Garbage Disposal Do's and Don'ts to Keep Yours Running
by Hanna Carolina · 4 min read
Should you run hot or cold water with your garbage disposal?
Always cold. That is the single most useful habit, and most people get it backwards. Cold water keeps fats and grease firm so they grind up and flush through the line. Hot water does the opposite. It melts the grease, and once that slides past the disposal it cools and hardens somewhere downstream where you cannot reach it, which is exactly how a clog gets started.
If your disposal is already jammed, humming, or leaking, call Herrell Plumbing at (407) 273-6260 or reach out to our team.
Grease is the number one reason we get called out for a clogged kitchen sink. It builds up on the inside of the pipe a little at a time, the opening gets narrower, and one day the water simply stops going down. The habit that prevents it is easy.
Run cold water before you switch the disposal on, keep it running the whole time, and let it flow a few seconds after the grinding sound clears so everything makes it all the way out to the main line instead of setting up like candle wax halfway there.
What should never go in a garbage disposal?
Never put glass, plastic, or metal into a disposal. Those are the ones that wreck the unit outright, and none of them are food to begin with. After that, go easy on fibrous and shell heavy waste, because that is what jams the grinding chamber. Clam and oyster shells, cornhusks, celery, artichokes, and onion skins all cause trouble.
The stringy stuff wraps around the grinder and stops it cold. Shells are just as rough. They are too hard and pack in around the blades. We have opened up plenty of seized disposals to find a wad of husks, a bottle cap, or a spoon that took a wrong turn off a plate. The fix is a habit, not a gadget.
Scrape plates into the trash first and treat the disposal as a way to handle the small bits left behind, not as a second garbage can. Feed it that way and it will last years longer before it ever needs us.
How do you clean a garbage disposal and get rid of the smell?
Ice and citrus do most of the work. Drop a handful of ice cubes in and run it to knock the built up gunk loose from the grinding parts. Follow that with orange, lemon, or lime rinds, and the citric acid cuts the odor and leaves it smelling clean. It takes about a minute and costs nothing.
For light scouring, small bones and eggshells help scrub deposits off the chamber as they grind. Skip the harsh chemical drain cleaners. They are rough on the rubber splash guard and the seals inside, and they do not clean any better than ice and a lemon. A disposal is mostly self cleaning as long as you run it with enough cold water.
A quick ice and citrus pass every week or two keeps it fresh, and it heads off the sour smell that usually means food is sitting in there rotting rather than flushing through. If a foul odor keeps coming back no matter how often you clean the unit, the smell may be rising from the drain line instead, and professional drain cleaning is what clears it.
When is it time to repair or replace a garbage disposal?
Start with the reset button on the bottom of the unit, because a disposal that went dead is often just tripped. If it keeps humming without spinning, leaks from the bottom, or trips over and over, it is time to call. A hum usually means something is stuck or the motor is failing, and a leak from the base means the housing itself has gone and cannot be resealed.
There is one more thing worth knowing. A disposal that keeps clogging is sometimes not the disposal at all. It can be a sign the drain line behind it is the real problem, which is why a repair that does not hold often points to something deeper in the plumbing.
We handle disposal repair and replacement as part of our plumbing services, usually the same day, and our trucks carry common units so you are not left waiting on parts. Call Herrell Plumbing at (407) 273-6260 or contact our office and we will get your kitchen back in order.