For one thing to "sharpen" another, it needs to be hard enough to be abrasive on it.

Electric knife sharpeners have industrial diamond abrasive surfaces. Others may use other substances. Neither glass, bones nor ice cubes are anywhere near as hard as the steel in a disposal and so my guess is they would accomplish nothing. Plus, you wouldn't want to run either of the first two down a drain line out of concern they could lead to a clog.

They'll make noise.

i'm with elmer...years ago did the ice cubes but haven't in years...but I got a pretty good one last time at Costco....and it's still going strong, but then there are only 2 of us anymore...

Don't put celery in it either. Learned the hard way!

Nor banana peels. When my aunt got the first disposal in the family about 1960, the installer told her to drop a coke bottle down it every now and then to sharpen it. That was when coke bottles were thick glass.

Shouldn't put egg shells down either. I basically use mine for scraping plates. When I peel potatoes, or carrots, I put down some paper towels and do it right over the towels, fold it up and put in trash. A plumber once told us that a lot of his business is thanks to garbage disposals.

I don't understand the use of garbage disposals. I always take them out, when I move someplace where there is one. To many "don'ts".

Have not taken the one in my present house yet. To much to do overall... but it is on my list.

Moni

I have one but never use it. I don't like them. They smell bad. Georgysmom, that is a great idea about putting the paper towel in the sink! I'm going to do that from now on.

I've never sharpened mine. I use old ice cubes when I refill the trays (old school ice maker) occasionally to clean the blades and all of my citrus peels for the same reason. I had a potato peel catastrophe on Thanksgiving once, it backed up the drain and was a mess. I compost most of my veggie scraps now.

I have one but once I started composting my scraps , my disposal use went to nearly zero. I did the potato peel thing the day of a Christmas dinner. What an inconvenient mess.

Ice can be good to create sharp "shards" to loosen any gunk in there, but I doubt it sharpens anything. Helps with smell/cleaning- add some dish soap to it. Potato, noodle, rice, carrot are all known to cause clogs in large amounts.

It was said here on the forums many years ago that all the plumbing calls on Thanksgiving from potato peelings make for a very generous Christmas for the plumber and his/her family.

You can't sharpen one. I do use Fabuloso to freshen the smell. Yucky things!

My MIL put a bag of corn meal down one.....had to take the pea trap apart. She seemed to think I would have done the same thing. ha ha ha aha....NO!

You got my mind going, so I looked around the internet. Seems it's a US only thing and other places look down on owning one. Weird! I suppose trash is trash, and it does keep some smelly stuff out of the trash, but I don't really use mine. Why do we have them? Merely musings.

;)

I removed the one in our condo. I didn't install one when we built a house -- didn't want that filth inches from what's in my sink. I have a pull-out instead. Try bagging 'disposal safe' stuff for a few days. It's VERY few things at our house.

They smell bad when they are not used because bits of food which inevitably go down the drain stick there and spoil. Once in a while they need to be run.

socks wins a disposal prize! :0) Yep....they take care of mulching little pieces of food. The dishwasher has a "mulcher" that chews up food too. Otherwise our drains would stop up.

I have had a disposal in 3 homes for a total of about 30 years of using one. Just about anything that is or was food/plant material goes into it. That includes smaller corn cobs and chicken bones. The only thing I avoid putting in one is meat fat or gristle and the papery part of onion skins. I have never had a blockage. The current disposal is on it's 16th year. No issues at all, including odor.

Two years in a row, cause a clog with peels from sweet potatoes. After first time, thought maybe too much at a time or not enough water. That clog resolved itself. The second year (again in prep for T-Day) put smaller amounts of peels and ran water longer. THAT clog required a PLUMBER... OUCH! Don't even think of trimmings from artichokes... even cooked leaves after you've eaten the good parts. Have heard/read or told that lemons (after squeezing) are good for the disposal... at least freshens things up.

If I didn't put many of the things that "they" say are no no's down the disposal, there wouldn't ven be a reason to have one!

My dad was a plumbing contractor his men would draw straws
to see who would be on call for Thanksgiving and Christmas he had them take a
truck home and let them keep the profits for the day. It was always big day for
them mainly due to potato peels.

He always told us never put any peels down the disposer,
except lemon or orange, or grease and to always use cold water and let it run
for a few minutes after you turn the disposer off. We never put bones of any
kind down the disposer. We had a neighbor put artichokes down his disposer more
than once the third time dad sent a serviceman out and charged him the guy
never spoke to any of us again.

