Air Gap How
Kung Fu Maintenance rights a wrong situation where someone had bypassed a dishwasher air gap while explaining the reasons and purpose of the air gap.
Someone has bypassed the air gap up top, which is definitely wrong; most likely because they were getting water shooting from the top of the air gap which would indicate a clogged garbage disposal hose. I’m just guessing at the reason, but this is definitely wrong. What will happen is the bacteria that’s in the garbage disposal will wind up getting into your dishwasher; you definitely don’t want that. This is why you want an air gap.
An air gap acts at preventing the disposal gunk from going over into your dishwasher. Let me show you how to fix this if you come across this. Also, this is how to setup an air gap. Here it goes.
There’s our air gap up top and here’s where this has been clamped together. The clamp is down here. What we’re going to do is remove this clamp up top. The larger line is going to go to the disposal up top. Here we go. 5-in-1 can probably slip over the top of this clamp. Blocked there. Now we can separate the drain line from this inside here. Slip it out. This side’s going to go up to our air gap, on larger side. We’re going to press that into place. Loosen up the cap, slip that up into place, and then tighten down the nut, positioning it in a spot that’ll be a little easier to get at in the future. You want to watch out for this stuff, this is an acoustic sound-dampening texture on the bottom of the sink, it’s pretty sharp stuff. It’s rough on the hands.
Next, we’re going to take the other clamp and bring this up where it’s supposed to go. Loosen this up, and then we’re going to need to slip this over the smaller side which may not be that easy to get on. What we can do is bend this a bit to try to widen it up and make slipping it on a little bit easier. Now it’s just a matter of pressing it up into place; it’s not always that easy. I’m just pressing and twisting, pressing and twisting; take a few runs at it to make it good. Once you get it up high enough, you’ll slide your clamp over. Again, you’re going to want to position it somehow it’s going to be easy for you to get to in the future, because you may need to from time to time, for maintenance or to replace.
We’re all set. Now we’re ready to run the dishwasher, test it out. We’ll field test it for leaks at all its different spots as well as to make sure that no water is shooting from the air gap drain line. We go ahead and do that; start the dishwasher, which I have unplugged so I could use the light. I guess I’m going to have to turn the light out. I borrowed the plug. We’re going to run the dishwasher; we’re going to push it ahead to the fill cycle. You can hear it filling. This is our copper connection; I can feel the water starting to get hot, copper water supply line.
This particular garbage disposal is the worst kind in my opinion. It’s not the brand, it’s the design where it’s got a thread collar end. These tend to leak. I find that when I have garbage disposals fail, most of the time it’s this is the design. That’s a different kind that has a flange and a compression fitting that goes in; those in my opinion, are a lot more reliable; in my opinion, and my experience. Just telling you, if you got a choice between the threaded one and the compression fitting kind, I highly recommend going with the compression type which I’ll show you sometime on another video; I’ll show you a change out. I can show you how to convert these, too. What you need is a tailpiece end to go here. It’s not too hard of a repair, no biggie.
Sounds like our fill cycle’s done, so I’m going to move it ahead to the drain cycle. We’re going to watch up top as well as below to see if the air comes out up top. So far everything’s draining like it should, so we’re good. We’re going to feel for any leaks down here. Everything’s good there. Feel for any leaks, we’re good there. Let’s go ahead and test my disposal. Everything’s working good. Everything’s doing what it should. That’s why I hook up that air gap line, and that’s the way it should be done for health reasons. If this comes loose or needs to be tightened, you can tighten this down with a pair of channel logs. I have another video covering how to unclog a clogged air gap, if you want to check that out.
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