Dishwasher Installation
Hello, my idea of white friends out there on the Internet. Hey Jeff, here again and today we have a video that we’re going to show you how to install a dishwasher and we’re going to show you how to do it right so that you don’t violate your building codes at the same time. So let’s get right into it. So we’re looking at the side of the dishwasher.
Here’s the front here and here’s the back so you can see why they, they have that block out there on the, on the back of the cabinet there on the side at the bottom by the floor that says you can only go up to seven and three quarter inches as they only want you to pass stuff back and forth through here. They don’t want you putting anything up. You’re out of luck. So everything has to be done down here. So we have to transfer that measurement seven and three quarter inches over there on the cabinet side, off the floor.
And so there we are, seven and three quarter inches there at the bottom of the pool. But remember, you don’t get all of that because the cabinet actually sits up about four, four and a half inches. So you’re really only going to get about three inches or so of useful space up there. Okay, so inside the cabinet, then at the bottom, she that back plate there, that’s about three inches tall. You can find my holes whole pass the hoses and the electrical cables, Camden in the dishwasher throughout this video, don’t forget, every dishwasher hasn’t wanted peace drain hose that goes and connects to your garbage disposal and before you connect this up to your garbage disposal log insight that you got to knock out with a screwdriver failed and knocked that out, all the water will continue to back up.
So what we’re going to do is I always put down a big huge clot and I tend to do things a little bit different than what their instruction. They want you to install a dishwasher and then laid their prone on your stomach and reaching underneath. You try to do that wire that’s just crazy. So [inaudible] around, gently lower it on his back. Perfectly safe to do that. Once it’s up on its back, you can see right down here you let your boxes full of, this is what we need to get at here. Okay, so we’re just going to unscrew this plate here so that we can get at the wiring and the little lid that’s on there [inaudible]. Okay, so here I’m going to take my uh, quarter inch nut driver here and they have a screw here. Now you can either use a Phillips head or the quarter inch nut driver and anytime I’m given the choice I knew it was go with the nut driver. Okay, got it. She pulled the screw out and then this lid just comes right up.
Okay. This green screw right here is going to be for our ground wire, the whole thing. Okay. So as you know, the dishwashers don’t come with a power cable, so you have to buy a separate power cable and you make sure that you get a three pronged payable. Like this got three prongs and it should have three wires coming out of it. It should have a black wire, white wire, and a, a green wire there. And so the green wire is the ground, the black wire as the hut and the white wire is the neutral.
Okay? So when we go to hook this up here, the green wire is going to connect you to this green screw. The black wire is going to connect up to the black wire there and the white wire is going to connect up to the white wire. Okay, so now, um, we’re going to pull this wire around here momentarily cause I want to show you this hole right here next to the green screw here. And you can see that’s a sharp edge there. So building codes require that whenever you’re running a wire through something like that, that you use one of these connectors. Um, non metal cable connector. And we usually use this for running role mix into your outlet boxes.
And I’m going through, you know the metal, anytime you’ve got a hole in the middle of winter, it’s sharp like that. So what you have to do then is keep them and then the nut goes down. I’m not going to fully tighten up yet and you want to [inaudible] it. So that the, you can still be at the screw those down flood, so what’s going to happen is we’re going to feed the power angle up here through the cable plan. Okay. So I’ve exposed a little bit more of the wire so we’ll have a little more room to play with and what I do is I twist coming together to run them up as one who the people don’t even make it go in that part just enough to get that what you need to get at and so we’re going to do the ground rules first and when you’re doing this and you’re wrapping wire around the screw, you always want to wrap. Yeah, clockwise. See that, that direction there.
