The main problem is feeding stuff too fast, or putting in fibrous stuff. If you take your time, you can grind up the remains of the Thanksgiving Turkey if you wanted to. If I ever have to replace mine, I will give serious thought to the Excel.
At one time, I wouldn’t stuff in more than a grapefruit peel, the chamber is only a bit bigger than a soup bowl, I guess.
Potato peels are fine, as long as you don’t shove a whole wad of them down the hole. And honestly, if you’re using a disposal, your drain will occasionally get plugged, almost always right where it T’s into the downspout from the other side of the sink. The fittings are just hand-tight plastic pipes – opening it up and cleaning out the plug is as easy a home job as you can find. The only thing you need is a bucket. I can clear a plugged kitchen drain while I’m cooking supper and never break stride. I taught my son to do it when he was 8.
By and large, I don’t produce much food waste anyway. I eat the entire apple, core and all, and I leave the skins on potatoes.
Even eating orange peels isn’t totally out. (I often eat lemons, peel and all.) And I eat the green leaves of green onions.
Garbage disposal? I am a garbage disposal!
ETA: As it turns out, I never buy eggs, so eggshells aren’t an issue, but I’m glad to have been warned not to put 'em down a disposal, as I might easily have done that. (See? These threads are educational!)
Plumbers love garbage disposals, and for good reason: they keep a steady paycheck coming in. Drain pipes aren’t meant for garbage, just like sewer pipes are not made for kleenex, tampons and diapers. While your disposal may (MAY) emulsify what you put in, at some point in the piping it’s likely to start accumulating. When enough builds up, you end up with standing water in your sink, and a smiling man will appear at your door and offer to show you his butt crack. Not guaranteed, but more often than not. The only things that end up in my disposal are errant crumbs from plates. Food scraps, grease, etc., go into the compost bin or into the landfill garbage where they belong.
Don’t ever try to stuff the trimmings from a bunch of leeks into the disposal and expect it not to clog. My only excuse is that it was the first time I’d ever HAD a garbage disposal and no one gave me the instruction book to read.
You guys must have a different type of garbage disposal than I do, or you are putting rocks down it. I’ve had a disposal for 20+ years; before that, my parents always had one. I’ve never had to call a plumber to fix it, because it’s never been broken. Never. I think maybe once or twice it was blocked; I fixed it myself in about 5 minutes. That hasn’t happened in years, in fact, in may never have happened in my current house where I’ve had a disposal for going on 11 years.
I remember my parents disposal getting blocked at times, but it was because a kid put something like a popsicle stick down there. I remember getting in BIG trouble for doing that.
Pretty much the only thing I always do while using the disposal is to make sure the water is running. I put a lot of stuff down it as well - pretty much any kitchen scrap on up to bones, and I hear those are OK, I just don’t typically have many bones lying around.
There are always outliers to any issue (my grandma smoked 7 packs of cigs a day and lived to be 300!!!). Most drain pipes are not straight shots to the sewer main (mine has two 90 degree turns that I know of), have root intrusion or have joints that are not smooth. Those are all trap points for debris. Not everyone understands that you need to run a LOT of water behind any food items that go down your drain (hot, in the case of grease). In my long experience in the maintenance arena, blocked drains were a common callout, and it was most often a greasy clump of rotting food that was the culprit.
It was pounded into my head as a kid to ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS run the water when using the garbage disposal. I run it continually while using the disposal, then let it run for a while after I’m done. As I said, I’ve never had a problem, even while living in houses that ranged from 50 to 100+ years old.
So maybe it is user error. Silly. You’d think they’d make a model that wouldn’t turn on if the water wasn’t running.
There’s an instruction book? I gotta ask my landlord! 