Garbage Disposal Maintenance

This week I've got a little bit of helpful information on your garbage disposal.

This is another one of those things where a lot of times people will make a call to a plumber, and that's usually a call that does not need to be made and you're going to spend a lot of money that you can probably just keep in your pocket. So let's get right to it.

A garbage disposal is an appliance that mounts underneath your sink. It's an electric motor and it's essentially got this wheel on it with some, kinda like impeller blades. Well, that spins real fast and the goal is for it to chop up all the debris that gets put down your sink. And that’s supposed to be mainly just food waste, right? So that stuff gets hit by these spinning blades and it gets ground into much tinier pieces. And those pieces will then flush down the drain pipe. A lot of times also if there’s a dishwasher in the kitchen, then that dishwasher’s also gonna connect to the garbage disposal and then anything that’s collected in the dishwasher is also gonna end up getting dumped down the garbage disposal.

One of the most common things that happens to this appliance is that it gets jammed. So I’m gonna tell you how you can free that up, and there’s also some maintenance tips we can perform on our garbage disposal and I’m gonna show you some of those too.

Now, before you do anything with a garbage disposal, it’s important that there’s no power to it. So you’re gonna open your cabinet doors, look underneath there, locate the garbage disposal, it’s probably a big black or chrome, large, cylindrical looking object attached to the bottom of one of your drains. There should be an electrical wire at the bottom of that, and follow that to the wall. Most likely, it’s just plugged in so you can simply unplug it, and then it’s safe to work on it.

If it’s actually hard-wired and there’s no way to just unplug it, then you’re gonna have to find the circuit breaker or fuse in some cases, where you can turn the power off to that appliance because you do not want some kind of accident happening an that thing getting turned on while you’re working on it.

So once you’ve got it shut off and it’s safe, the first thing that we’re gonna do to free it up, and let’s assume that it’s just jammed and it won’t turn, on the bottom of the disposal you’re probably gonna find a little place where there’s a hole for a hex wrench. And for those of you that don’t know, this is a six sided hexagon shape, it’s gonna probably be fairly tiny. The hole for this hex wrench is gonna be maybe an eighth of an inch or a quarter of an inch in size, or diameter. And if it does have one of these, sometimes the manufacturer places this hex wrench in a little pouch and it’ll be attached somewhere on the garbage disposal. So if that’s the case, you can just use that. If not, you’re gonna have to locate one that’s of the same size. Don’t try using something that is not meant for it, so in other words, don’t try using a flat-head screwdriver. Don’t try using a hex wrench that does not fit it properly, cause you do not want to strip it out and you might have to tweak on it pretty good so you want something that fits and something that’s actually meant for it.

So to get that flywheel turning again, you’re gonna put the hex wrench in there, and then you’re gonna give it a little pull. And you’re gonna try to spin it around in both directions. Try to spin it all the way around clockwise, and then try to spin it all the way around counter-clockwise. Do that a couple of times and make sure that it’s now spinning freely. More often than not, this alone fixes any kind of jamming problem where the disposal’s not spinning.

Another kind of problem that you can have would be a leak. And there’s two main places where a disposal can leak, either hoses that are attached to it, or seals that are like gaskets. So what I like to do is just kinda rub my hand around the disposal, touching it everywhere and feeling for wet spots. That’s gonna help you find where it’s actually leaking at. If you can see water dripping, that’s obviously a bonus. Tighten up any fittings that are attaching hoses to the disposal. If you can’t find the leak around hoses, then probably, especially if the leak is right underneath the disposal, probably it’s actually leaking through the flywheel seal.

Now if that’s the case, you gonna have to take the disposal out. You’ll be required to disassemble it and locate that seal and find a replacement for it. If that’s too much for you, you can take the disposal itself into a repair shop and have them do it for you.

And the last thing we’re gonna talk about is, believe it or not, those impeller blades inside the disposal, they do get dull. A lot of times, when it seems like the disposal just doesn’t work too good, that’s because those blades are dull and at that point, sometimes people will go out and just buy another disposal. That’s not really necessary, those blades can be sharpened and they can be replaced.

Last time I checked, a new garbage disposal is gonna be like a minimum $55 or $60, but in this case, if the motor’s spinning real good and you can tell that the flywheel is spinning around and the disposal seems like it’s not chewing things up right, you’re gonna want to sharpen or replace those blades. So you’re gonna have to again, take the whole thing out, you’ll have to remove the fittings, remove the disposal out from underneath the sink and then you’re gonna have to take the disposal apart.

Now, if you wanna try your nack at sharpening, sometimes you can even do that with the impellers still in place. In other cases you might have to remove them. If you’re getting a lot of clogged drains in your kitchen, if water keeps filling up in there and it’s kinda like a slow drain, then chances are this is what your problem is and it’s just draining very slowly because the food is not getting chewed up like it’s supposed to. A lot of times, if you can get those impeller blades off the disposal, you can take them to a grinding machine and just sharpen them that way.

If they’re beyond repair and you can’t get them sharpened, you’re gonna have to replace the whole flywheel assembly because more than likely you won’t be able to find the impeller blades themselves.