The reason for not putting egg shells down has nothing to do
with the disposer they don’t disintegrate. They can clog up your septic system
and leach lines I don’t know about living in a city I live in the mountains. I use
the paper towel method for peeling vegetables we only have a disposer in one of
the kitchens sinks and just use it for scraps. I don’t have a dish washer so
everything gets washes by hand.

I've always had a disposal and I put just about anything down it other than a lot of fibrous matter like celery or artichoke leaves. A single artichoke is fine. So are the potato peelings from just a couple of potatoes. It's the five or ten pound bag of potatoes that the line can't handle. Common sense as to the amount. Just like when using a toilet. ;-)

There is nothing to sharpen on the disposal. I use mine several times a day. If it's food waste down it goes. I am amazed at the misinformation and "fear" of using disposals that is out there. The disposal is on while I scrape plates. Since it is always in use nothing smells.

I hate being without a disposal fir 4 weeks every summer in our vacation rental ( septic system, not town sewers). My grandsons eat huge quantities of cereal and keeping the bits in the milk from clogging the drain, to say nothing of the smell of garbage in the kitchen trash can, makes me long fir my disposal!

Quality design and build is the key. My original 'grinder' was a
builder's special and it gave up after 3 years. I installed a replacement disposal 38 yrs ago in my kitchen sink. There were no instructions for sharpening the blades and I have not done anything to it in all these years and it yet works. Some day, I may need to replace the blades. My blades slide out by centrifugal force and the ends have hard tips. The tips appear like metal cutting tools and may be carbide. My unit was one of Sears & Roebuck higher quality models. I do not know who made the device for Sears; It may have been Kitchen Aid.

I grind any kind of vegetables in it including potatoes with skin, onions, carrots, celery, and cabbage. Of course, water is run through at the same time. A few scraps of meat have gone through too. Occasionally, I will turn it on when its grinding bowl is full of soapy dish water to flush out the small outlet holes. If an odder develops, I will run a cake of disposer cleaner through it per instructions on the package. This cleans up the inside nicely. I may do this once or twice a year.

There was one important instruction that came with the disposal and that was a caution about putting grease down the drain. Grease clogs in drain pipes are common. The instruction said that one could successfully flush grease down the drain with if both the cold water and the disposal was running. Their claim was that the cold water congeals the grease and the disposal emulsifies the cold grease making it flushable. I have no way of knowing if there was truth to that statement. I have successfully flushed small amounts of cooking grease using the disposal, I dispose of large amounts of grease by putting it in a container and sending it out via the garbage route.

I have now acquired 38 years of use of this disposal without a problem.

Well, I did have one problem. Someone in my house accidentally dropped a spoon down the disposal and jammed it. After unplugging the disposal and removing the mangled spoon, and plugging it back in, it refused to run. There was absolutely no response and then I had one of those ah-ha moments. I laid on the floor and scooted my head into the sink cabinet to get a look at the unit, and YES, there was a red button sticking out the side of the motor shell. It had a built-in overload. I pressed it in until it clicked and was back in business. That was 10 years ago.

My advice is do not shop for the very lowest cost you can find. Instead, shop for quality when choosing a garbage grinder. Price is secondary. This doesn't mean that the highest priced one is the best, either. Read reviews. In this case, Consumers Reports is a decent source. Look at their ratings based on users feedback. If you know a trusted plumber, ask him what he has found to be trouble free units.

Edited 09 Feb 2017: The brand name of my disposal is "In-Sinkerator".

Oh thank God I'm not the only one who backed up my disposal & drain from potato peels! Watch, I did a whole bag of potatos so there was lots of peels.

Sheila, I remember the coke bottle trick too! But I never tried it.

My disposal never stinks. I run it probably 20 times a day and every couple days I drop some liquid soap in while it's running to keep it fresh.

I have done the lemon or orange trick & that makes it smell great!

I have to come clean. I did clog the about 2 feet of plumbing once. I was cleaning out the pantry, letting my mind wander to other things, and poured out a whole box of expired instant rice down the disposal. Then rinsed off my hands in hot/warm water. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what happened next. Of course I do some of my best work at 2 AM. Poor DH had to get out of bed to dismantle the plumbing. A large box of Uncle Ben's make a lot of rice.

When I first went deaf I had a lot of adjustments to make. One day a piece of fat/sinew was rattling around in there. I turned the disposal on and off trying to get it to move on. When it didn't I reached in to pull it out. Didn't realize the disposal was still on. Walked around with a pretty badly bruised hand for a week or two.

