The garbage disposal is an amazing invention. In fact, many homeowners regard it as one of the most valued appliances in their kitchen. Your garbage disposal offers remarkable convenience as it saves you on trash bags and immediately eliminates your leftover food odors. However, make no mistake, your garbage disposal is not your trash can. It is an appliance that is only designed to do so much. Without careful attention to what you send down your disposal, you could set yourself up for plumbing problems and costly repairs.
Here’s some top items never to put into your garbage disposal – some may surprise you!
Vegetable Peelings – If you’ve gotten in the habit of peeling your potatoes or carrots over the disposal, stop. This can quickly coat the blades of your disposal and render them useless or even damaged.
Pasta & Pasta—These are soft, sticky starches that can adhere to your blades like vegetable peelings and eventually cause a backup in your system if they are disposed in excess. Rice and pasta also have a habit of expanding when left in water, which can be bad for your pipes.
Shells and Bones – This refers to eggshells as well as the shells from shellfish. Both shells and chicken bones can wreak havoc on your garbage disposal, even if you think they are too small to matter, as they can easily get caught or wedged in between the blades.
Coffee Grounds – Just like pasta, an abundance of coffee grounds can clog up your disposal.
Pitted Fruit – The inner pit of peaches, apples and cherries are just too hard to put down your kitchen sink. Even the best garbage disposal models are not equipped to chop up solid fruit pits.
Fatty Meats – If you’ve enjoyed a nice steak dinner with the family, you’ll likely be left with several strips of fatty meat left on your plates. While it may be tempted to scrape these unwanted fat strips down the sink, you should know that your garbage disposal may not be able to handle it. The fat can get stuck and eventually produce a very foul odor from the spoiled meat.
Is your garbage disposal not working like it used to? Perhaps it refuses to turn on at all. Let one of our plumbing professionals at Metro Septic evaluate your system and fix minor problems before they jeopardize your entire plumbing operation.
