Garbage Disposal Buying Guide

Garbage Disposal Maintenance and Care

These tips will help you fix and prevent some common problems, in addition to answering common care questions like how to clean a garbage disposal.

• Run the disposal before loading. Start the disposer before feeding waste into it, and load waste in at a steady pace. Overloading it with lots of food at once or pre-loading the grind chamber with food can cause clogs or jams.
• Run the disposal after you're done. Let it run for a short time after you are done feeding product in. This ensures that any residual waste is ground up and removed.
• Use a lemon and ice cubes for a light cleaning and to deodorize any bad smells in your garbage disposal. Run them through the disposer after you're done using it. For heavier cleaning your user manual will usually outline the best way to clean your garbage disposal, but in many cases this can be done with a stiff brush and a hot water / soap solution.
• Never reach in the disposer with your hands. If you need to get an object out of the grind chamber, use tongs, pliers, a screwdriver, or other tools. Also make sure that the unit is shut off first.

 As with any equipment, though, your owner's manual is the definitive source on how to care for and maintain it, and you should defer to those recommendations.

What Not to Put In A Garbage Disposal

Commercial disposals can power through most foods, but generally they won't work well with these and similar items:

• Very hard items: clam and oyster shells, glass, china, plastic, and metal
• Very pliable items: plastic wrap, fish skins, and corn husks
• Grease and oil
• Drain cleaner or corrosive detergents.

Small, hard items like metal bottlecaps, or scraps of china and glass can be flung from the disposer at high speed, creating the potential for injury. Pliable items like fish skins and corn husks can put extra strain on the motor and cause it to wear out prematurely. Grease and oil can accumulate and clog the drain.

It is very important to read your unit’s warranty and user manual documents closely to find out what you can put in a garbage disposal, since processing items that the disposer is not equipped to handle may result in a void warranty and costly repair bills.

Garbage Disposal Alternatives

If your area has restrictions on disposal use, there are other options that offer many of the same benefits. Always check your area’s regulations to see what is permitted.

• A pulper / waste reduction system can be a good option for high volume applications. This type of system uses a disposal to grind up waste, but rather than sending everything down the drain, the processed waste goes to a de-watering tank. Water is separated from the waste and sent down the drain, while the remaining solid waste is ejected into a trash can with its mass and size greatly reduced.
• A scrapper / waste collector system is designed to take the place of a traditional pre-rinse setup by recirculating water over a scrapping basin. Water-soluble items are ultimately sent down the drain, and the remaining waste is caught in a collection basket that can be easily removed, emptied and replaced.