Miele dishwasher won’t start and keeps showing “Close the door” — Westwood, NJ

The call

The dishwasher would not start. Push the door shut, press Start, and nothing happens — the display just sits there reading “Close the door” while the door is very obviously closed.

By the time we were called the household had been shutting it harder for a week, which is the natural thing to do and the wrong thing to do. A door that needs slamming is a door with a mechanical problem, and slamming is how the hinge and the seal join it.

What we found

The message is worth taking literally. A Miele will not run a program until the control has been told, electrically, that the door is latched — not that it looks shut, not that it feels shut. Until that confirmation arrives the machine is doing exactly what it should by refusing to fill a tub it cannot keep closed.

So the question was never whether the door was closed. It was where the confirmation was getting lost: in the latch, in the interlock switch it drives, or in the wiring back to the board.

It was the latch. The mechanism had worn to the point where the catch no longer travelled the last fraction of its stroke, and that last fraction is what closes the contact. To a hand on the door the difference is invisible — it clicks, it holds, it feels right. To the control there is simply no signal. The door alignment was fine and the board was fine; one small mechanism in the door was not.

The fix

Replaced the door lock assembly with the correct part for the machine and put the inner door panel back together — on this design the interlock, the wiring loom and the control module all live inside the door, so it comes apart to reach a part the size of a matchbox.

Then we tested it the only way worth testing it: latched the door and watched the display let go of the message, selected a program, and stayed with the machine long enough to see the lock engage, the fill start and the cycle actually running. We also opened and re-latched it several times cold, because an intermittent latch that works once proves nothing.

One note we left with the customer: this is the failure that gets mistaken for a dead control board, and a board on a machine of this class is a different order of money. Worth knowing before anyone quotes one.