Garbage disposals can be an amazing convenience. However, they can also be a drain clog waiting to happen. It all depends on how you treat them. If you are nice, garbage disposals will happily purr and grind your unwanted food away for you. But if you are not careful, they will growl, click, screech and finally go silent.

Your garbage disposal is like a pet. Like a pet, the garbage disposal will do best when fed the right stuff. Soft foods are good while hard materials like bones are bad. Unlike your pet dog, hard materials will dull the teeth (blades) of your garbage disposal.

What is a garbage disposal?

Garbage disposals look like a 2-pound protein shake container attached to the drain pipes of your sink. Housed inside the cylinder of the garbage disposal is a spinning motor attached to a blade. The growling sound you hear when you turn on your garbage disposal is the spinning blade grinding up material. Your garbage disposal drains the ground material down with the rest of the wastewater. To summarize, your garbage disposal is basically a blender that disposes of unwanted food.

In this article we will look at the garbage disposal and what you can put in it. Here are 5 things not to put in your garbage disposal.

What to Avoid?

Celery:

While celery isn’t hard. It is fibrous. Long green strands of plant material run along the length of the celery stalk. These strands are basically little fiber ropes. These ropes won’t pulverize. In fact, strands of celery clog a sink drain in a similar fashion as strands of hair clogging a shower drain. Also, the strands will stay in the grinding chamber of the garbage disposal. Celery clogs are definitely not something you want to deal with.

Eggplant:

Eggplant is another fibrous plant you don’t want to put in your garbage disposal. Eggplants are large purple vegetables. Oftentimes their tough skin is peeled so that their soft inner flesh can be cooked. It might be tempting to dispose of the tough skin in the sink disposal, but don’t do it. The skin will work the disposal’s motor hard and won’t flow down the drain.

Non-Food Items:

Don’t put paper in the disposal. It is fibrous and will clog your disposal and overwork the motor. Also, don’t put glass in your disposal as it might chip the blades. These items might damage the internal working of the disposal in addition to clogging the sink. Additionally, cleaning the drainpipe with broken glass can be dangerous.

Hard Foods:

Hard food like bones, carrots, potatoes are difficult for the disposal to pulverize. These materials might chip the blades. When the blades become dull, the disposal doesn’t work as well. A disposal with dull blades is more likely to get clogged. The motor is more likely to get overworked when disposing of hard foods. The harder the motor works, the more likely it is to fail.

Your garbage disposal will last longer and work better if you avoid putting these foods down the drain. If your garbage disposal makes loud clicking sounds or isn’t working right, it might be time to get a new one. Contact the plumbing experts at Master Plumbing at 208-955-8533 and we will get you a good working garbage disposal that purrs when you use it.