The reason is is if it was going the other way, and I’m going to put this under that washer there, if this was going the other way and you go to tighten the screw, it’ll actually just keep unraveling wire on here. I’m going to make sure he’s mentioned twisted there. Let’s go ahead and get this on there. Yeah. For these little green ground schools. It’s always best to use the five sixteenths inch nut driver, the way easier than doing the Phillips head. Okay, so now we’re grounded and now we’re going to take our other two wires here and run them in [inaudible]. I’m going to show you two different ways we can connect these wires together. We’re going to use, we’re going to use here two different types. So I have, this is our standard wiring, not, and then this year I’ve been using a lot lately. I really like these.
These are the Waco, uh, wiring. Leave nuts here. So the way this works is you stick the first warrior in there, close it down so it’s locked onto that black wire. And you take the second black wire here, stick it into the other side, close that lever down. And that’s it. You got to do, you don’t have to twist the games, you don’t have to strip any extra wire out of than what’s there. It just works perfectly. Now we’re going to show you the other way. Okay? So I had a strip, a little more wiring or off this one because you need to be able to twist these two together to run the winery.
Tighten it up a little with the pliers or Lineman’s pliers. You take the winery, right nut, screw it on there. The mall. We’ve completed our electrical connection. Now you’re probably wondering, hey, why don’t you need to put a, and you don’t need one on this side because they put a little smoothly, gentle there. Put the box back on. Just want to just move back. So all the carbs and stuff, she was up to use your, I’ll try to put links to everything down in the description for seem to be able to find something. You have to buy don’t forget, you know, just find the machine.
They don’t give you the power cord or water [inaudible] what this does is this comes with the hose and nutritionally help you meet [inaudible] remember the kit comes with [inaudible] type name and then I’ll go [inaudible] attach it, right? They’re like, they say to norm. Just like a regular hose. Pip Go hand tightened as far as you go, and then you go buy that half a term beyond that.
That should be good enough. Now I want to point out to you, see I’m doing it backwards from the way they tell you to do it in the instructions because again, they tell you when the instructions to run the hose first all the way back in there and they want you to take it down to the floor. But the problem is is again, you’re going to be on your face trying to hook all of this stuff up.
You know when you at a complete mechanical disadvantage and it’s so much easier to do it all when you have it just like this. So you’ve done it enough times, it’s pretty easy and you won’t have any problems. Yeah. Okay. So the drill, the holes, I prefer to use my little hole saws here. These are perfect for wood here and so to use the two inch, okay. Okay. So when you’re using the two inch one, I’ll see if this bit, you just screw this right on there and this is going to attach right to the drill. That’s it. So I get to do, okay. So notice how this works is it has the drill bit in the middle first.
So this works best to stabilize it and give you the perfect hole because you start with the center tap drill bit and that drill bits just starts a pilot hole for you that keeps this thing steady. It keeps it from rocking side to side while it’s spinning so that these can finally get a grip and dig into the wood and make a nice smooth cut. So let’s get this first hole in [inaudible] [inaudible] electrical plugs, see how they go home and just take it [inaudible] called [inaudible] [inaudible] water hose. This is the supply hose. Run them through our, the power for here. We’ll do the [inaudible]. All right. So when I did real quick, which I just wanted to push the dishwasher into place and just kind of gauge whether it’s high enough up to me to counter the bottom of the counter here. And as it turns out, no it is not. So what we have to do is we have to jack it up.
It looks like about an inch so that these will be sort of touching the bottom of the counter when you push it in the dishwasher. And then if you look here, you can see the green guys did a great job here. What they did was they buried the wood strip in there for us to screw into. So that’s kind of cool. Sometimes you don’t get that. Sometimes granted guys will a glue a piece of wood on, you know that hangs down, you know. But this one here is really nice. It’s the embedded it right into the bottom side of the granite counter top there. So what we have to do then is jacket up. And the way we jack it up is you have these screws down at the bottom here. There’s one here on the front there is, he had to get the feet there and so we’re going to have to turn those counter clockwise. There’s one there and there’s one in the front there and then lay in the back, zoom in there way in the back, there’s the other one, see there’s the rare ones.
