The short answer
Standing water is a restriction, not a dead pump, in most cases. The ranking here starts with drain hose kinked, crushed or blocked.
What you observe
- A few centimetres of water in the sump after every cycle — The normal picture of a restricted drain rather than a dead pump.
- The pump is audible but the level barely changes — A restriction downstream: hose, air gap or disposal.
- No pump sound at all at the end of the cycle — Points at power, a door confirmation or a jammed impeller.
- NEAR MISS — water is appearing on the floor as well — Then treat it as a leak first: the water-leak page ranks that properly.
Causes, most likely first on a Signature Kitchen Suite dishwasher
- Drain hose kinked, crushed or blocked — Grease collects at the low point of a sagging hose and narrows it over months. Ranked first on a Signature Kitchen Suite dishwasher: it is the part most often damaged by an installation, and a kink stops the flow completely.
- No high loop or air gap, so the machine siphons — This puts water in the sump that the dishwasher never failed to remove — it came back.
- Garbage disposal knockout plug, or a full disposal — A disposal full of waste blocks the same inlet just as effectively.
- Filter and sump blocked — Labels, seeds, glass chips and bone fragments all end up in the sump and all of them restrict it.
Check in this order, and why
- Pull the machine forward and follow the hose along its whole run — Feel for a hard, greasy section at the low point of the run.
- Look at how high the drain hose rises before it falls to the waste — Water that appears between cycles rather than after them is siphoning.
- Run the disposal, then check whether the dishwasher drains — A disposal that has never been run since installation is the first suspect.
What an owner can safely check
- Ease the machine forward, straighten the drain hose along its whole run, and check where it passes the cabinet — Most installation kinks are at the point where the hose leaves the cabinet, and straightening it is the fix.
Tools: torchAbout 25 min
- Check the drain hose rises to just under the worktop before it drops to the waste, and secure it there — A hose secured in a high loop stops the sink from siphoning back into the machine.
Tools: cable tieAbout 20 min
- STOP HERE if the next step needs a panel off or a meter on live terminals — That is where the owner checks end and a service call begins, whatever the ranking says.
Before you open anything
Safety
Power off at the breaker or isolation switch before any hand goes into the sump, and give a capacitor time to bleed down. Assume there is glass in the water: glove and torch, never bare hands. The water supply valve gets closed before a hose is loosened. Keep weight off the open door, and let the machine cool before reaching in after a hot cycle — the water and the heater both stay hot for a while.
When to call a technician
The owner's part is everything you can reach: the filter, the sump, the hose run, the disposal and the air gap. A jammed or dead drain pump is behind the sump housing and is a technician's job. Do not run further cycles on an undrained machine. Use an installer or technician authorised for the line: panelled and integrated machines can be damaged by the removal itself, and the trim and hinge hardware is specific to the family.
Nearest pages of this class
What this page does not cover
This page covers the Signature Kitchen Suite dishwasher as a class, not one family or model line. Where a family- or model-specific page exists for your unit it is linked above and it is the better answer — read it first. Deliberately not here: part numbers, wiring colours, panel removal order and torque figures, all of which differ between families under one nameplate.
Lead Appliance Repair Technician · 12 years experience
Experienced technician with 12 years specializing in washing machine and dryer repairs across all major brands.
