All Forum Posts by: Ian Krysztofiak

@Ian Krysztofiak We remove all garbage disposals.

When I bought my first property 30 years ago (aB&B) we had friends over for dinner one night.

Following dinner my partner and I went to tend to a B&B guest and one of the friends “cleaned up dinner”. Which consisted of feeding about 1lb of chicken down the garbage disposal.

The next morning the chicken backed up the sewer line into the basement of the building.

We had to get an industrial length snake to get at the problem as the sewer line was about 150’ long. Unfortunately YEARS worth of bacon grease that had been put down the line was also clogging it up.

When all was said and done it took us about 6 hours to remove 20lbs of old bacon grease and finally unclog the line. It took another 3 hours to finish cleaning the basement.

We never used the disposal again and never had another problem in 10 years of owning the property.

Now that I own rentals we just systematically remove any garbage disposals that may have been installed. Our tenants don’t expect them.

Garbage disposals are the bain of the existence to most landlords. Many of us actually purposefully remove them from our properties before renting them.

As @Matthew Crivelli said, do not allow a tenant's friend or 'Contractor' to do any work on your property. Never. 

And I would suggest you pass on this anyways. A garbage disposal should be on a separate circuit, as they can draw a pretty decent Amp load. See what the instructions that come with the GD say. Your tenant's friend will probably just draw it from whatever nearby circuit thay can tap into most easily.....

So running a new 14/2 cable from the main panel will probably not be easy unless it is really close.

It's a fair proposal, but I would have headed that off quickly and said no in the first place. They're nothing but problems.