So you jack them all up to the same high. We’re going to Jack this thing up about one inch. Now the thing that’s thinks about these and all the manufacturers, you know I hate the way they do this. That’s a really, really tiny hex head there and so that’s actually a five 30 seconds. So you’ve got to make sure you have a five 30 seconds inch socket and that’s why I use this. I love this tool. This was one of the best things I ever bought. Some phone them rise socket wrench so you and allows you to get into these types of spaces to make those adjustments down there. See, so that’s what we’re going to be doing is putting the socket on there to make that adjustment.
Okay? Now. Alternatively, if you don’t have that socket, you can use a wrench at the bottom there, right down here and start unscrewing the bottom put there. The only problem is it’s difficult to get a wrench on it, that tight space. Somebody going to have to hold this up for you while you’ve been on the ribbon. I want you to get it started in your hand. You’re okay, but um, it’s just a pain and you know, by the way, just to be more efficient. You know, you didn’t have to wait like I did and you know, of course the dishwasher in what? You’re better off just measuring this height when you have the dishwasher out. And then measure the height of the counter, calculate the distance and then just preset. All right? All your legs and everything the first time while you’re having your dishwasher out on the main part of the floor. So the way this works now, stick your data on top of it. [inaudible] [inaudible] okay, now I want it to be level, front to back and side to side.
So what I’ll do is I’ll loosen it back up a little bit till the thing levels out. Yeah, see that. So that’s all I had to do. You just adjust them until your spirit level reads perfectly level from front to back. And we’ll do the other side too. We checked the other side here and it’s pretty close to level. Okay, so now we put the level on the front there and we can see it’s perfect from side to side. So now I know this thing is nice level, plump, true and all that. And you’ll know it too because if it isn’t, when you go to slide it in, you’ll see the difference in the door here is it lines up to your cabinet. Everything in this kitchen was designed to be perfectly plumb and square. One item is out of clothes. You’ll know it later and you’ll have to start playing with your legs down at the bottom there.
The adjust your dishwasher to be a little crooked if you want it to look lined up to the cabinets. The cabinets are fricking, but everything looks good so far. Okay. So now we will take this hot water hose here and we’ll attach it over to the hot water cutoff valve there. So you can see me get closer here for you. Typically what I do is I, I get these really nice double valve set ups here. So this one goes to the hot water faucet up above on the sink. And this one here is for the dishwasher.
So the benefit of it is is I can independently shut off the water flow going into the dishwasher or the faucet or 10 flow. So this is a great flexible, these are about 15 $20 I’ll put a link down in the description for your disease are really very useful. Then [inaudible]. All right, so I will usually tighten these by hand and then I go about another half a turn with the pliers so I could turn on the water, go into the dishwasher. I want to make sure that there’s no leaks there. Now the synchronous motor going another faucet and nick dishwasher is hot water through the support.
Okay. So now I want to show you something that’s very, very important related to safety, health codes, building codes and all that. And I’m going to show you this. So this is the mistake everybody makes when they connect up their Washer, the dishwasher, they pull in the drain hose right from dishwasher and they proceeded to just go right up here plugging into the the garbage disposal and they think that’s okay. Now let me just back up here for a second. Let’s, let’s just stare at this and let’s take a look at this as a violation of health and the way the building codes. So if you look here, if you were to turn on the garbage disposal and let’s say the food and there was flying around and everything, and if it ends up in here, it can end up down here and work its way into down below, down into the dishwasher.
And then you’ll have all of this, this water and sewage backing up inside the bottom of your dishwasher. And that can cause huge, huge problems. Furthermore, supposing you had a sewage back back up here and a sewage backup comes up in here and it gets inside your garbage disposal, goes up here, pops out here, and then it goes down and now you have a sewage backup going into your dishwasher. You think that won’t happen to you? I’ve seen it happen three times and the last couple of years where the sewage system backed up simply because you can get clogged down the line from all the idiots that keeps throwing chicken fat down into the line there and then eventually backs up here and it backs up into your sink drain right there too. So I’ve seen that happen. It happened to me in one of my units a couple of years ago. All right, so you never want to do it like this. Okay. With the building codes require is what’s called a high side loop.
