Call a Real Plumber, Don’t Try And Do it Yourself

A simple kitchen sink drain can sure get complicated.

As you can see from this installation everything seems to fit together nicely and looks all nice and crisp and white—-so what can be the problem?

The distance from the bottom of the trap has been dropped way down to allow for installation of the tail piece for the dishwasher (the vertical section of pipe with the grey hose attached to it).  If you look closely at the middle left of the drain (in the shadow) you should be able to see where the drain enters the wall.  This drain opening is too high (even without the dishwasher tail piece) to allow for proper installation of the trap.  Too much water would have ended up trapped in the pipe than would be proper.

The addition of the dishwasher tail piece not only keeps way to much water in the pipe but it allows water to seek its own level through much of the dishwasher drain.  This water will be laden with crud that gets poured down the sink drain and under the right circumstances could be sucked back into the dishwasher (nasty thought—-use your imagination and think of all the things you have put down a kitchen sink).

This next picture—highlighted in “water-blue”—-shows the approximate standing water levels present in the drain —-that means it sits there all the time when the sink or dishwasher is not being used.

The dishwasher drain line rests on the bottom of the sink cabinet where again I have highlighted the drain in blue.

In this next picture you can see the approximate water line in the dishwasher drain were it heads toward the top of the dishwasher.

In the drain cycle, the dishwasher pumps water to the top of the dishwasher and then down and supposedly out the drain.  This dishwasher will have to overcome all that water and previously mentioned crud that is already in the drain.

Unfortunately the fix for this will not be very easy as the drain in the wall itself will have to be lowered (or possibly a different sink installed) in order to allow for proper installation of all of the necessary components.  Perhaps a plumber should have been called in the first place.