Garbage Disposal Repair and Installation

Try the hex key before you try us

1. It hums but nothing turnsJammed. Switch it off at the wall, fit the hex key into the socket in the middle of the base, and work it back and forth until it spins freely. Fish out whatever caused it, then press the red reset button.
2. Silence, not even a humReset button first, breaker second, switch third. A fair share of the disposals we get called to are not broken, they are reset, and we would rather say so on the phone than find it on your invoice.
3. It runs fine but the sink fills upThat is the drain, not the disposal. Running it longer will not move the blockage. Start with drain cleaning.
4. It only leaks when the dishwasher runsThe dishwasher drain connection, nearly every time. That is the part of a disposal swap most often done wrong, including by people who do it for a living.

A disposal makes the pieces smaller. It does not make them go away.

This is the part nobody selling disposals puts on a brochure. Everything you grind still leaves the house through the same private lateral. The unit changes the size of what is in the water, not the amount of it, so it is no remedy for a line already in trouble. On a bad line it is the thing that tips it over.

EPA's guide for sewer collection systems is blunt about what stops a gravity line: "a structural defect, poor design, poor construction, an accumulation of material in the pipe (especially grease), or root intrusion". Roots are the big one. The peer reviewed review that Fairfax County cites on its own wastewater page puts roots behind more than 50% of all sewer blockages, and grinding food finer does nothing at all to a root mass. Sewer line repair does.

The other one is slope. EPA's flow velocity table shows solids settling out of the flow below roughly 1.0 to 1.4 feet per second, and a sagging length of pipe sits under that figure every time water runs. It reclogs on a schedule however well it was cleaned, and a disposal hands it more to drop. Plenty of houses here still drain through cast iron, which EPA lists among the materials vulnerable to sewer gas corrosion where clay and plastic are not, so what the drain line is made of matters more than the brand.

What the utilities here ask you to keep out of the drain

Fairfax County's wastewater FAQ says it without hedging: do not pour cooking oils and grease down household drains, put them in the trash, because they may cause problems in your service line and possibly the county sewer. On this side of the river it is in local law. Prince William County Code Sec. 23-53(a)(16) prohibits discharging grease to the sanitary sewer, as Prince William Water sets out.

Wipes are a toilet question rather than a disposal one, but they travel the same pipe. WSSC Water, the utility next door, has spent $2.5 million installing and maintaining grinders at its pumping stations purely because of wipes that go down and do not break apart. Its test is the one to remember. Does it dissolve like toilet paper or organic waste? If not, it is not flushable, whatever the package says. Fairfax County tells residents not to flush wipes "even those labeled as flushable."

• Grease and cooking oil, which go down warm and liquid and set hard out of sight
• Coffee grounds, which do not break down and pack into a sediment past the trap
• Fibrous vegetable waste, the stuff that wraps instead of grinding
• Eggshells and bones
• Anything you would not pay somebody to cut out of the line in your front yard

Twelve years, and nobody is promising you more

InterNACHI's life expectancy chart for homes puts a food waste disposal at 12 years. It is a single point figure rather than a range, and close to the only published number there is: we could not find a manufacturer that states a service life for one. The Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety is blunter. There are "no existing minimum standards for the durability of appliances," it writes, and it finds the duty cycle capacity and lifespan of today's appliances has declined. The horsepower on the box tells you about grinding. It tells you nothing about years.

Appliance or fixture? The code leaves a gap and the permit sits in it

Virginia runs on the 2021 Uniform Statewide Building Code, in effect since January 18, 2024. Section 108.2 lists the ordinary repairs that need no permit and no inspection, and two of its items come close to a disposal without landing on it. Item 14.2 exempts "replacement of plumbing fixtures ... without alteration of the water supply and distribution systems, sanitary drainage systems, or vent systems." Item 14.4 exempts "replacement of mechanical appliances provided such equipment is not fueled by gas or oil." A disposal is an appliance rather than a fixture, which puts it outside 14.2, and whether it is the sort of mechanical appliance 14.4 has in mind the code does not say.

Localities read borderline electric appliance swaps differently, so we will not invent a statewide answer. Prince William County, on the same code, treats a like for like electric water heater in the same spot as exempt while a gas one always needs a permit. That shows the thinking without settling your job, so we call the county ourselves. Two things hold either way: an exemption does not excuse the work from the rest of the code, and where an owner asks for a permit on exempt work, Section 108 says it shall be issued and inspected.

On the electrical side, the figure the residential code puts in writing for a kitchen is a minimum of two 20 ampere branch circuits serving the kitchen and dining area receptacle outlets. Its individual branch circuit language is written for central heating equipment, not disposals, so we will not tell you yours must have its own. Adding a circuit is a permit category of its own, and a separate piece of work rather than something to improvise in a cabinet.

Buying one

We will fit what you have already bought or bring one, and we are honestly not precious about the brand, partly because of that IBHS line: no durability standard sits behind any of it. What decides whether the install is dry in five years is the workmanship at three joints, the sink flange, the discharge tube and the dishwasher inlet.

What a disposal call looks like

• Replacing a seized, leaking or burnt out unit
• First installs, including sinks that never had one
• Jams, and chasing reset or breaker faults back to the cause
• Leak repair at the sink flange, the discharge connection or the dishwasher inlet
• Putting a dishwasher drain connection back the way it should have been
• Telling you when the real problem is the drain

It is a small job and we do them anyway, because 40 odd years in this trade have mostly been small jobs with a few big ones between. Office hours run seven in the morning to five in the evening, Jon takes what lands after that himself, and the licence is Virginia Class A number 2705131990.

Common Questions