A garbage disposal is a popular and convenient item to have in your kitchen. Allowing you to empty food scraps into your drain, chop them up and flush them away, it’s a good alternative to dumping uneaten food directly into your trash can.
Many homes contain garbage disposals, where with just the flip of a switch, food waste is eliminated for good. While there are many good things about having a garbage disposal, there are also things you should watch out for when using one.
Garbage Disposal Smells
While garbage disposals help prevent unpleasant odors emitted from rotting food sitting in your kitchen trash can, they can become quite odorous themselves. Putting the wrong items down your disposal can clog it, causing odors to waft from your kitchen sink. Citrus peels, a mixture of baking soda and vinegar or disposal cleaning tablets occasionally rinsed down the sink can help keep smells at bay.
Clogged Garbage Disposals
This brings us to our second point: Clogs. Putting the wrong items down your garbage disposal causes clogs that lead to backups (and a call to us for drain cleaning help!) Before you throw everything and the kitchen sink down your kitchen sink, remember that not all food scraps should go down it. Stringy foods, bones, starchy foods and fats like butter and shortening often jam disposals, causing expensive clogs and foul odors.
Water Waste
Using a garbage disposal requires running water to flush food down the drain after grinding it up. Your kitchen faucet uses an average of 2 gallons of water per minute. If you use your disposal frequently, that ends up being a lot of wasted water!
Drain Line Sludge
Food waste disposed of through a garbage disposal creates a sludge that can become difficult for water treatment facilities to process because it must use more chemicals and energy to treat it. This same sludge can build up in your drain lines and cause problems later on.
How to Use a Garbage Disposal
The most important thing to remember if you have a garbage disposal is to simply be smart when using it. Understand that they’re not meant to handle the scraps of your entire meal but instead, are meant to flush away allowable scraps. Garbage disposals are handy and convenient kitchen tools and using it correctly gives you reassurance that you won’t experience problems with it later on.
Garbage Disposal Installation & Repair
If you do experience a problem with your garbage disposal, the experts at Reid & Pederson Drainage are standing by to help. We can install a new garbage disposal quickly and get things back on track for you ASAP! Give us a call today!
South Suburbs
NW Indiana
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