You’re probably really wondering what the heck is a high side loop? What do we do with that? All right, so let me show you. So what the building department wants you to do is this, they want you to take this hose, run it all the way up the inside here as high as it can go all the way up to the top right? So it’s gotta be higher than the bottom of the sink here. Right? And then you could come down and bring it around and it would plug in here and you, you’d have a hose clamp here, but you can see the difference here and you’ll see it more than once we have that hooked up. And I’m just trying to demonstrate for you that now the path would be, the water would have to go up hill, what’s your probably can’t and then down and it would have to go down, you know, next door to the dishwasher.
So it has a much harder time doing that. And if you had a backup from your sewage, the sewage would back up and it would just come up the drain instead of going up your hose, which is going to be way up there. So this is called a high side loop. And I’ll show you a quick diagram of it. See, most people never read the directions the early, but the instructions are in all of the directions. So you see how they show it happening there. So they show it coming from the dishwasher and that it gets, you use a bracket there and you tie it, the hoses as high as it can go, which is typically 32 inches to the bottom of the counter.
And then it comes down to the garbage disposal. So that’s called the high side loop. And right there can, you can see the instructions say the drain hose loop must be at least 32 inches high from the floor to ensure proper drainage. So that way when when the dishwasher pumps out the water, all the waste is going to come here and it will pump it up. It has enough strength of pump it up and back down. But sewage will not be able to come back up this way. Reverse. So in a way it almost acts like a p trap. It’s kind of a similar in, in strategy of what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to protect you from the sewage, whereas a p trap is trying to protect you from the gases coming up from the sewer system. Okay? So here’s where there’s proof. People always, um, try to challenge us. So here I wanted to show you where it shows it in the code here. Now here on our 2017 Florida building code here, which is based on the uniform plumbing codes that used around the country. Here it says here in eight oh two.one 0.6 domestic dishwashing machines.
And it gives you three possible scenarios here. It says the domestic dishwashing machines shall discharge indirectly through an air gap or air break into a waste receptor in accordance with section eight oh two dot two or just charge it to a wide branch fitting on the Tlp of the kitchen sink. Or, and this is our case, the dishwasher connection of food waste. Disposer you see it right there, highlighted in yellow. So we’re, that’s our scenario there. So that is allowed. Okay. And then the next sentence, it continues on and says the waistline of a domestic dishwashing machine discharging into a kitchen sink, tail upon piece or food waste, disposer shall connect to a deck mounted air gap or the waistline shall rise, be securely fastened to the underside of the sink, rim of counter. So in this case here, you can see we have our hose is mounted, uh, what they call, you know the high loop. So it’s mounted up the side of the cabinet all the way up to the bottom side of the counter top. So this is allowed. Now in some states, this is not allowed. Some states, I think like Minnesota and Wisconsin, they require you to have those stupid ugly, ugly air gaps that go on top of the counter because they want the thing to be breathing above the level of the flood plain of the, uh, of the same. So whatever the top level where you can, where you could possibly have a flood and coming out on the scene.
So this now places at somewhere between 36 and 40 inches above the floor instead of 32 inches above the floor. But to me it doesn’t matter it. And why would you want that ugly thing anyhow when the current way of doing things is perfectly acceptable. All right, sorry, I just wanted to show you this part is what’s important. So each manufacturer will, we’ll show you this grayed out zone here. That’s the only area where you can cut and pass drill holes here and pass your hoses and electrical wires through to the side of your cabinet. Because if you go higher, like this one here says what, seven seven and three quarter inches. If you go higher than that, seven and three quarter inches and try to pass your hoses through, now you’re going to pump against the side of the dishwasher and you’re going to be in a bind because what are you going to do? Everything will be bunched up. So you can’t do that. So they tell you to keep everything.
