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What Does a Garbage Disposal Installation Actually Involve?
Pulling the old unit off its mount, resetting the sink flange, hanging the new one, and re-tying the discharge into the trap. Almost all of it happens inside a cabinet you have to empty first.
This one was a kitchen a few minutes off SR 436. The old unit came down, the sink flange and mounting ring came out with it, and what you see in the photo is the bare drain opening in the sink with the dark ring of old plumber's putty still around the rim. Everything under it was open cabinet.
A disposal hangs from a three bolt mount clamped to the underside of the sink. The flange drops in from the top, bedded on fresh putty, and the ring underneath draws it down tight. Get that seal wrong and you get a slow drip nobody notices until the cabinet floor swells. Then the discharge tube comes off the side of the unit and ties back into the P trap, which is where most of the fiddling happens, because the outlet height on a new disposal almost never lines up with the trap arm the old one was using.
One detail catches DIY installs out more than any other. If a dishwasher drains into the disposal, there is a knockout plug moulded into that inlet, and it has to be driven out with a screwdriver and then fished back out of the grinding chamber. Leave it in and the dishwasher backs up on its very first cycle.
Why Do We Ask You to Shut the Pets Out Before We Start?
Because the cabinet under your sink is our work space, and because of exactly what happened on this job.
The cat had been supervising from the doorway all morning. Cleaning supplies out, drop cloth down, old unit off the mount, and somewhere in there she went in through the open cabinet door behind us. The first we knew about it was a white paw coming up through the drain opening. Then the whole face. Two yellow eyes looking straight up at us through a three and a half inch hole that had a garbage disposal bolted under it twenty minutes earlier.
We got the phone out, which is why there is a video of it.
Nothing was running and nothing was live, and that is not luck. It is the order the job goes in. The disposal is unplugged or its breaker is off before a single fastener comes loose, and it stays that way until the new unit is mounted, piped, filled, and tested. There is no point in a properly sequenced install where a curious animal can reach anything with an edge on it.
Even so, this is why Herrell Plumbing asks you to put pets in another room before we open anything up. The tools are not really the issue. An open sink cabinet is just the most interesting place in the house to a cat, and we would rather be watching the trap than the doorway.
How Do You Know When a Garbage Disposal Needs Replacing?
The noise usually tells you before anything else does. A unit that has started to sound like a coffee grinder full of gravel has either lost the swivel on an impeller or picked up something it cannot pass.
The short list we work from is this. It hums but will not turn. It leaks from the bottom rather than the top. It trips its own reset button more than once in a week. Or it is simply old and the housing has gone thin. The first two of those deserve separating, because they lead to completely different answers. A hum with no rotation is almost always a jam, and a jam is a hex wrench in the socket underneath and about two minutes of work, not a new appliance. A leak coming out of the base is a different story. Water at the bottom seam means the seal around the motor shaft has gone, and nobody repairs that economically. A leak up at the top, where the flange meets the sink, is a putty problem and gets fixed on the spot.
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 replacement tends to go faster, because the mount is newer than the sink it hangs from. If yours is making a noise you have not heard before, call the shop at (407) 273-6260. The rest of what we handle in a kitchen sits on our plumbing services page.
What Should You Keep Out of a Disposal in a Central Florida Kitchen?
Grease, coffee grounds, and anything fibrous. That is the whole list, and the first one generates more of our calls than the other two put together.
Grease goes down warm and liquid, then cools somewhere in the horizontal run under the floor and stops being liquid. Coffee grounds behave like fine sand and settle in the same place. Celery, artichoke, corn husks, and onion skins wrap themselves around the impellers instead of breaking up. Potato peels turn to paste. None of this is a sign that your disposal is underpowered. A disposal grinds what you put in it. It does not make the drain line downstream any wider than it already is.
That distinction matters more here than it does in much of the country, because a good number of Seminole County kitchens still drain through cast iron that has been in the ground since the house was built. Cast iron scales up from the inside over the decades, so the pipe you are feeding is narrower than the day it went in, and it grabs whatever goes past. Run cold water while the unit is going and for a good ten seconds after it clears. Cold rather than hot, so any fat that does get in stays firm enough to travel.
If the sink was already draining slowly before the disposal started acting up, a new unit will not fix that, and it becomes a drain cleaning conversation instead. We would far rather tell you that 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 it sounds like a jam, a seal, or a replacement. Shut the cat in the bedroom first. We will bring the drop cloth.