What do you do when your garbage disposal stops working?

Pat

Pat

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When your garbage disposal stops working what do you do and how long do you go before you replace it? Mine has stopped working and I am ready to have it replaced, I do try to keep all food out of the garbage disposal but it does smell a bit. I am having trouble getting a person to replace it.
 
Every once in awhile my old disposal stopped working and it was a simple fix: it just needed adjusting. There is a little hole in the bottom of the disposal (outside bottom, the big can part that is under the sink). You can use an Allen key to turn that hole clockwise two or three times. This I guess is tightening the flywheel which is inside the disposal and is the part that actually chops up the food. (if you do this, please make sure the power to the disposal if off before you try it!). We actually had to do this about every six months for many years, but it fixed the problem every time.

Eventually we did finally replace the disposal, it was nearly 20 years old, so we upgraded to a more powerful one. My husband was able to replace it himself. It didn't seem like it was too hard of a job. If you don't want to do it yourself, maybe a general handy man might be able to do it for you?
 
Not such a popular bit of kit in the UK
We compost what we can at home and we also get a waste food bucket which gets picked up weekly , which we don't use
When I have worked in places where they have a gobbler they block and seem to be constantly getting the motor rewound , or rogue cutlery would get stuck in the trap
 
Yep - as stated above by @Berties we don't really have them in the UK.

Food waste goes into the compost recycling which the council collect on a weekly basis from special brown bins. You can put the food waste into biodegrable 'plastic' bags, newspaper or in some areas where they have invested in a plastic bag removal machine, even use the cheap plastic bags that supermarkets still give away. I never had a need for this service in our old home, but now where I am at the moment, we need to use it. It is better than in going to landfill.
 
I have a compost bin in the back of my yard too that we built a few years back. I'm still working on getting it to actual compost. We don't have a lot of yard clippings since we've been in a drought for 5 years, so I don't have much other than food waste to put in there. We've had a lot of rain (flooding actually) during the month of May which brought us out of the drought, so maybe this year I'll be able to build up my compost!
 
We do a lot of composting up here where I live and so I try not to throw big chunks of food in the garbage disposal. I had to replace mine once and it was not a cheap task to complete. Some people tend to think that the garbage disposal is a catch all for any food waste, but they are really intended for small pieces of food. They have a motor that will burn out if over used.
 
We don't really have them very much in the UK. I used to once have one which sort of 'munched up' vegetable matter put down the sink. We are very much encouraged to use re-cycling bins here. Its a bit of a pain, as (in my area) we have three bins and there are many moments of uncertainty as to what goes into which bin! Also, this varies according to the district in which you live.
 
As above - not much seen in the UK but I must say you all seem to have forward thinking councills here in county Durham we have just been informed that if we wish to recycle even our garden waste it will now cost £20 [it was free] - not much I admit but not much encouragement. As for food waste - that has never been recycled.
 
sidevalve said:
As above - not much seen in the UK but I must say you all seem to have forward thinking councills here in county Durham we have just been informed that if we wish to recycle even our garden waste it will now cost £20 [it was free] - not much I admit but not much encouragement. As for food waste - that has never been recycled.
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I've just had a childhood memory of a pig-bin which was emptied by the council. It was a medium sized metal bin in which we put vegetable peelings and other edible waste. I presume it actually did go to feed pigs! Perhaps that was a system brought in during the War. This was in the 50's. Can't recall when it stopped.
 
We got tired of babying our finicky garbage disposal and yanked it out. The thing refused some items and spit them out; it would accept other things and then clog the drains. We actually had to buy a plumber's snake to deal with the clogs. I am much happier without the dratted thing. We just scrape our food waste into a lined container and the contents are picked up with the rest of the trash. Our trash is picked up twice a week, so rotting food is not really much of an issue. We haven't had to use the snake since we got rid of the garbage disposal. I think they are overrated and unnecessary. And our pipes are much happier.
 
I would be careful about not getting that fixed immediately, I've come home to a flooded kitchen several times at my last apartment because apparently the previous tenant was fond of dumping large amounts of pasta and rice down the garbage disposal, and it would sometimes back up overflow my sink. I almost had to get my carpet replaced in the adjacent living room area too as a result, but they ended up steam cleaning it thoroughly instead.

I don't think I could live without one personally, because there are some things that I do not like to throw in my trash can because they stink it up pretty bad - such as trimmings from raw chicken when I'm prepping it, or when I'm removing skin from fish, raw onion scraps, etc... I would have to be taking my trash out constantly because the juices from that stuff would tend to leak through the bag into my trash cans, in addition to washing out the bottoms of my cans constantly. Especially since in all the apartments I've lived in, there was never a window in the kitchen so the air didn't circulate much in there and lingering smells were really noticeable.

Once your garbage disposal is working again, you can keep it "fresh" by throwing lemon rind in it and running it for a bit with clean water. Supposedly coffee grinds are actually helpful to flush out your garbage disposal too, so dumping some used we grinds in it and running it for a bit with running water will clean it out. Pouring some vinegar, particularly the cleaning strength variety, and letting it run through it also helps cut down on the odors.
 
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