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What Does a Garbage Disposal Installation Actually Involve?
Dropping the old unit off its mount, resetting the sink flange, hanging the new one, and marrying the discharge back into the trap. Most of it happens on your back, in a cabinet somebody has to empty first, beside cleaning products nobody has touched since they moved in.
A kitchen a few minutes off SR 436. Old unit down, sink flange and mounting ring out with it, and what you see in the photo is the bare drain opening with a dark ring of old plumber's putty still stuck round the rim. Under it, nothing but open cabinet. Hold that thought.
A disposal hangs from a three bolt mount clamped to the underside of the sink. The flange drops in from the top on fresh putty and the ring underneath pulls it down tight. Get that seal wrong and you get the sneakiest drip in plumbing, the kind nobody notices until the cabinet floor has gone soft and the spare sponges are growing something. Then the discharge tube ties back into the P trap. That is where the fiddling lives, because the outlet height on a new disposal almost never lines up with the trap arm the old one was using.
One thing catches out more DIY installs than everything else combined. If a dishwasher drains into the disposal, there is a knockout plug moulded into that inlet, and it has to be driven through with a screwdriver and then fished back out of the grinding chamber. Leave it in and the dishwasher backs up on its first cycle, usually with an audience.
What Happens When the Cat Finds the Open Sink Cabinet?
You get a coworker. Briefly.
She had been supervising from the doorway all morning, the way cats supervise, which is to say with visible disappointment. Cleaning supplies out. Drop cloth down. Old unit off the mount. Somewhere in there she slipped through the open cabinet door behind us, and the first anyone knew about it was a small white paw coming up through the drain opening.
Then the whole face. Two yellow eyes framed perfectly in a three and a half inch hole that had a garbage disposal bolted under it twenty minutes earlier, blinking up at two grown adults who had completely stopped working.
Obviously we got the phone out. That is the video.
For the record, nothing was live and nothing was spinning, and that is sequencing rather than luck. The disposal is unplugged or its breaker is off before a single fastener moves, and it stays that way until the new one is mounted, piped, filled and tested. There is no moment in a properly ordered install where anything under that sink has an edge or a current to offer.
So no, nobody needs shutting in a bedroom. Pets are welcome to supervise, and mostly they do. Herrell Plumbing has been working around other people's cats and dogs since 1970, and it is almost never the thing that makes a job run long. Most of them get bored of us about ten minutes in. This one was just unusually photogenic about it.
How Do You Know When a Garbage Disposal Needs Replacing?
The noise tells you first, and it is not subtle about it. A unit that has started to sound like a coffee grinder full of gravel has either lost the swivel on an impeller or swallowed something it cannot pass, and it will keep announcing that until somebody intervenes.
The short list we work from: it hums but will not turn, it leaks from the bottom rather than the top, it trips its own reset more than once in a week, or it is simply old and the housing has gone thin. The first two deserve pulling apart, because they end up in completely different places. A hum with no rotation is almost always a jam, and a jam is a hex wrench in the socket underneath and roughly two minutes of work. Please do not buy a new appliance for a jam.
A leak out of the base is the sad one. Water at the bottom seam means the motor shaft seal has gone, and nobody repairs that economically. A leak up top where the flange meets the sink is only putty, and putty gets fixed while we are standing there.
Age counts too. Plenty of the Altamonte Springs housing stock went up through the 1970s and 80s, so a lot of these kitchens are already on their second disposal. The second one tends to go quicker, because the mount is newer than the sink it hangs from. If yours has started making a noise you have not heard before, call the shop at (407) 273-6260. The rest of what we handle under a kitchen sink is on our plumbing services page.
What Should You Keep Out of a Disposal in a Central Florida Kitchen?
Grease, coffee grounds, and anything stringy. That is the list. The first one generates more of our calls than the other two combined.
Grease goes down warm and friendly, then cools under your floor into roughly the consistency of a candle. Coffee grounds act like fine sand and settle in the same spot for years. Celery, corn husks and onion skins wrap around the impellers like they were designed for the job. Potato peels go straight to paste. None of that means your disposal is underpowered. It grinds what you feed it. What it cannot do is make the pipe downstream any wider than it already is.
Which matters more here than most places. Plenty of Seminole County kitchens still drain through cast iron that has been in the ground since the house was built, and cast iron scales from the inside over the decades. So run cold water while the unit is going, and for a solid ten seconds after it clears. Cold, not hot. Fat that sneaks through then stays firm enough to travel.
And if the sink was already draining slowly before the disposal started acting up, a new unit will not fix it. That is a drain cleaning conversation. We would far rather have it on the phone than after we have installed something.
Disposal Humming Instead of Grinding? Let's Take a Look.
Tell us what it is doing and roughly how old it is, and we will tell you on the phone whether that sounds like a jam, a seal, or a genuine replacement. We bring the drop cloth. The cat can supervise.