Usually this is typical seven and three quarter inches by four inches away from the wall. So as long as you’re within that square that you see on the left side, that that’s where you can drill. And then here they show you of course to take the hoses and the electrical wires down. You’ll see later on here, I don’t adhere to this, um, instruction here is I prefer to tie everything to the bottom of the unit or the unit is propped up so I can get at it. And then I, I shoved the machine in here, feed the hoses through, you just pull them in from the inside the cabinet. So now I’m getting ready to push the dishwasher back in place. And you can see, I just find it easier to route all of these lines to the bottom of the dishwasher before I even put it in the instructions. Uh, you know, I’m, I’m sort of opposite of what the instructions show you to do because I find it to be much easier. The instructions tell you to take those things down on the floor ahead of time and then they want you to get down on your stomach in front of the dishwasher to do all the work. And tying them. And I say to heck with that sentence.
All right, so let’s push this into place. Now. Each dishwasher manufacturer is different on where they want you to take your measurement level. This particular one wants us to put it right here on the bottom of the door when you open the door. And as we look, you can see it’s a little off. So we’re going to pull it back out and adjust the legs. This is nice and perfectly centered and likewise they want you to pull out the rack and put this onto the bottom of that track. They’re on the right to see if it’s a level of front yes back. So let’s go ahead and pull out the back and that is um, lower drawer here and there’s a spirit level there and you can see we’re pretty level front to back there. So the only thing we need to do is adjust the side to side from left to right. And so if you’re wondering why it’s not level, that’s because the floor is not level. See that. So, even though I had it out here and it seemed level over here or time, you move it back over there, you can see there’s problems with the level of the floor there. So we’ll just make a very brief adjustment to level out this dishwasher. Okay. So we made some adjustments to the right side legs and now our dishwasher is level of side to side. We can screw it to the underside of the cabinets. They’re there, the kitchen counter [inaudible]. Okay. So now we are fully attached to the bottom of the kitchen counters here. All right, so next I put the hose clamp onto the end of the dream who was here and I usually use a five sixteenths. Uh, this is a nut driver here and this is a lot better than using the Phillips head screwdriver. So I’m just going to insert this on there for now. Get it in there all the way.
Okay. So before we explain the whole setup of the high side loop, now that it’s installed, I just wanted to remind you that if you haven’t subscribed to us, yeah, this would be a great time too. And don’t forget to give us a thumbs up down below there. So let us know that you like us. And then when you hit the subscribe button, be sure to hit that bell icon so that it will alert you. Every time we upload a video, we have over 250 videos on this channel showing you all sorts of failures to repair around your house, all sorts of remodeling. And you know, we do really, really deep engineering and stuff too. So you’ll definitely want to come back and binge watch some of our other videos. All right, so let’s get into the high side loop explanation. Okay, so there’s your big picture. Look here. We’ve completed the installation of the high side loop. So let me just walk you through it. So the drain hose comes here from the dishwasher there and it goes up and you can see I’ve got it strapped into places to make sure it stays straight up and down. And then it comes all the way up here, goes up underneath the counter, see how it goes, all the way up to the counter, 32 inches up. Turns around and comes back around. And I’ve got this last strap right there holding it. Okay. And then it comes over here and I just have it zip tied in, two spots there to the bottom of the, of the garbage disposal to hold it in place there. And then it comes around and over to the left. So this is a little bit more complicated than normal because in most cases is uh, if your garbage disposal is facing this way, the dishwasher is on the left and comes in and it would just go straight into it. But in this case here, we’re different because our dishwasher has to be on the right. So we brought the hose in around this way.
