Home Mortgage Alliance Corporation (HMAC)

Keeping your garbage disposal humming and healthy

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Published Date 2/20/2020

You can talk about how to care for your washer and dryer, how to maintain a refrigerator, but when is the last time someone told you how NOT to treat your garbage disposal?

Chances are good that when you bought your home, you never took the time to read the instructions that came with your disposal, the hidden machine that provides a quick and sanitary way to dispose of food waste, keeping trash bags lighter and landfills from overflowing. FamilyHandyman’s Don Stout talks about how these amazing workhorses that grind away year after year have their own Achilles’ heel, and it’s time to pay attention to what will mess it up.

That adage about the beauty of churning up coffee grounds and eggshells in your garbage disposal needs to be put out there as disinformation once and for all. Stout debunks the common folk remedy of using coffee grounds to remove odors. Coffee grounds are reduced to a dense, thickly-packed pasty wad — precisely what you don’t want going down your drain lines. As for eggshells, no one knows where the myth that says the shells somehow sharpen the blades came from. While eggs don’t really do any damage, think about how the egg membrane on the inside of the shell can get loose and lodge in the drain or around the impeller (the rotor that throws waste against the wall-mounted blades).

It’s no secret that pasta expands when soaked in water, so why would you drop a ton of pasta leftovers down your disposal where it will, after all, soak in water and keep expanding? “Like most of the items on this list, a few scraps cleaned off of a plate won’t hurt,” says Stout. “But don’t try to dispose of an entire pasta casserole, and when you do run pasta through the disposal, run the water as cold as it will go for 30 seconds afterward, to flush it through the trap and into the main line. Otherwise, you’re likely to run into clog issues.” Believe it or not, oatmeal is another expansion threat.

Garbage disposals are simply not built to deal with extremely hard items, such as bones. Or clamshells. (Or spoons). “If you do drop a chicken wing or fishbone in the disposal, don’t panic. Disposals are hardy appliances, and can handle grinding up the occasional small bone,” says Stout. “But if you try to drop a rack of ribs down your sink and grind them up, you’re setting yourself up for disaster.” Even a few handfuls of peanuts are not a good idea.

Onions are a staple in all kinds of recipes — chopped, diced, or in chunks — and most onion waste shouldn’t be a problem for your disposal. But not so with onion skins. “That thin, wet layer is often removed before the onion is chopped, and thrown into the disposal,” says Stout. “But the layer is so thin that it can pass through the disposal, missing the blades and wind up wedged in the drain.”

Hopefully by now you realize that a garbage disposal is not meant to process real garbage. Just take the time to speak with a plumber or handyman, and you’ll find that they’ve dug out everything from paper towels, bags, candy wrappers, and banana peels, rolling their eyes while recounting their discoveries. Even pumpkin and fibrous vegetables, such as celery, rhubarb, and corn husks are terrible ideas, along with potato peels, fruit and olive pits.

And lastly, Stout says don’t even think about pouring caustic chemicals or paint down your drain unless you want it to be permanently coated with them.

Source: FamilyHandyMan | TBWS

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