My understanding is that eggshells don’t float, tend to settle and stay put.
just to add: sink disposals in Europe are like V8 5.7L engines … people have heard of them, but nobody owns one …
This has been an informative thread.
We had a disposal when I was growing up and ran all sorts of food waste through without issue. I owned a house for a while, learned about grease and fat, but that’s all.
Now the house I’m in has one but am told not to use it. We scrape plates and use a strainer. Good to know it’s not just my parents being crazy, it’s actually proper.
There’s no blades in a disposal. I think there’s at least one horror movie that incorrectly shows this. It’s more like an electric cheese grater than a blender. The spinny part is a plate with usually a pair of not-too-sharp nubbins (the “impellers”) that pushes waste to the sides of the chamber, which has a rough perforated surface.
I should say that most common disposals are “continuous feed” so you don’t want to overload it with too much at once. But if you’re running a commercial kitchen or something or are specifically looking for one, you can get “batch feed” which usually are partially closed to debris and you can open it up for a larger amount of scraps.
A few is fine, a whole pot is not, as others have said.
.Right.
Our contractor actually suggested a lemon peel once in a while to clean it.
But not a whole lot.
I don’t think sink disposals are very common in Canada, either – at least, I’ve never lived in a house that had one, and I’ve lived in houses of all ages, new, old, and old but renovated. After reading all the caveats in this thread, and after my major plumbing disaster, I’d be afraid to use one.
Prior to my well-publicized plumbing disaster, I had been very casual about flushing stuff down the kitchen sink. The disaster was precipitated by pouring expired pasta sauce down the drain which happened to contain small chunks of sausage and mushroom, so it was essentially like a sauce that had been run through a garbage disposal – just small bits of solids that I thought would easily flush away. How wrong I was! Once you get enough solids, even if small, they can clump together and potentially create a massive clog.
Pretty much the entire drainpipe system in the basement had to be disassembled and cleaned out! Fortunately that part of the basement is unfinished so at least they were accessible. I am now super-careful about anything going down the kitchen drain other than water and plain liquids, and definitely no grease!
As the guy that fixes your home after the waste line from your sink cracks, I think hot soapy water is the proper thing to go down the disposal.
After the ptrap the pipe usually drops vertically down to the next level, then takes off with an elbow or “y“ to wherever its draining. These fittings get clogged up with gunk. Water, which is heavy, backs up behind the now slow fitting stressing the joint. Eight feet of 1 1/2” pipe filled with water is heavy. At some point you find an icky wet spot on your basement carpet and when you move whatever furniture was against the wall you find wet moldy drywall
If you are going to send solids down your drain, its better to chop them up first, but the best thing is not to send solids down your drain if you can avoid it. Flushing your pipes with hot soapy water regularly, and using drain / enzymatic cleaner helps.
Dishwashers do the same thing, but offer a much more substantial labour saving than a sink disposal. I am not even sure that running a sink disposal is any easier than emptying a drain basket. Cleaning the rubber gusset, which gets disgusting is an even worse task.
I never saw them until I moved out West. They are a standard feature in many homes. I wish they weren’t.
I’ve probably stuffed a whole turkey carcass down mine at some point. I have had a few clogs that required lots of plunging, usually from Mrs. Cheesesteak disposing of too much all at once, but nothing that needed a plumber to visit.
The only thing I’ve found that is absolutely forbidden to go near it… date pits. I put a handful down once, and it took me multiple hours to get the disposal back up and running. They broke into the perfect size to jam into the blade works and keep it from re-starting successfully.
Those drain screen things cost like $5 for a cheap one. If they get too nasty you can get a new one.
I live and die by sink drain screens. It’s amazing how much a simple, cheap device can offer so much.
Why do humans have to over think things?
Get you a plastic ice cream bucket. Find a place in your fridge.
Scrape any compostables there to take out occasionally.
Any meat product(sans chicken bones) go to the dogs.
Rice is a problem. Dogs won’t have it. If left on. Seems like they pick the grains off and spit them on the floor. Doesn’t rinse down the dishwashers. The screens in them are always full of rice and oddly, peas. We clean those often. The smell will ruin your life if you don’t.
I have one in my bathroom sink. It’s necessary, but i hate it. It gets so gross and disgusting. Like, every week.
I have something similar in my master bath. Cleaning only works so much and it eventually gets so nasty that I get a new one every several months.
Nope. Nor with a disposal. Because ordinary food scraps in a disposal make it clog.
I’ve lived here 30 years and it hasn’t clogged, yet. My parents had a disposal for at least 40 years without ever having a problem. They put scraps down their, too.
You know, I’ll be brave and take the heretical position here. I’ll put anything and everything food waste (except bones) down the garbage disposal. If it fits in the hole, down it goes.
I understand this to be bad practice, and yet, in the 11 years I’ve lived in this house, and the 16 years in my previous house, I’ve only had 1 jam, and that was when my original disposal failed in some way that it only had a tiny fraction of its power left. No pipe clogs ever. 
The one I have, that doesn’t work, definitely has blades. They’re about an inch long.
I feel like food that’s been ground up by a disposal isn’t really all that different, in texture or chemistry, from poop.
The current issue of Consumer Reports has an article with 15 tips on how not to wreck your appliances. One of the tips is to not put potato peelings in your disposal (the other 14 tips are for other types of appliances).
It’s definitely going to be different chemically. It’s spent hours marinating in stomach acid, for one thing. Picked up a lot of our gut biome, too. Plus, it’s had all the nutrients and vitamins and what-not removed.