Mending our dishwasher AEG OKO Favorit 5040W (1999). There are basically two motors, one to do the power wash and a smaller one to drain the water out. Our problem was that it sounded like the drain motor was working because of its humming but it was clear by the dirty water left inside the dishwasher that it wasn't functioning. It took me a lot of time to work out that there wasn't a blockage in the system and that the drain motor sounded as if it was working but when I finally took it out and wired it up to the mains on the kitchen worktop. The impeller would spin four times out of five but then the next time the power went on it would stall but still make the same noise as if it was working properly. I was quoted £80 for this motor at a local shop but found this excellent company on the website http://shop.ezee-fix.co.uk/ +44 (0) 1423 505 663 where the motor cost me £43. They even recommended a similar motor from Zanussi which was five pounds cheaper and is almost identical to the Bosch one. They give helpful advice on the phone. The motor electric female connector on the Zanussi pump was a little different to the male connector of the machine and needed one wire to be added to join one of the connections to the plug. Make sure that if you have to modify that you get +ve to + ve. The motor came two days after I ordered it online.
I bought a useful plastic pump- two clear pipes with a corrugated plastic bulb on top, about £8 from my DIY shop to hand pump out the mucky water from the sump before tipping Dishwasher on its side. The tip on towels is helpful as they soak up any remaining water
I made a mistake of removing both the black sump pump and the motor together. With such a tight space underneath the dishwasher, even with all the panels off and the dishwasher on its side, it was a nightmare to try and get the motor and pump back onto the rubber hose. In the end I took away the wire spring clip and used a Jubilee clip to clamp the hose onto the pump.
Tip - The motor comes off the black pump housing easily with a quarter of a turn anticlockwise. The motor has three lugs on it that lock onto the pump housing with a big o-ring inside to seal it. There is no need to remove the pump housing from the rubber hose as well. Saving a whole afternoon that it took me to try and get back the wire spring clip into position. It’s very easy to put the new motor back in with a quarter of a turn.
Two different engineers I spoke to on the phone both said that the drain (sump) motor is one that goes fairly frequently. It seems that water, in the end, gets past the seal on the bearing behind the impeller. I wonder if most problems people have on this page, where the machine will not drain, is down to an intermittent drain motor fault. Both engineers said that OKA was an excellent quality machine but now an OKA have been taken over by a British company, the German made ones are still good but a lot of the machines are now British and badged OKA and the quality is not the same. One said Siemens now is the better quality machine which I may get when my OKO finally packs up but I think it is a quality machine and it should last a long time more with the occasional maintance.
My AEG OKO, has been working well since I put a new drain motor in.
I have one problem since then which has only seems to happen maybe once a year. When the level is too high in the sump, the switch goes on and overrides the power switch and programmer etc to run the emptying (sump) pump continuously. The advice you gave above is good, pull out the dishwasher, with towels on the floor tip it over 45 degrees. This will drain the water in the sump and reset the switch. The dishwasher will be fine again for ages. Of course there shouldn’t be a leak but I cannot find it and once a year I am willing to put up with it.
Mick S
December 2008
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