I’m taken aback by all the ‘upper-middle class’ references with regards to garbage disposals. Trust me, around these parts they’re as common as barking dogs.
mmm
Regarding clogs: People sometimes forget that they come with an Allen wrench which fits in the shaft at the bottom of the disposal so you can manually turn it in both directions until you dislodge whatever’s caught in it. Usually, the wrench has been lost, but it’s a standard size Allen wrench you can buy at the hardware store.
I suppose it can be seen as an “affluency” issue, but the price doesn’t put them into “major upgrade” range, and they aren’t terribly difficult to install. I’m hardly a master plumber, but I managed to install one once. A decent enough 1/2 hp disposer can be purchased for about $80-100. A 3/4 hp model for under $150. If you’re willing to spring a couple hundred, you can probably get one capable of grinding up whole chickens.
Yeah, I pre-rinse the plates with the water that comes through while I’m waiting for the hot to run. I always wash up straight after the meal, so nothing gets too encrusted, and I insist that the plates aren’t stacked at the table, because this just spreads sauce or gravy onto their undersides, making the rinse harder.
Pans get filled, soaked and emptied before entering the wash bowl.
A 4 litre bowl of very hot water for the first wash normally suffices - maybe two if there are a lot of pans. Another couple of litres for the hot rinse, then a polish with a clean teatowel as it all goes away into the cupboards.
Uncooked vegetable trimmings get composted in a cylinder in the garden. Cooked food, meat trimmings, stale crusts, bones, etc go into a bin that is collected once a week and carted away to a municipal digester to make methane and fertiliser.
Yes, exactly. :rolleyes:
Speaking as an engineer working for a municipal sewer utility: not so much, especially considering the increasingly stringent environmental regulations.
In addition, as thelabdude mentioned, if you are in an area with combined sewers (common in older cities) in which the sanitary sewers and storm sewers are combined in a single pipe, the use of garbage disposals results in even more organic loading to local water bodies when the sewers overflow during storm events.
All in all, though, there are much worse things that people put down the drains than organic food waste. Nevertheless, some municipalities have actually gone so far as to ban the use of garbage disposal units in their service area, especially in circumstances where the local wastewater treatment facility is at or near capacity. Enforcement can be problematic, though.
Indeed. They are a terrible idea if you have a septic system. My home has a septic system, which is why I won’t let my wife put in a garbage disposal unit.
Septic system here, going on 8 years. We put a garbage disposal in the first year we bought the house. We did go back and forth about it, having heard all the doom & gloom about garbage disposals and septic. We changed our mind about it when the master plumber we were consulting with told us he had a septic system & a garbage disposal and hadn’t had a problem with it.
Why on earth do you need a garbage disposal to put those things down your sink? I’ve been putting shit like that down my sink my entire life and never had it clog.
I’ve burned through three garbage disposals in all the time I’ve lived in this house. Now I have no garbage disposal and I kinda miss it. The thing is, though, the garbage disposal used to have the rubber thingy set into the drain opening, and gunk would build up underneath and rot and smell to high heaven, so I would constantly have to take it out and scrub it…Now I have a horrid little mesh basket in the drain opening, which also collects gunk and has to be taken out and tapped smartly into the trash can. Now in the heat of summer, my drain smells rotten, though no big bits or grease or coffee grounds go down there. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. I can’t win, my sink stinks!
I am too. I grew up with them - I know we had one from 1962 on when I was a kid. I don’t think I’ve ever lived in a house or apartment that didn’t have one. They are very handy. You can’t put fiber things down, like corn husks, but why would you do that anyway? I don’t put bones and hard shit like that down mine either, but certainly it gets used daily. Our old one wore out recently so I replaced it - $80 from the local True Value, and I’m sure I could have gotten it cheaper if I’d wanted to shop around instead of going to the closest, most convenient place. Here in the western U.S. they’re as common as dirt, and cheap. I don’t know why you wouldn’t have one.
Cripes. Using a compost bin is so much simpler!
I compost some in the summer months, but winters are long back home and no matter what you put it in, accumulating food waste draws in critters.
Same here. Winters are long, frozen, and snowy. At least half the non-winter time, we can’t even put out a bird feeder without attracting bears and racoons. Not to mention I have absolutely no use for compost - my yard is so shady that growing anything other than a few pots of flowers on the deck is impossible.
Composting isn’t a catch-all solution for everyone.
Had one in every house I’ve every lived in and remember once or twice a jam or maybe a spoon going down needing to be retrieved. I don’t put whole chickens down or anything thing, but it’s fine for our pretty typical use. Never had a septic tank, so I can’t speak to that. I avoid pouring grease down it like the plague, though!
Just emailed my cousin who is Canadian and lives outside of Toronto. She says her parents’ house (built in 1981) had had a Garbarator and so did her home, but now they are banned in Ontario.
As usual around here, the more informedI get the less I am sure of the proper answer.
So maybe not banned in all of Ontario?
Think I will be doing more composting.
