Broken garbage disposal?

If your garbage disposal stops working, particularly if it’s been working fine and then one day simply dies, you just might be able to fix it yourself with the press of a little red button. Who knew?

Just like your hair dryer, garbage disposals have a GFCI: a circuit interrupter that shuts the device off if there’s a safety issue. If that safety issue was just a fluke, resetting the button will do the trick. You should be able to find the reset button just underneath the disposal. Just make sure the normal on-off switch is set to ‘off’ and that there aren’t any spoons in the sink, so you won’t have any surprises when the disposal starts running again.

Is this common knowledge? Well, my friend didn’t know, and had gone 3 weeks thinking her garbage disposal was broken before I fixed it tonight. I wouldn’t have known had my brother not told me. And he didn’t know before either: he figured it out when installing a replacement disposal for his mother-in-law, who’d gone without for ages.

So if you didn’t know, well, now you do, and knowing is half the battle. Maybe someday it’ll save you or a friend the cost of a new disposal or visit from a repairman.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 7th, 2010 at 11:25 pm and is filed under Idea Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.