Garbage Disposal Maintenance and Care

Anytime you use your kitchen's garbage disposal, Smart Plumbers emphatically recommends that you avoid grinding up sticky foods like spaghetti noodles, wet potato peels, or carrot peels.

The principal mechanism behind a garbage disposal is centrifugal force. When the disposal is turned on, the food scraps will travel to the outer walls of the can and the bottom blades will slice up the collected waste. Sticky food like spaghetti, however, will get stuck to the edges and not drop down properly in order to be cut by the blades into smaller, drainable pieces. When they finally do fall down the drain, they will accumulate into a sticky clump that can clog the kitchen drain pipe entirely.

The above picture on the right shows a clogged sink on the garbage disposal side. On the left, we have potato peels jammed into the sink's P trap. These potato peels weren't grinded in the disposal and subsequently clogged the kitchen waste line.

At Smart Plumbers, we fix garbage disposal issues all the time. If the above steps haven't prevented your disposal from having a problem, give our 24-hour plumbers a call to take care of it for you.

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