Hesitant Handyman Repairs - Garbage Disposal Replacement

Garbage disposals are the unsung heroes of the kitchen. You don’t really notice them when you have them, but if you’re used to having one and go somewhere you don’t have one, you’ll notice. Certain scraps of food may not fit down the average drain sans disposal, leaving them to rot in the garbage can until it’s either full enough to take out or the stench of rotting flesh makes you wonder if you woke up in an episode of the Walking Dead. Run it through the disposal, and it pulverizes it and washes it down the drain.

When we moved into our house, I looked under our kitchen sink to see what kind of disposal we had. It was kind of a nerdy thing to do, in retrospect, but when you’re a first time home buyer, you find yourself wanting to know every nook and cranny and feature in your new home. What I found under there was a 1 ¼ HP beast with a plastic casing. The noise it generated was enough to startle wildebeests on the other side of the planet (okay, I might be exaggerating a little, but it was loud). It didn’t take me long to notice that something didn’t seem right. When we ran the disposal, I noticed the collar for the disposal seemed to shake around quite a bit, and little bits of black shuddered out from under it. I may be new to homeownership, but every place I’d lived in previously, the disposal collar stayed put when I turned it on.

I began to look around at this beast under my sink, and noticed a couple of things right off the bat.

1. The rubber gasket, which I would normally expect is there to help stop leaks, was partly shredded, and water was dripping off of it.
2. When I said the casing was plastic earlier, what I hadn’t noticed is that the collar itself was also plastic. Metal on the top, but the rest of the collar was plastic.

To quote Luke Skywalker upon his first viewing of the Millennium Falcon, “What a piece of junk!”

I’m  by no means a rocket scientist, but from a sheer engineering standpoint, if you’re going to hook a heavy 1 ¼ HP motor to the bottom of the sink, its primary job being violently pulverizing things into smaller bits you can wash down the drain, I don’t know that plastic is going to be first choice to really secure it in place. It quickly occurred to me what the person who installed it probably did: They went to Costco, saw this thing, saw how cheap it was, had the Tim Taylor “More power!” moment when they saw it had a 1 ¼ HP motor, and bought it without a second thought, grunting their way to the checkout.

The homes I’ve rented over the years have had all had one thing in common—in the kitchen sink, there was a metal ring with “Insinkerator” stamped on it, which is really an excellent piece of branding–I couldn’t tell you the brand name of any other disposals on the market, but I’ve known Insinkerator by name for close to 30 years. I started looking at their products, and ultimately settled on a Badger 5. It’s a pretty basic model, only ½ HP compared with the disposal-who-shall-remain-nameless’ 1 ¼, but it’s also basically solid metal. The mounting collar? Metal. The exterior? Metal. And let’s be honest, folks—Garbage disposals aren’t sports cars. If it comes down to solid construction with less horsepower or cheap plastic with more horsepower, you want the solid construction. You don’t need a disposal that can win a drag race, you need one that’s going to last. Short of the salesperson at the home improvement store trying to upsell you to one of the fancier models, I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone say, “Gee, I wish I’d sprung for the extra horsepower on my garbage disposal.” Once it’s installed, odds are you’ll forget it really exists until the next time you have to replace it.

The installation is fairly simple, in theory–remove the old disposal, scrape away the old plumber’s putty, make a new ring of plumbers putty, install the collar, mount the disposal, plug it in and let her rip. There were a few things I learned going through the process, too:

1. Having an outlet instead of a hard-wired disposal makes replacement pretty darn easy. Unplug the old, plug in the new. It’s not that I couldn’t have done a hard-wired disposal, and I’m sure there are many virtues to doing it this way, but as someone who hadn’t really tackled electrical work before, it was actually kind of a relief to find a plug down there.
2. As part of the swap, I replaced the original electrical outlet with a ground fault interrupter. It seemed pretty strange to me that the contractor wouldn’t have done this, given the outlet is under the sink–water and electricity, in my limited experience, don’t mix well. I went out to the garage, flipped off the breaker, then went in and tested both outlets with my non-contact voltage tester, which was a good lesson in triple-checking things–the two sockets were wired to two different electrical circuits. You can imagine my shock (pardon the pun) when I stuck the tester the bottom outlet after killing the breaker labelled “Garbage disposal” and it lit up like a Christmas tree. When working around electricity, always make sure the power’s off before you try disconnecting something. I wound up going back out to the garage and randomly killing breakers to figure out which one the other outlet was wired to.
3. The hardest part about the whole installation was actually the removal of the old disposal. You see, because of the collar being plastic, it had gotten pretty beat up over the years, so I couldn’t get it to twist free from the sink. If this is a problem and you have a reciprocating saw, this actually is no big deal—grip it and rip it, you’re through the plastic in no time. If you don’t own a reciprocating saw (which, at the time, I didn’t) and, instead, have to attack it with a tiny hand saw, you’re going to be wishing you owned a reciprocating saw ten minutes in. It may have been faster for me to drive to Home Depot, buy a reciprocating saw, drive home, and then cut it loose, and probably would’ve saved me a ton of hand cramps. In either case, I finally was able to free the unit itself, but even after my cut, the collar was still stuck in the drain, so I had to spend another 5-10 minutes with a screwdriver and a mallet, shattering the inner ring so that we could remove the collar from the drain.
4. The collar for the Insinkerator is amazing. It’s a quick lock mount, meaning should this one die, the next one will go on easier because I can skip replacing the collar first. I don’t anticipate needing a new disposal for a long, long time, but it’s nice to not need to worry about it.
5. You would think, as long as the garbage disposal has been a part of the American kitchen, that there would be some kind of standardization in sizes–you take one out, add the new one in, and everything just fits. You would be sadly mistaken. Upon removing the old disposal, I found out rather quickly that my pipes didn’t line up. Being a newbie, had I planned for this? Of course not! Another trip to the local hardware store to buy a short length of pipe to cover the difference.

Since replacing it, I’ve not had any of the crazy rattling with my disposal, and there’s been no need to keep a small bucket under the sink to catch the leaks.

Worth noting: When I bought the disposal, I bought the Badger 5, however if you go to a Home Depot store, they’ll have a Badger 500 on the shelf, not the Badger 5. As best I could tell, the only difference between the two disposals is the branding–the Badger 500 appears to be Home Depot exclusive, but the specifications for both of the models appeared to be identical, after doing what one friend called “Probably more research than anyone else has bothered to do on the subject.” Someone smarter than I am might be able to find a difference, though.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the brands, products, or services that I have mentioned. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”