Bosch Dishwasher Water Tap Symbol & 'Check Water': What It Means & How to Fix It
The water tap symbol on a Bosch dishwasher (often with 'Check Water' behaviour — the machine stopping early in the cycle) is the fill system asking for help: water isn't arriving as expected. It's the pictogram version of a fill fault, and the causes are the fill chain: the supply tap and hose, the AquaStop hose system (where fitted), the inlet screen, and the valve.
Work the supply chain from the wall
Is the under-sink tap fully open? (Partly-open taps are the #1 find.) Is the inlet hose kinked where the machine was pushed back? Bosch's AquaStop hose has a mechanical safety valve at the tap end — if it has tripped, the hose itself has shut the water off, usually because it detected a leak or a burst risk; a tripped AquaStop doesn't reset — the hose assembly is replaced.
The inlet screen and the valve
At the machine end of the inlet hose sits a small filter screen: shut the tap, unscrew, rinse it. If supply is proven strong at the hose and the tap symbol persists, the inlet valve is the remaining suspect — a technician meters its solenoid; the valve is replaced as a unit.
Don't forget the obvious water states
A machine that was recently moved/installed can show the tap symbol because the tap was never turned back on (it happens constantly), and very low house pressure at peak times can trip the fill monitoring intermittently — note whether the symbol appears at the same time of day.
One symbol, several spellings: tap, faucet, tap water — and 'red tap'
Owners search for this pictogram by every name it collects — Bosch dishwasher error code tap, error code faucet, error code tap water, error code water tap — and a good share add the colour they see, 'red tap', because on many panels the symbol is picked out in a warning colour. Bosch itself simply calls it the symbol 'water tap', and its own support page for the symbol is titled as a water tap error in the display. Whatever your panel calls it, and whatever colour yours shows, it is the same report: the dishwasher's self-diagnosis has a water-supply problem to tell you about. Bosch's page for the symbol gives exactly three candidate causes, and they structure everything below: a kinked or blocked hose, low water pressure, and a filter blockage. Note what is not on that list — the drain, the pump, the heater. The tap symbol is an inlet story from start to finish, which is why the checks that cure it all live between the wall tap and the machine's inlet valve.
Bosch's first check: the hose, straightened by hand
Bosch's step one for the water tap symbol is physical, not electronic: inspect the dishwasher supply hose and untwist any visible kinks or bends. Its fuller instruction is to check that there are no kinks in the cold water fill hose and the waste water hose by pulling the appliance out slightly and untwisting any visible kinks or bends in these hoses. The timing is the usual clue — a tap symbol that appears right after the machine was pushed back into its housing, after under-sink work, or after anything was stored against the hoses, is a hose that has been folded by its own installation. A kink is also a flow fault that comes and goes: the machine may fill on one programme and fault on another, because a partial kink passes some water but not the rate the fill monitoring expects. Straighten the run, leave the hose a gentle curve rather than a fold when the machine goes back, and retest before moving on — Bosch puts this check first because it is the one that costs nothing and cures a large share of tap-symbol visits. While the machine is pulled out, look at the hose itself as well as its shape: Bosch's check is for a hose that is kinked or blocked, and a hose crushed flat by the machine's own weight, or furred up internally in hard-water areas, restricts flow even when it looks acceptably curved from the front. If the run cannot be made to lie in a smooth, open curve, the hose — not the dishwasher — is the part under suspicion.
The bucket test: Bosch's 10 litres per minute, and the tap itself
Bosch's second check measures the supply instead of guessing at it. Check the water pressure directly from the tap using a bucket: approximately 10 litres of water per minute should flow out of the tap when it is fully open, and if the pressure is too low, Bosch's advice is to contact your plumber or fitter to check the water installation — the dishwasher cannot fix a house-side supply. The same figure appears in Bosch's manuals for the numeric version of this fault, and the manuals add the tap states the bucket test exposes: the water tap is turned off (it happens after every plumbing job), or the water tap is jammed or furred up, in which case turning it fully on — working a stiff or scaled tap back to fully open — restores the flow. A tap that delivers a lazy half-bucket in a minute has told you the whole diagnosis: the machine is reporting the supply accurately, and the repair belongs to the tap, the house pressure, or whatever is restricting the line upstream, not to the dishwasher. Run the test at the tap the dishwasher actually uses, hose disconnected, rather than at a convenient neighbour tap — the point is to measure what arrives at the end of this machine's own supply run, through this tap, and a strong reading elsewhere in the house proves nothing about a partly closed stop valve or a scaled outlet on the dishwasher's own line. Note, too, when a marginal supply faults: a house at the edge of the 10-litre line may pass in the morning and fault in the evening peak, which is why an intermittent tap symbol with a borderline bucket result is still a supply result, not a machine mystery.
