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Somebody in Flushing put an entire plate of leftover pasta down the garbage disposal last week and could not figure out why the sink backed up an hour later. The pasta swelled. That is what pasta does when it sits in water. It expanded inside the P-trap until nothing could get through. Queens Plumber snaked it out in twenty minutes but the homeowner had been standing over a sink full of grey water for an hour before calling.
Most of the kitchen drain clogs Queens Plumber deals with start at or just past the garbage disposal. The unit grinds food into smaller pieces but those pieces still have to travel through the drain line. In older Queens homes where the kitchen drain is two inch cast iron that has been corroding for fifty or sixty years, those ground-up food particles mix with grease already coating the pipe walls and create blockages that the disposal was supposed to prevent.
Queens Plumber is at 53-05 108th St, Corona, NY 11368, phone (929) 481-3200. They handle Garbage Disposal Queens homeowners call for when the unit jams, leaks, stops working, or needs to be replaced. They also do drain cleaning, water heater repair and installation, sewer line repair, and general residential plumbing across the borough.
What Not to Put Down There
Grease is the big one and everybody already knows this but does it anyway. Hot cooking oil goes down the disposal with the water running and it feels like the water is flushing it all away. It is not. The grease travels maybe three feet into the drain line, hits a cooler section of pipe, and solidifies on the walls. Keep doing that nightly and the inside of your kitchen drain becomes a narrowing tube of hardened fat.
Potato peels are the one that surprises people. The disposal grinds them up fine but potato starch mixed with water turns into something that acts like paste. It coats the pipe interior and traps everything else behind it. Rice does something similar but worse because it keeps swelling after it goes down. You put a handful of rice through the disposal thinking nothing of it and an hour later that rice has expanded inside the trap and sealed the line.
Coffee grounds are deceptive. They go down smooth, they look harmless, they are small. Then they compact into a dense plug inside the P-trap. Queens Plumber pulls compacted coffee ground blockages out of kitchen traps in Astoria row houses every week. The homeowner has been dumping grounds down the disposal every morning for a year and the trap is basically cement at that point.
Celery, corn husks, asparagus, artichoke leaves. Anything with long fibers does not get chopped by the disposal. The fibers wrap around the grinding plate and bind it up until the motor stalls. About half the jammed disposal calls Queens Plumber gets trace back to someone putting fibrous vegetables through the unit.
Bones depend on the size. Small chicken wing bones, the disposal handles those. Anything bigger just bounces around dulling the grinding plate and the pieces that do break off are hard enough to sit in the drain line permanently.
When the Disposal Jams
A humming sound when you flip the switch but no grinding means the motor is running but the grinding plate is stuck. There is usually a hex key slot on the bottom of the unit. A quarter inch Allen wrench inserted into that slot lets you manually rotate the grinding plate and free whatever is stuck. Most disposals come with this wrench. Most homeowners lose it within a month of installation and never think about it again.
If the motor does not hum at all, the unit may have tripped its internal breaker. There is a small red button on the bottom of the disposal. Press it. If the unit starts working again, it overloaded and reset itself. If pressing the button does nothing and the unit is completely dead, the motor has likely burned out.
Queens Plumber can diagnose whether a disposal needs a repair or a replacement pretty quickly. Jammed units are usually a simple fix, something wedged between the grinding plate and the housing. But if the motor has burned out on a unit that is already eight or ten years old, nobody is going to rewind that motor. A new disposal install takes about an hour and the cost is reasonable enough that it does not make sense to try saving an old one.
Leaking Disposals
The most common disposal leak Queens Plumber sees is at the sink flange where the unit connects to the bottom of the sink. The plumber’s putty or rubber gasket up there degrades over years and water starts seeping past it every time the sink runs. You notice it as a puddle forming inside the cabinet under the sink.
Dishwasher drain hoses crack too. The rubber takes a beating from hot water cycling through it thousands of times over the life of the dishwasher, and eventually a split opens up at the connection point on the side of the disposal. A loose hose clamp can cause the same problem. And the drain outlet gasket at the bottom of the unit, where it connects to the P-trap, wears out over time the same way any rubber gasket does.
Queens Plumber can reseal any of these connection points on a disposal that is still in decent shape. If the unit itself is ten years old and the leak is coming from the housing, that usually means the internal seals are shot and the body is corroding. Resealing a corroding disposal buys you maybe six months before something else starts leaking. At that age a new unit is the better use of the money.
Old Pipes and Garbage Disposals Do Not Mix Well
Here is something nobody talks about. A garbage disposal in a brand new kitchen with PVC drain lines works exactly how it is supposed to. The ground up food travels through smooth pipe, gets carried to the main drain, and exits the building without issue.
A garbage disposal connected to sixty year old cast iron drain lines is a different situation. The interior of that cast iron is rough, corroded, pitted. Ground up food particles catch on that rough surface and build up instead of washing through. Add grease to the equation and you have a pipe that clogs faster with a disposal than it would without one.
Queens Plumber has seen homes in Woodside and Sunnyside where removing the garbage disposal and putting in a standard basket strainer actually reduced how often the kitchen drain clogged. The homeowner was grinding food waste into small particles that were perfectly sized to stick to corroded cast iron walls. Without the disposal, large food scraps went into the trash instead of the drain, and the pipe stayed cleaner.
That is not to say disposals are bad. They work well in homes with modern plumbing. But in a pre-war Queens home with original drain lines, a disposal can create more problems than it solves.
Disposal Maintenance
Run cold water for fifteen seconds before turning on the disposal. Keep the water running the entire time it grinds. Run it for another ten or fifteen seconds after the grinding stops to flush everything through. Most people flip the switch, grind for three seconds, and turn the water off immediately. That leaves ground food sitting in the drain line with no water to push it through.
Ice cubes through the disposal once a month help clean the grinding plate. The ice chips break up soft buildup on the grinding components. Citrus peels freshen the smell but do not actually clean anything mechanical. They just mask odors for a day or two.
If the disposal smells bad persistently, there is food stuck somewhere the grinding plate can not reach. Queens Plumber can disconnect the unit, clean it out, and reinstall it. Or if the smell is coming from the drain line itself, a professional drain cleaning of the kitchen line takes care of it.
Queens Plumber
53-05 108th St, Corona, NY 11368
(929) 481-3200
Queens Plumber
Phone: (929) 481-3200
Url: http://queensnyplumber.com/
53-05 108th St
Corona,
NY
11368
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