GE Dishwasher parts nightmare!

We have a GE dishwasher. Model number: PDWT380R10SS. It’s one of those that has “touch buttons” on the lid.

This one was made in 2009. It’s in its glorious 11th year as I am writing this blog entry. According to Consumer Reportsthe average life of a dishwasher is 10 years. I already changed the detergent pump of the dishwasher which was clogged because of our mistakes (probably another blog entry).

The “touch buttons” and their LED lights started to fail one by one in the last few years. The last one standing was the Start button (essential functionality). Last week it decided to die too.

I was looking for the part for the last 2 years or so and it is always out of stock. Here is the part number for the “Keypad Assembly”: WD34X11603.

Since we don’t have a functioning dishwasher anymore, I gave a call to GE. Since Covid started they cannot keep up with the parts anymore due to increase of home appliance usage. :( I decided to reverse engineer the buttons. Long story short, I learned a lot how these buttons work but I couldn’t save the keypad assembly.

However I figured out that part number WD34X11587 has actually same connection pattern as WD34X11603! It’s also ~$100 cheaper. It’s missing few “modes” which is totally unused by us anyway. So I ordered it, mounted it and now we have a running dishwasher :)

I hope this helps someone. ;)

Totally unrelated, not really: I ordered this one and few other parts from AppliancePartsPros.com and I’m very happy with them. I don’t get paid to write this here. I just like how it was easy and fast. Thanks!