When I knock on a door, and the person on the other side answers with, “Who is it?”, my common reply is, “It’s the plumber; I’ve come to fix the sink.” It’s an obscure reference to a short cartoon that played on “The Electric Company”when I was a kid. Some people get it. Most don’t. That doesn’t stop me from continuing to use it.
I am not really a plumber, but I do try to be one every once in a while. A few decades ago, I learned a valuable lesson with garbage disposal units. I learned another one recently.
Let’s start with garbage disposal unit lesson No. 1. In the mid-1990s in our first home, our garbage disposal unit quit working. I found the little tool to hand crank it, but it still didn’t work. So I bought a new unit and replaced it. In throwing out the old one, I noticed a reset button on the bottom. Ugh. With the new unit already installed and working, I didn’t even try the old one to see if it would work. I quietly disposed of it. Now I know that garbage disposal units have reset buttons. Lesson No. 1 learned.
On to garbage disposal unit lesson No. 2. When our dishwasher wasn’t draining recently, I did a YouTube search and found a few tips. One was to take a plunger to the kitchen sink and try to knock the clog loose. Had I watched more closely, I would have learned not to plunge too aggressively. But I didn’t, and the jackhammer plunging I did apparently broke the seals in my garbage disposal unit. No big deal. The unit was old, and I had replaced these before, right?
In the meantime, our dishwasher wasn’t working, so I called a plumber friend of mine for advice. He told me to contact a sewer service, so I did. The guy who cleaned the line told me I had a leaking garbage disposal unit, which I knew by now. So, I installed a new garbage disposal unit myself. With a dishwasher still not draining and a kitchen full of dirty dishes, I did what I should have done from the beginning and called an appliance repairman. A few hundred bucks more spent, and I learned that the garbage disposal unit I installed has a knockout plug to the dishwasher hose that I apparently didn’t knock out. It was a simple fix, but, at this point, I simply wanted to knock myself out. Lesson No. 2 learned.
So, if you are following along, you now know that garbage disposal units have reset buttons and knockout plugs. Worst of all, my “It’s the plumber; I’ve come to fix the sink” joke seems to — once again — be on me.
Have a terrific Tuesday, and thanks for reading.
Shane Goodman
Editor and Publisher
Times Vedette digital editions
shane@gctimesnews.com
641-332-2707