And so I’m very careful not to kink it right there. You don’t want to pull this radius here. You don’t want this radius to be so tight full of tension that oppose this thing and kinks it. Cause remember that’s part of the hose as well. So you want to keep that like it is. So the reason why I put these two zip ties here is so that when we come right out of the port on the side of the garbage disposal, we want to immediately start going up, going up, going all the way up, 32 inches. And here’s our loop. So now if you ever had a sewage backup, it’s probably not going to make it past this joint right here. It’ll, it’ll come out the port and maybe a little bit and maybe come up a little bit like this, but it’s not going to go all the way up. So that’s our protection from any type of sewage ever backing up into the dishwasher. This is why I spent so much time on this because it’s very, very important. And I can tell you when you pay, what is it? A 150 bucks for the big box stores to come and install it for you. They don’t do it like this. I’ve got news for Ya. So this is something you might want to do yourself. Save them money. And as long as you watch this video here, you’ll do it. You’ll get it done right too.
Okay, so we’re going to plug it in and we’re going to test it. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So when you go to plug in the dishwasher here, of course there’s only one other outlet here, but test them and make sure because it does matter which one because one of these is the garbage disposal and it’s controlled by the switch. So I’ve already chested and I, I know that this bottom one here is as opposed to go to the dishwasher. Okay. Then we’ll tie up all of our courts here. Okay, so now before we tested dishwasher, what we want to do is see how it wiggles a lot down on the bottom here. So now that now that we can reach the bottom of the feet here pretty easily, we’re going to take our channel locks here where you can use an adjustable wrench and we’re going to just slightly tighten it up a little bit just to make it snow, just to put pressure going like this. So it’ll be against the floor. So we’ll go ahead and we’ll just turn it a little bit, maybe half a turn at the most just to give it some force up against the tile there. And then we’ll do the same thing with this one over here as well.
All right, so now we’re going to test out the dishwasher here with two plates that have kicked on food, stick them in there and I got our little soap pod there. And it’s important to remember to do a whole cycle on here before you put that black plate back on the bottom there, because you want to be able to look under there and see if there’s a leak and don’t just turn on the dishwasher and after five minutes ago, okay, no lake, we’re fine because you have to wait until the cycle is complete. You want to know that this dishwasher was successful and discharging everything through that plastic hose that comes off and heroin a 10 minute. Okay? Okay. So I want to show you a little trick that a lot of people get this wrong. But whenever you run your dishwasher, you’re only supposed to turn the hot water on here first. Make sure that you have hot water coming up here cause this way here and make sure that you’ve already got hot water coming in to your dishwasher.
Cause if you don’t do this, the dishwasher has to wait until it can heat up that waterfall. So that uses up a lot more energy and it takes more time. So I always make sure that there’s hot water running one right there first. Okay, so while the dishwasher is filling up, that’s the spot you want to focus on right there, right where your water intake is. So you want to make sure that that’s not leaking. You want to feel all around it. Make sure you don’t feel any moisture at all. Not a single drop. Cause if there’s a single drop that means there’ll be more. So this is the partner is the most concern to you right here. Right now we saw the water coming in through the holes here. So it was being discharged, pumped out by the dishwasher. See that little league right there. It’s because we didn’t take them down the nut yet. So let’s get that taken down. Okay. There it is. Nice and tight. Okay. So now it’s pumping water through again on the second cycle. And this time we don’t see any water leaking here, so we’re fine there right now this hose was completely filled with water and you can feel the hot water too. Mm. So at least we know that the discharge part is working just fine.
There’s no leaks in here. And then when they come back over here to the dishwasher side, there’s no leaks down there either. Mm [inaudible] okay. So our cycle was a complete success. There was no leaks. It was perfect, but that doesn’t mean you’re out in the water you cause now you smooth it out the door here. And uh, I need to update the drying cycle, but we want to make sure that there’s no water flooded in the bottom there. So you see, you look down the bottom there and sure enough we have no water slower than you, which is a good sign. That means that the dishwasher was able to pump it out. And here’s our plates nice and clean. So this was a complete success.
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