The filter in the water connection: Bosch's eleven-step clean
Bosch's third check is the small filter where the supply hose meets the water connection — in Bosch's manual wording, the filters in the water connection of the supply or AquaStop hose are blocked. The procedure Bosch prints for it is exact, and worth following exactly: switch off the appliance, pull out the mains plug, turn off the water tap, unscrew the water connection, remove the filter from the supply hose, clean the filter, re-insert the filter in the supply hose, screw the water connection back on, check the water connection for leaks, restore the power supply, and switch the appliance on. Bosch's support page gives the shorter version of the same job: turn off the water tap, remove the hose from the tap, clear the filter under running water, use a small brush to clean it, reconnect the hose and check for leaks. This screen is the machine's last defence against grit, scale flakes and the debris that plumbing work shakes loose, which is why a tap symbol that debuts right after a new tap, a new hose or building work should go straight to this step — the filter did its job, and now it is wearing what it caught.
'Check water supply' flashing is a different sentence from the tap symbol lit
On Bosch's current manuals, two displays that owners merge into one are actually printed as separate faults. The water-supply indicator lighting up belongs with code E:32-00, and its causes are the supply chain above: hose kinked, tap off, tap jammed or furred up, inlet filters blocked. But the display 'Check water supply' flashing is listed separately, and Bosch's cause for it is blunt: a technical fault is present. The prescribed response is different too — press the on/off switch, unplug the appliance or switch off the fuse, wait at least 2 minutes, restore power and switch on; and if the problem occurs again, switch off, turn off the water tap, pull out the mains plug and contact Customer Service, giving the error code. Older Bosch manuals are simpler — there, a 'Check water supply' display that lights up lists the tap turned off, the water supply interrupted, the supply hose kinked and the filter in the water supply blocked. Read your own machine's wording carefully: lit and flashing are not the same message, and on current models the flashing version is Bosch telling you to stop working the supply chain and make the call. Neither display should be confused with E:30-00/E:31-00 in the same tables, where the water protection system has activated — that is the leak-protection fault, whose instruction is turn off the water tap and call Customer Service, and it is a different system from everything on this page.
How the tap symbol relates to E14, E16, E17 and E18 — only as far as Bosch documents it
Machines with numeric displays report this same territory as codes, and Bosch's own published definitions draw the honest map. On Bosch's official error-code list, E14 is a flow meter failure or an issue with water flowing into the dishwasher or the filling system; E16 and E17 are an issue with water flowing into the dishwasher or the filling system, where the water may not be able to enter, with the published check being the inlet hose for kinks or damage; and E18 is an issue with water flow into the dishwasher where the water level is too low, checked by confirming the inlet hose is unkinked, the water supply is turned on, and the flow rate is 10 litres per minute. Now set the tap symbol's three Bosch checks beside those rows — kinked or blocked hose, low water pressure, filter blockage — and the relationship is plain without inventing one: the symbol and the E14–E18 family patrol the same inflow system, and their first checks overlap almost completely. What Bosch does not publish is an equation — nowhere does it state that the tap symbol 'is' E14, or E16, or E18 — and the split that does exist in its list is worth respecting: E14 names the flow meter and filling system, which is why Bosch's instruction for E14 is to contact Customer Support, while the symbol's checks stay at the hose, the tap and the filter. Work the symbol's three checks first; if supply is proven at 10 litres per minute with a clean inlet filter and the fault persists, you have walked to the edge of what the pictogram can tell you, and the filling-system branch — flow meter and valve territory — is a service diagnosis, quoted with whatever numeric code your model can show.
Key takeaways
- Check the AquaStop valve before anything else on equipped models — a tripped AquaStop is the whole diagnosis.
- If the symbol appears only on the first cycle after plumbing work, suspect air/debris in the new line — the screen check covers it.
Resetting the Bosch dishwasher
On Bosch dishwashers, most error codes clear when the cycle is cancelled: hold the Start button for about 3 seconds until the display shows 0:01, let the machine pump out for a minute, then switch off. For many codes a control reset is the next step — switch the machine off, and on models with a physical power switch also cut power at the breaker for a few minutes. A code that returns straight after a reset is an active fault; Bosch controls re-detect it at the next self-check, typically within the first minutes of a new cycle.
Related guides
Facts on this page were checked against manufacturer documentation: www.bosch-home.ca · www.bosch-home.com · www.bosch-home.com · washingcodes.com · manuals.plus · mans.io