Let me make an analogy. What if I told you: “Cigarette smoker here, going on 8 years. I did go back and forth about it, having heard all the doom & gloom about smoking and lung cancer. I changed my mind about it when the chiropractor I consulted with told me he smoked and hadn’t had a problem with it.” Do you see any problem with that statement?
Anyway, out of curiosity, how often do you have your septic tank pumped?
In any event, you should realize that what you are risking is your septic leach field. All septic leach fields have a finite lifetime. Some may last 30 years or more, while others may only last 10 years. You shorten the life of a leach field by adding more solids loading to the system.
BTW, replacing a leach field is expensive, typically $15-20K. If you have an older system that has to be brought up to code, your costs go up from there. If you haven’t got enough land area on your property to support a new leach field, you can really find yourself in deep shit (no pun intended).
It’s not that common, but you don’t want to end up like one homeowner I came across (on a tiny parcel of land) who was required to install a holding tank (i.e. a tight tank) after her septic system completely failed. She had to have the holding tank pumped every two weeks, and had been doing that for several years. (I was designing new municipal sewers for her neighborhood. Nobody in the neighborhood was more happy to see me than her. Needless to say, she was the first person to hook into the new system.)
Incidentally, does your master plumber buddy also replace septic systems?
[QUOTE=Acsenray]
…can we discuss what the point is of a garbage compactor? When I was growing up, all our rich friends had them. Haven’t seen one in years.
[/QUOTE]
The idea was to smoosh a week’s worth of garbage into one tidy little cube. Two major boo-boos to that plan:
[ul]
[li]It’s a smaller volume, but now you have one block of trash weighing 40 pounds to pull out of the machine and carry to the curb. The weight is not magically compacted away.[/li][li]Anything moist or wet will make it nasty. Most people take out the kitchen trash two or three times a week, but a compactor would let you go for a week or even longer on one bag. Food waste + sitting around = stinky. The fancier compactors had deodorant dispensers that would release a squirt of a masking fragrance with each cycle, but that only added to the ongoing cost of operation and adding a smell to cover another smell is nowhere near as good a solution as not having the first smell to begin with.[/li][/ul]
A couple of years ago, I picked up a free compactor via craigslist and used it in the garage to crush pop cans. It actually did pretty badly at that - it wasn’t able to develop enough PSI against the cans to crush them more than about halfway. After a few months, I cast it loose and someone else got it for free via craigslist.
If you go to Sears, they still have a couple models to mollify anyone who’s stuck in the '70s.
I’ve never had trouble with one I owned, although we had an old one wear out and need replacement. However, I was once in a boarding-house type shared living arrangement where several young, unattached, slovenly men shared the kitchen. One day the garbage disposal ground to a stop like it was packed full or jammed, and I called the landlord, who sent out a plumber. The plumber eventually called me to the kitchen to show me something. On the other side of the room, there was a panel in the wall he opened up, and the whole opening was full of wet garbage. Somehow it had backed up all the way through the pipes on the other side. Years of abuse by careless tenants, I assume. it was pretty nasty.
My (well-to-do) aunt was one of the first to get a compactor, decades ago. It crushed all the trash into a nice cube wrapped in a tight plastic sheet, stamped with the manufacturer’s logo.
GE was a well-known maker of consumer electronics…garbage compactor output was less well-known at the time. This probably accounts for the behavior of the well-dressed man the family observed one morning who stopped his car next to the curb where the trash had been put out for pickup, opened his car door, looked around theatrically, and scooped up the nice plastic-wrapped cube with the GE logo and sped off.
Hardly the same thing. When you’re not on the Straight Dope, there’s differing opinions on septic tanks and garbage disposals; the downside of having one is that you need to pump it more often. As it only costs about $100 each time, I am willing to do that. $100 every 5 years or so is nothing compared to the convenience of a garbage disposal.
Last we had it pumped was 5 years ago; we probably need to do it again this summer.
And our septic tank is huge. We have a big house, built for a family of 6 or more. We’re only 2 people. The septic system can handle it.
Not an issue; we have 11 acres.
Nope. And we consulted a few plumbers, not just one. Nobody could see issues as long as the septic tank got pumped.
That’s more or less how I do it too. Right side full of dishes & hot soapy water, left side empty.
Grab dish, scrub out with scrubby sponge, rinse with running water, dry. Repeat until no dishes are left. (note: this is only done for large unwieldy items or things lef over after the dishwasher’s full)
I kind of do a mixed use thing with the disposal as well; expected large volumes of stuff go into the trash can (think lots of potato peels, carrot tops, etc…), but small things like the skin of half an onion, little potato trimmings, and unexpected things like the unwanted funky bits and pieces off of veggies, celery ends, etc… go into the disposal, mostly because it’s right there. I generally clean the used dishes off more or less into the trash can beforehand though.
I wouldn’t worry about the stuff going into the sewage treatment system; it’s grease that’s the big culprit for both city and homeowner clogs, not finely ground up stuff like disposals make. Plus, many municipalities sell the sewage sludge directly to farmers, or process it for sale for commercial and home use. (look up Milorganite, Hou-Actinite or Dillo Dirt for more), so I imagine cutting down the amount of organic matter would impact that seriously.