Meet the GE Monogram ZBD5900 Dishwasher

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What a POS. Supposedly this model was actually manufactured by Bosch, but I can not verify this for sure. The first failure occurred very early after the purchase. I was able to take the door apart, and find the control board which was faulty. I called GE and they sent a new control board to my house, with a “trained” technician to arrive in a couple of days. I wasn’t sure if the tech knew the board was in my possession, and I thought he might bring another leaving me with an extra. I thought I might scam one out of GE. I wish I had just replaced the board myself since the technician did not have a spare board, and he apparently had never worked on this model. I had to watch over him and explain where all the hidden screws were. He ended up stripping one screw in the end with his power driver.

Since then, the door springs have had to be replaced twice because they take a set and barely keep the door from dropping like a rock. 

I also had the microswitch in the latch handle fail. This $2 switch costs me $35 at the appliance store. I later found the same item at Digi-Key for $2.

The cutlery basket wore out, that was another $50.

Then all of the plastic wheels on the baskets started to age and crack. Since the upper basket could be set at two levels, it had two sets of wheels. I started scavenging the extra set one by one since it had something like 8 wheels at $20 per wheel. Another $0.50 item marked up to ridiculous prices.

Luckily when I first got the dishwasher, I complained about the efforts to slide the upper basket in and out, so they gave me another. I had another set of “spare’ wheels that saved me big bucks. The design of the basket stinks, so there was nothing wrong with it other than the basic design. The wheels cracked because of a poor design and poor material choice.

Now comes the other failures. Circuit board connections started to corrode and would melt the wire insulation due to the high resistance. I tried to solder one one loose/burned terminal back on the board, and due to foil or trace lamination I did a poor job I must admit. After about 1 year, the wire actually burned in half. So, I did a better job of rigging the connection and soldered the wire right to the board and installed an intermediate connection.

Every so often I get a blinking light and a fault. Sometimes a restart will ‘fix” the problem. It seems I often pull the dishwasher out, unplug some wires on the control board to inspect everything, put it back together and it runs. I have no clue what I “fixed”, it must be poor connections.

if I actually paid a service tech, I would be broke since they don’t do board repair. The control boards are $350-527 depending on where you buy them, and $200 used on eBay!

It would be great if I could find a good repair manual, and the logic diagram of the control board from the engineers that designed it, but I can’t. If I wasn’t dumb enough to pay $1,000 for this thing years ago, I would have thrown it on the curb long ago.

To make matters worse, this thing has all electronic controls (no simple timer), and a pressure switch instead of a float, so basically none of the typical online repair advice applies.

After I purchased this machine, I also discovered that it does a poor job of drying dishes. A drying agent helps. GE explained to me that this was a non-vented European design, so opening the door right after the rinse cycle (prior to heating) and/or right after the heater runs lets out a huge cloud of steam which will help also. However, this requires baby sitting. In fact, twice for reasons unknown, it will just run the pump forever (as in hours until it fails) so you can’t leave the house. The first time it would actually pump out water, then continue to run. The second time it happened, it would run, but not pump out water. I never replaced a part, just took it apart, put it back together and it mysteriously “fixed” itself.

This thing is an embarrassment to GE.

With all that said,  the baskets are designed well for loading the dishes and cutlery. I think the pump and “guts” so to speak are of descent quality, the root of all evil is the shitty control board design.


Update: October 8, 2011


I ran the dishwasher one night, got up in the morning only to find that the drain pump was running all night. No LEDs, no response to any button presses. I figured the logic board was dead. I turned off the circuit breaker.


I unplugged and plugged back in all 9 wires on the logic board to see if a connection was bad. I heard the board beep, so I thought a poor connection might have been the issue. However, the drain pump was still running. Now that I have a real repair manual I found on eBay I took a quick look at the wiring diagram. 


It turns out that there is an overflow reservoir underneath that is accessible only after a panel removal. A small overflow hole exists near the bottom edge of the front door. If the water level gets too high (let's say the logic board fails and holds a water valve open) a small chute that looks like a sliding board channels the water into this reservoir. Then a float switch turns on the drain pump. The same voltage is detected by the logic board, and the logic board shuts itself down. This is called a watch dog. Not a bad idea, accept the normal customer would not know what just happened, and would require an $80 service call. Who knows if the tech would know what to do since they never see this low volume machine.


I decided to read how to lower the water level, thinking maybe it was just a little high all these years. So when I went through the procedure to set it lower, I found that it was one step higher than factory default. Since this is hard to get into this mode, someone had to do this. Probably the tech that came out years ago and stripped a screw and needed my direction on how to find the hidden screws!


I set the water level timer back to factory default, and it seems to be working. I'll keep my fingers crossed.


Update on the water level:


 I had the same failure two days later, so I figured something else was wrong and allowing water to leak into the overflow reservoir. I checked the lower housings, they were all dry. After pondering for a bit, I checked the bottom door seal. I discovered that food crud had built up, and got under the seal not allowing it to do its job. I took a few paper towels and cleaned all the crud  from under the seal. That was it, the dishwasher has been working for months. It is now January 16, 2012.




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