Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Pre-Black Friday Disposal

Today I'm going to show you how we installed our steal of a deal disposal that we got from Amazon. When we bought the house, it did not come with a disposal and after living without one for about 6 months (I can't believe we've been living here for 6 months already!) we were super excited to find Nate's dream disposal (we have weird dream items) for a super deal. This doesn't give a lot of visual improvement to the kitchen, but in terms of functionality, it makes life a million times better. All changes occurred under the sink in the picture below.


The first step in this improvement was to shut off the water so that we wouldn't flood the kitchen.

Next we took out the old plumbing (we were going to put in a better system so we took everything out). The next step was probably the hardest. We had to take out the old drain which took way longer than it should because it was all gross and rusted so it basically refused to unscrew. Eventually we got it, but then we had to do the other one (so we wouldn't have one shiny one and one grimy one). By the end of this process we were a little grumpy but we really wanted to get it installed so we pressed on.


Next thing we did was read the directions for installing the monster of a disposal we got.


The first thing to do was to install the new drain. The important thing with this step is to make sure you use enough plumber's putty under the lip so that when you screw it in it oozes out of the sides. You want to make sure it comes out all around. This prevents water from leaking out underneath the drain and damaging the cabinet below.


The drain comes with special clips so that the disposal justs clips on. Before you do this though, you have to hook up the electrical. If you aren't comfortable doing this on your own, this is when an electrician comes in handy. We wired the disposal to a switch under the sink for now, but when we renovate the kitchen, the switch will get moved to a more convient place. Once the disposal was wired, we used the special tool that came with the disposal to attach it to the base of the drain. The disposal is heavy so this is easier to do with two people.


At this point it was time for some plumbing! Nate's the expert on this stuff so I'm not going to pretend. All I know is that you should have p-traps on both drains so that water and gas doesn't back up into your sink.  Here is what it looked like when Nate was done with it.


And here are some tips from Nate: use little 45 degree pieces under the right sink so that the water drains quietly, and use a "Wye" piece where the two drains connect together so that when the disposal forces something down the drain there's no way for it to come up the second drain. Also, some joints screw together and others are connected with cement.


One little problem with this installation is that the p-traps are actually in backward. This is because our drain is unusually high (it's about a foot above the bottom of the cabinet) and so we couldn't fit the p-traps the normal way. This puts a little more water pressure on some of the joints than normal, but we decided that it was a reasonable trade-off for getting the p-traps in place. We will, however, be fixing this when we really get into the kitchen reno.


I must say it is pretty awesome to have a disposal again and it is also really nice to have new, not nasty plumbing that won't leak!

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