Bill Roper's Journal

According to the websites that I visited yesterday, the average lifetime of a garbage disposal is 10 to 12 years. Since our house is going on 14 years old, this would explain why our builder-installed disposal is stubbornly refusing to grind potato skins fine enough to go through the pipe without clogging it up. Sunday night was the second time that this happened and it took both daisy_knotwise and I (again!) to get it unclogged after the application of a whole bunch of drain cleaner. (It's a dual sink, so Gretchen held one plunger in place as a stopper while I plunged the open side with great vigor.)

I took this as a hint. The original garbage disposal was a InSinkErator 1/3 hp Badger 1. Tonight, I purchased a InSinkErator 1 hp Excel model which I'm hoping will eat pretty much anything we want to throw at it. Supposedly, a replacement garbage disposal is easily installed by one person. However, it apparently is very useful to have a second person handy to help hold the thing up while doing the installation. (The recommended alternative appears to be building a stack of books to hold it up. Thank you, but no. I like my books.) I considered having it professionally installed if it didn't cost too much, but I carefully checked with samwinolj to see if he were available to help in case of obscenely high installation costs.

$150 was well into the obscene range, so I've officially asked Sam for the favor.

We'll see if $150 still seems obscene when we finish. :)