As you cook your holiday meal this season, please hesitate before throwing certain cooking and food byproducts down your kitchen sink drain, and take a moment to read this blog post.
While garbage disposal systems are of course very convenient and easy to use, many homeowners give them a little more credit than they might deserve. Look, we aren’t against using a garbage disposal–we could write a whole new blog post about the benefits of these systems! But it is possible to overuse them, or trust them a bit too much, especially in the season of extra cooking and extra kitchen use.
This holiday season, we want to help you protect your kitchen sink plumbing by…
STOPPING. Don’t Put These Items Down Your Kitchen Sink Drain!
FOG (fats, oils, and grease), potato skins, eggshells, hard food items, food products that expand with water… these are just some examples of what shouldn’t go down your kitchen sink drain. Some of these items can damage your garbage disposal system while others can get stuck inside the drainpipe and create stubborn and showstopping clogs. And yes, this is most likely to occur during the holiday season–in fact Thanksgiving and the day after are two of the most common days for our professionals to get called for an emergency drain clog or plumbing issue.
FOG
We named fats, oils, and grease, as some of the things that shouldn’t go down your kitchen sink drain. This one isn’t because it will hurt your garbage disposal system, but because of what it does as it goes down the drain. It cools off, and it hardens as it does so. As a result, it creates a blockage in the sink drain that only builds up and can catch other food items as they latch on going down the drain. FOG should go into a disposable or compostable container and then be thrown away rather than put down the drain.
Potato Skins and Eggshells
Perhaps at some point, you were cooking a meal for your small family and had no problem putting a couple of potato skins or a handful of eggshells down the garbage disposal system. That’s fine, but when you’re putting excessive potato skins or eggshells down the kitchen sink drain, what happens is that the garbage disposal gets jammed up and can’t process it all. As a result, you’ll have a clog and a backup, and it won’t be pretty!
Hard Food Items
Fruit pits and meat bones should never be put down your garbage disposal system, as it can damage the system. Even if these items make it through the garbage disposal, they can get lodged inside your kitchen sink drainpipe, thereby creating blockages and an eventual clog.
Fibrous Fruit and Veggie Leftovers
Thing celery–the fibers from a vegetable like this can get wrapped around the impeller blades of your garbage disposal system and stop it up. While this may not impact your kitchen sink drain, it’s not worth the risk of damaging your garbage disposal.
“So, What Can Go Down My Kitchen Sink Drain?”
Soft foods like yogurt or applesauce, citrus peels, and non-fibrous fruit and veggie scraps are all safe to go down your garbage disposal system and kitchen sink drain! Please reach out to us if you have any further questions.
For professional service on your plumbing in St. Peters, MO, look no further than Performance Plumbing. Contact us today!