I Think I Fixed My Dishwasher

A couple weeks ago I ran into a strange, and still unsolved problem with my dishwasher leaking.  At first I thought it was the dishwasher itself, but as it turned out, the steel-braided water line was leaking, and from multiple pinholes on various sections of the five foot tube.  This seems on its own, but removing the leaking water line revealed a bizarre failure of the internal rubber hose, which had swelled and pushed out through the steel braid, creating a pattern of rubber nubs on the outside of the hose, many of which were leaking water.

Pictured is my steel-braided dishwasher water intake line.  The white rubber (I think it is actually Teflon)
is the interior hose that for reasons still unclear, pushed through the steel braid over the course of nine
days, finally resulting in a water leak and some minor water damage.

If you don't know or don't remember, this is what a steel-braided hose looks like new.

The Cause of My Leaking Water Line is Still Unknown

This is a very strange mode of failure for a steel braided hose, since the leak did not happen until nine days after it was installed, and after much searching on the internet, I was unable to find anything that resembled this problem.  Assuming it was just a defective hose, I went to Lowes and purchased another one, this time an eight foot hose, and it failed in twenty minutes.  The failure mode was very similar, except this time it only occurred at four points.  Because the hose was eight feet long instead of the previous five, there was some excess that I had coiled underneath the sink.  At the top and bottom of the coil where the hose touched itself, the Teflon had pushed through the steel braid, fused with the Teflon pushing through from the other loop of the coil, and fused together, causing a very heavy leak.  I was just lucky I caught this one very early or else it would have been worse than the first leak.

At this point I knew the issue was not with the hose, but I did not know where to put the blame.  I wrote a post about it encouraging suggestions, and while I did get a number of them, I still don't have a definitive cause.  Water that is too hot or too pressurized has been ruled out since my water heater is set to 120^oF (hose rating is 180^oF) and the house pressure is around 50 psi (hose is rated for 125 psi).  I also have a steel braided line on my kitchen faucet, which is connected to the same hot water line, so blaming the water conditions has all but been ruled out.

The only two options left are that I purchased two defective steel braided hoses, or the dishwasher is grounding or sending some sort of electrical current into the water line, causing it to heat up and melt.  The former seems highly unlikely, especially since there do not appear to be any other people with similar problems, meaning I would have had to pick out two defective hoses on two separate occasions from two separate stores out of hundreds of good ones.  Not impossible, but very improbable.  The latter is the most likely culprit at the moment, though I have been unable to test if this yet.  I am hoping to have results on this test soon.

My Dishwasher is Working Again

Anyway, as the title of the post says, I think I fixed my dishwasher woes.  I still don't know what the issue is, but to mitigate all potential problems, I purchased ten feet of soft copper tubing to be used as the intake line instead of the steel braid.  This will solve every conceivable problem that could be causing my previous water leaks.  If it is water pressure, the copper tubing can handle pressures up to around 600 psi.  If it is water temperature, copper melts at almost 2000^oF.  If it is a grounding issue, let it ground.  Copper conducts electricity well and the dishwasher will ground into the piping easily.  There should not be any more issues with this dishwasher.

It has been almost two days now and all looks good on the dishwasher front.  It is too early to tell whether all the water leak issues are behind me or not, but I am cautiously optimistic.  The copper really should be able to deal with just about any issue, so if I do end up with another water leak in the copper line, I will definitely be calling the Samsung repairman followed immediately by a priest.  And if that does happen, I will certainly be writing about it.