If you have a previous owner, then you have problems. Here's one of ours: the dishwasher disconnect.
Our inspector ran the dishwasher. I told him we wanted to make sure it was working, since the last house we'd bought and had inspected was lacking electricity to the kitchen. That was odd, but this house was newer and in a fancier neighborhood, so we did not expect anything odd at all when it came to the dishwasher.
And there didn't seem to be anything odd. The dishwasher ran, got stuff wet, and sounded like it was draining.
We tried the old dishwasher one time. It looked old, and we assume it had been used hard like most of the house. It's when I went to install the new dishwasher that I shook my head at the previous owner.
The old dishwasher was drained to the disposal. That's fairly standard, and I just hooked up the new dishwasher the same way. However, after getting all the connections done and running a test, the new dishwasher was not draining. Odd, since I used the exact same hookups.
I monkeyed with all kinds of other things because I knew it had to be a bad pump or a kink in the drain line. It was getting frustrating, since our first new dishwasher had been delivered with big dents, and it was looking like our second one maybe had a mechanical flaw.
After nothing worked, I tried the unthinkable: I unhooked the drain line from the disposal to see if the knockout plug was still there. AND IT WAS! Since there was no other drain hooked up to the old dishwasher (and it was old), that means the previous owner lived in the house for over a decade with a dishwasher that did not drain.
Men I have told about this try to explain it off some other way, but I know the general physics of plumbing, and there is no possible way the old dishwasher was draining, since the knockout plug was completely intact. It wasn't just turned sideways, and it didn't have a small hole drilled in it. There was no T in the line. It is possible that the PO replaced the disposal at some point, but that unit did not look brand new, either.
Later on, my wife was like, "That explains why there was some water in the bottom of the old dishwasher." Yep, that was probably from the test run by the inspector.
There's nothing to say that the old dishwasher didn't work. In fact, it was likely never used. I set it out on the side of the road, and I hope someone gets some real use out of the thing.
With some of the other problems our house has had being directly related to the builders, I'm hesitant to say the PO is the one who never connected the dishwasher. However, it's assumed that when you sell a house with a dishwasher, you are selling a unit that both washes and drains.
