Old House Handyman: Quick 'fixes' don't last with garbage disposals
I see eclipses everywhere now. THE eclipse on Monday. Awesome!
The white frame around a dark, round window at the top of a farm silo. Elegant.
My friend’s breakfast sandwich with a little corona of egg sticking out from the edges of the darkened toast. Delicious.
My sink drain as I peered beyond the bright, stainless-steel rim into the dark heart of a garbage disposal that is no longer working. Frustrating.
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The dark heart of a garbage disposal
The disposal motor failed a few days before the total eclipse of the sun, so I can’t blame it on any celestial events. And, in fact, the only surprise about its death is that it didn’t happen several years ago.
The disposal with a one-year warranty is at least a decade old. And as is my tight-wad nature, I have “fixed” it a few times in recent years. First, it developed a leaky crack in the housing, so I mixed up some J-B Weld epoxy putty, pressed it into the crack and solved that problem.
Until another crack developed. I mixed up more epoxy putty and fixed that one, too. Sometime later, it began leaking intermittently from undetectable (by me) locations. I knew it was leaking because we occasionally found the cleaning supplies in a tub beneath the disposal were damp, and that was annoying.
Having given up on fixing it again, I found a bucket of the right size and dimensions and positioned it under the disposal to catch those occasional leaks. This is not a recommended repair, and in fact, was not a repair. But it worked that way for a couple of years − until about a week and a half ago. The motor hums, but it won’t spin the grinder in the disposal. (We can easily spin it with the handy tool provided with the disposal to unlock it when someone drops in a peach pit or some other obstruction that would lock it up.)
For the past week, we used an old-fashioned disposal − a sink strainer that collects food particles so that we can dispose of them manually. On Saturday, I went online in search of a new disposal − the third since we remodeled our kitchen in 2002 − and found the model I wanted at Home Depot and Lowe’s. They had different model numbers, but that appears to be a branding effort for each store, because the stat sheets I reviewed were exactly the same.
The only difference beyond the model numbers was the price. It was $5 more at Lowe’s, which is where I needed to go that day for some other items. I printed out the Home Depot price and took it with me to Lowe’s, which gave me the lower price. (I would have driven across town to save $5, if Lowe’s wouldn’t have been willing to match the lower price.)
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With new disposal in hand, it was time to turn off the power to that circuit in the kitchen, crawl under the sink and install it. It’s a relatively easy job because the new disposal is virtually the same as the old one, it connects easily to the existing housing in the sink drain hole, and the connections for the wiring, dishwasher and drain are in the same locations. If I’m lucky, both the new disposal and I will last until the next eclipse is visible from Ohio − in 2044.
Alan D. Miller is a former Dispatch editor who teaches journalism at Denison University and writes about old house repair and historic preservation based on personal experiences and questions from readers.
@youroldhouse