zero degrees out - dishwasher won't drain

[David C.]

OK, we had our kitchen redone in our primary residence this spring.

a few weeks ago when we got the first 'polar vortex' our dishwasher failed to drain overnight. Since it was still under the 1 year warranty, we had the GE guy come out to look. He got here Thursday, the polar vortex was gone, and it looked fine to him and drained fine. He said: the drain line must have frozen.

Well a couple days ago it happened again, again it was zero degrees. The dishwasher is on an 'outside wall' and its the wall the gets slammed with wind when we have storms.

We never had this problem with our old dishwasher which was in the same location.

Is the drain line freezing a good explanation for this?

Would you uninstall the dishwasher and try to add insulation behind it, or route the drain line differently?

We attempted running a space heater under the sink(next to the dishswasher, where the drain line arrives to feed the water into the garbage disposal, but even after a few hours of that, we ran the dishwasher and it failed to drain?

[Sean Kuhn]

I'd call another appliance guy and see. Mine had the same problem but it was the solenoid that went bad not the drain freezing. It is possible that it did freeze. Usually they drain out the side though and go through the wall of the sink cabinet. I'd change that.