The 10 Best Garbage Disposals

When you have a big family, are busy in the kitchen cooking elaborate meals for everyday consumption or special occasions, or you have food that is no longer edible and requires tossing, kitchen waste is inevitable. For that reason, you'll need a reliable garbage disposal for your sink to grind food waste into pieces small enough to pass through your plumbing system without having to store them in a trash compactor until garbage night.

A garbage disposal is an electrically-powered device typically installed under a kitchen sink. It is usually located between the drain and sink trap and designed to chew up food scraps in combination with a heavy flow of cold water. Cold water helps to congeal and solidify certain foods that would otherwise have a tendency to be slippery or sticky at higher temperatures. When food is kept cold and hard, it is less likely to cause a blockage in the sink's drain system while the disposal is running.

A disposal has several parts working together to grind up foods, including an upper hopper, shredder ring, a flywheel equipped with impellers, a lower hopper, electric motor, and a waste line connector. Let's use a piece of aged celery as our food guinea pig to describe how the device works. When you start the disposal, its motor activates in order to power and spin the flywheel at nearly 2,000 revolutions per minute. When the celery enters the drain, it falls through the disposal's upper hopper chamber and onto the spinning flywheel. The flywheel's impellers serve to fling the garbage against the disposal's shredder ring, which chops up the celery as it rotates around the flywheel. Once the food has been chopped up, the cold water from the sink flushes the pulverized waste down into the lower hopper where it finally exits through the waste line connector and into the pipes. In order for this process to work as efficiently as possible, most garbage disposal units are rated to at least one-half horsepower, but a range of three-quarters to one horsepower is strongly recommended for the best results.

Garbage disposals are available in either batch feed or continuous designs. Batch feed units are activated using specially-designed covers placed over their openings. They are designed to operate after food waste has been placed inside them. The covers for batch feed units are equipped with magnets and are twisted to align with additional magnets inside the disposal units themselves. By contrast, continuous feed disposals are more common than batch feed units and are activated with an electric switch before waste is placed inside them. They will continue to operate until the power has been cut.

Batch feed units tend to be quieter and a bit safer to use than continuous feed models due to the use of their covers, which serve to muffle the sound of their motors, while also protecting a person's hands from venturing too far down into the disposal's opening. Continuous models also have a tendency to burn out if the power is left on for too long, whereas batch feed units will only activate through the use of magnetic cover. However, use of a cover can also be problematic, as it's another piece required for the disposal to function in the first place. Most modern garbage disposals feature built-in overload protection designed to cut power to the units before their motors overheat and cause damage the devices.