Disposal Leak
Kung Fu Maintenance shows changing out a broken garbage disposer video while explaining many of the different factors, an often missed step for longevity, to keep things working great, and converting from a threaded slip joint drain connection to a flanged tailpiece compression fitting.
I’ve got a garbage disposal leak, and showing how to replace it. This particular garbage disposal; I see these wear out tends to be a lot faster. There’s two different styles of garbage disposals: One where it’s got a threaded end like this. I seem to not have very much luck with these; they seem to leak a lot more and crack. The other kind of disposal has this end; I’ll show you how that gets hooked up.
We got to unplug our plug, undo our disposal drain line. Take this off carefully because usually there’s some water left in the line. We’re going to replace this piece, it’s what’s called the tailpiece. Looks like this instead; it’s got this flanged end that we can stick our rubber gasket against and link that through the disposal.
I usually use my knee to lift this up and then turn these locking plate out, and then move the disposal down, like so.
If our cord’s not in bad shape, we can reuse it. This one, the cord has already partly come out. Usually, this gets locked in underneath but it looks like someone didn’t bend the second tab out underneath this portion. Once you put this in, then you have to bend this tab out. For our purposes, it’s just going to make it easier to do a new one.
Looking at my cord, everything looks in good shape. No breaks in the insulation, so I can reuse this. Pop our top off. There’s our neutral, there’s the hot. It’s already a part. Now screw. That’s our new disposal. Since we’re hooking up a dishwasher line, we’ve got to known out this knockout. Just use my flat blade of my screwdriver and hammer, and knock this in. Make sure I retrieve my piece.
If you look inside the knockout hole hat we just did, you can see a ridge around the inside; these little burrs. What you want to do is take the flat bade knife and just rotate it inside and take that edge off so that it doesn’t leave a place for food to hang out. This is an often cause of the disposal drain line being clogged. One more little burr. Nice and clear now. Then we’re going to pick up our pigtail, take off our access plate, our ground screw.
When you’re facing the outlet, the hot is on the right side, generally. You can follow the right side of the cord all the way back to here. This one’s going to be my hot. We’re going to feed the wires into our disposal port. I’m just going to hookup my hot so we don’t forget which one’s where. Twist these together a little bit. We’re going to use our wire connector. Here’s our neutral, our ground.
Hookup our ground, and then I’ll show you how this deal fits in. I’m going to turn it this way so that we have access to the prong that’s not bent yet. We put the bent end in first, and then push this side in, like so. Then we’re going to insert our screwdriver in underneath here, and then the tab out so that we lock it into place, like so. That protects the wire from rubbing against the sharp edge of the sheet metal. Here’s our plate. We’re ready for action.
Back to our plumbing deal. We can’t use this end. We might get away with it for a couple days, but eventually, it’s going to leak. What we need to do is convert it to our tailpiece, which is right here. We need this flanged end out. Just remove this side. We’re going to use these on this end. We can slip this on and then we can jump this part, this rubber gasket. It’s important; we want the gasket to seat up against the edge of the tailpiece flange. We’re going to slide our deal here, like so. We may have to trim this end a little bit depending on the space that we have for the disposal. There we go. We’re going to slide that on there.
Once again, I’m going to use my knee to lift the disposer up and lock it into place. Sometimes I can just lift it with my hand. Sometimes I just use my knee underneath it to hold it; that way I got two hands free. I can also if I need to. We rotate these pieces in. Sometimes if these are really stuck, if you’re trying to take it off, you can insert your screwdriver into these parts and pull it over. I find usually I’m able to just undo it. I’m going to re-hook my disposer line. I should peek in here that this is clear; there’s not a whole bunch of gunk and stuff in. Here, you don’t want to tighten this clamp down too tight; just nice and snug, 1/4 -turn past tight is good. The reason being, the seam for the disposer goes right through the middle of the disposer drain line port, and if you tighten this down too much, you can crack it.
For our tailpiece, see how it fits in. Looks like we’re going to need to trim just a hair off maybe. Let’s see. No, we’re going to be okay. This side’s just nice and easy: Slip joint plumbing tightens the beveled washer inside there to seal the ends, and this side uses a compression fitting. They’re both compression fittings, but you get the idea. We’ll just tighten these up nice and easy. Then when we go to plug our cord in, we want to get it off the ground so we want to loop it over the drain line; that way it’s not hanging in water or anything like that. There we go. Clean up my mess down here. We’re ready to test it out.
We can field test it for any leaks. Beautiful; no leaks. The better way of testing is to do what’s called a pressure test. Just take your plug and plug the drain line. Let the sink fill up, turn the disposer on, and then pull the drain plug. That’ll force the water through extra-fast. Even any little pinhole leak will show up so we can prove that we don’t have any leaks down here. Turn on the disposal. We’re all set. Good to go.