What Should I do When My Garbage Disposal is Not Working:
It is frustrating when the sink backs up or begins to smell when the disposal stops working. Here are a few things to try before calling us:
Check to see if there is a red reset button on the bottom of your disposal. If the motor has to work too hard at grinding, sometimes the motor will shut itself off as a protection against burning out.
On many disposals (of the Insinkerator type) in the very middle, on the bottom of the disposal is an Allen wrench opening. If you have a disposal wrench or Allen wrench (a hexagonal wrench), you can insert it into that opening and manually turn the disposal to unjam most problems.
If there is a grinding sound when you turn the wrench—stop! It may mean that something hard or sharp is in the disposal (we pull a lot of glass out of disposals) and turning the wrench too much might damage the seals and ruin the unit.
Check the outlet and the breaker to make sure there is power going to the unit. Occasionally we’ll see the disposal power coming from a GFI outlet and it has tripped. Or, the breaker at the electric panel has tripped and needs to be reset.
If none of these work, give us a call!
How Do I Fix a Sticking Door?
Doors can be a bit finicky, and there isn’t much space for them to move before they begin to stick against the jamb, or the latch stops engaging and locking. Here are a few places to look to see if you can locate the problem:
Open the door and look at the door jamb on both sides and the top. Is there any place where you can see rubbing or paint scraped away? That will give you a clue as to what has happened.
Look at the door from the inside (the side with the hinges sticking out). Is the reveal (the small space between the door and the jamb) uniform around the door? For example, if the space is smaller at the top of the door on the latch side, it means the door has sagged away from the hinge side.
Does the spring latch of the doorknob still. engage into the strike plate on the jamb? If it doesn’t, detecting if it is too low or too high can also clue you in to what moved.
If you can determine what moved, here is an easy first step in repairing before you call us. On the door hinges, there are usually three screws. The middle screw is the farthest in, away from the door. If you remove that screw, which is usually short, and replace it with a long screw of about 2.5”, the new screw will go into the framing behind the jamb and draw the hinge and jamb tight against the framing. If you do this on the top hinge, the top of the latch side of the door will be drawn up. If you do this on the bottom hinge, the top of the latch side of the door will lower down.
If that doesn’t work, give us a call. Doors can be finicky and we don’t want you to ruin one trying to get it to behave!