like with the plastic part removed.  You can see a hint of the n@stiness to come at the bottom of the door.

Closer inspection....

Even CLOSER inspection (YUCK!)
I actually had to SCRAPE that stuff off;  I suppose some sort of wire brush would have worked, but it probably would've taken the paint off also, so I used fingernail-buried-in-a-cleaning-wipe.

This is the plastic part I took off;  looks pretty harmless, doesn't it?

Until you look on the bottom:

Before:  on the left side (the right side was much the same)....

AFTER MUCH SCRUBBING:

NOTE: this stuff looks SO DISGUSTING, and I don't want to know am not quite sure what exactly it was, but "sludge" and "gunk" were the words that came to mind when I first saw it.

The very bottom of the door



After MANY hours of cleaning with toothbrush, cotton swabs, and toothpicks:

This part was A BEAR to clean because I couldn't easily get it in the sink AND it required a lot of scraping and scrubbing.  I suppose it would have been easier to clean in the bathtub, but then I wouldn't have been able to see what the demolition experts children were doing.  This was, BY FAR, the n@stiest thing to clean.

(Rest easy:  the worst is over!)  I HAD NO IDEA that a dishwasher could look like this when all you do is WASH DISHES in it! And our dishwasher runs once or twice a day, so it isn't like things are sitting in there for days on end! At least THIS part of the dishwasher comes into direct contact with the dirty water;  next, I looked at the VENT, which, *I* thought, was just for letting steam escape.....

I became suspicious when I carefully removed a piece of Styrofoam near the vent and saw this.

The two easy-to-find-screws made vent-removal look simple, but I'm not very mechanically/spatially inclined, so when I got the last screw out, I was surprised to hear the sound of something hitting the floor.  I looked down and saw this:

Silly me!  I thought the part I was unscrewing was going to come off;  not the bottom!  And what is all of that disgusting stuff that got knocked off of the vent cover when it hit the floor?!  STEAM!  I thought STEAM went through this vent!

This is what it looked like BEHIND the vent cover, on the door.

The MUCH MORE PLEASANT "after" pictures:

This part wasn't too hard to clean.

This part was VERY easy to clean since it conveniently fit in the sink.

Honestly?  I just don't know if I will ever be able to make myself do that again, so I should probably start saving money for a new dishwasher RIGHT NOW!