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Posted on: December 1st, 2024
By: Alan O'Neill
Posted in: Holiday Tips

Abacus Plumbing Expert Sam explains how to un-jam your garbage disposal:

"Hi I'm Sam with Abacus and today we're going to be talking about disposals. So first thing you want to do is get that water going and turn on that disposal. After you're done putting your food down the disposal you want to go ahead and turn off the disposal let the water run for a little bit make sure that it gets all pushed out of the way. If your disposal ever clogs on you to where it's not running just making that little humming noise what you want to do first is get this thing unplugged. After we unplug it just take a little flashlight look down in here see if we can see anything that could be jamming it up. If we don't see anything right away what we want to do so got this little allen wrench right here most of them come with your disposal. There's a little hole down here that you put the allen wrench in and you can just manually turn it. Once you're able to manually turn it then you've unjammed the disposal and want to plug this back in and get that water going again test the disposal. It's running so we know that it's cleared and now can turn off the water. In case you ever come down here and this doesn't want to move on you and if it's just getting stuck and not wanting to move might be time to replace this disposal. A lot of times we see these half horsepower disposals in the home and that's more of a builder grade. We definitely want to get at least a minimum of a 3/4 horsepower and up depending on how much we're cooking in the home. Here we have a half horsepower disposal and the way that this works it goes in from up top grinds it all up and then it spits it out right here into your pipes over here. We have a one horsepower disposal now as you can see it's a lot bigger than this one over here but reason being this has a sound jacket and it also has a four stage grinder meaning it's going to keep grinding up that food until it gets smaller and smaller and smaller and then it's going to go ahead and spit it out. Over here this half horsepower disposal is typically for smaller houses. If we don't do a lot of cooking you know don't want to spend a lot of money and this is what we want to use, but for our for our families that cook a lot out there and are always in the kitchen making something we definitely want to go with this one right here, which is a lot more reliable and has a warranty. You probably won't have to see us for a while remember the most important thing is you never want to stick your hand down the disposal and if you ever have to check inside of the disposal first thing you want to do is unplug the disposal, get a pair of these right here and then you'll be able to take a look and keep your hands out of that disposal"