OMG! That's terrible. You could have lost fingers. I always am afraid when I reach in to yank out a piece of grizzle or something stuck.

Think about how you sharpen knives... you can't 'sharpen' disposer blades, which are not sharp to start with. If you put a bunch of ice cubes in and grind them up, you are cleaning the gunk off the blades, not sharpening them.

Here's a challenge for you: make sure the disposal is off, heck, unplug it if you are that sort. Don't do this in the presence of someone else, especially wise-guys and jokers. Put your hand down into the disposal and actually FEEL the mechanism. Or try this at the hardware store on unconnected display units.

Interesting thread. I never knew about potato peelings but then I compost all veggie remains. We have had an InSinkErator for 35 years with no problems except when a spoon got caught. The reset button saved that day. I recall years ago, my mother's sink backed up at a holiday dinner and I'll bet it was because of all the potato peelings because she didn't compost.

I think that putting a Coke bottle or two down one might well lead to the need for a new one.

Did the one who suggested that ...

... sell garburators?

o j

Our plumber said rice was a big no - no, too. I basically use mine for scraping plates and if I clean out the fridge -- the cooked food goes down it, too.

There is one feature that my disposal has that helps to clear out clogs and that is it reverses direction on each start, e.g., whichever direction is was running the last time, it runs in the opposite direction the next time it is turned on. This reversal helps to dislodge junk that was caught over the exit holes.

Mine too jemdandy! It does help.

The thought of chicken bones in a disposal is just awful! I would never do that, or glass either! In fact I never put anything like ice in mine either to sharpen the blades. I can't imagine they would really need 'sharpening' like a knife since they aren't sharp to begin with.

I use those packets to freshen every few months and I run a lemon or orange peel now and then to freshen. Also I take a paper towel and wipe under the rubber gasket to get the gunk out. Amazing how nasty that is. I compost almost everything now so I have little waste to put in mine. I do run cold water and let it run for longer than probably necessary, then turn it off and back on again to make sure everything is clear.

Bones and certain other scraps go in the trash. We're on a septic system and (knock wood) haven't had a problem in 17 years with either the disposal or the septic system.

I once spent three months helping my father convalesce from an illness. He lived an old fashioned life---no disposer, dryer, nor dishwasher. He lived in an area where the recyclables had to be divided into 5 different bags. The grocery stores were very basic and selections of meat and produce just terrible. When I got home and was sorting the whole experience out I decided that the lack of a disposer was the thing that bothered me most---we all thought that very odd as standing on the back porch hanging up clothes on a cold March day was the pits!

What about coffee grounds? I've heard opposite opinions if they should to in the sink? And then to the Disposal?

Coffee grounds will clog your drain lines in short order.

I made sure that our replacement disposal had the removable gasket so I can take it out and scrub it with a small brush. Also, those blades are only used to sling stuff around so it gets between the grinding plates, I've been told. Ice and rock salt occasionally will clean off the blades if they get gunky.

The guy that pumps my septic tank says if it won't go down the drain on it's own then it shouldn't go down the drain. We compost.

A disposal wrench can unjam just about anything. Also-one of the best gadgets ever-look on Amazon for a ' disposal genie'. Love, love, love mine. No more retrieving objects that have fallen in there.

used coffee grounds are manna of the gods to earthworms! Feed your gardens and lawns with those!

My rubber gasket comes out too & I wash it.

I don't have a septic tank, just regular sewer here. I also don't compost. Our HOA doesn't approve it.

I also put my coffee grounds in my garden during the spring & summer.

True story, My son was VP of a "Upper End" (i.e. EXPENSIVE) home building company. A couple who spoke English as a second language, and not very well at that, wanted a garbage disposal repaired/replaced under warranty. It broke because they'd been putting their newborn baby's disposable diapers in it. Because it was a "disposal" and they were "disposable" diapers. (The company did the right thing and replaced the garbage disposal. And told them it wasn't for diapers.))

Drews, OMG. I have no words.

I love my garbage disposal! I've jammed it up only once - carrot skins.

Of COURSE if will stink if you don't run it regularly! Food bits will just sit down there in it if you don't run water and turn it on so everything can go on down the drain.

I was always told to put ice cubes down the disposal to sharpen the blades and pieces of lemon to make the disposal smell nice. I just keep a bag of chopped up lemons in my freezer and put a few pieces down the disposal every few days. Kill 2 birds with one stone.

He always told us never put any peels down the disposer,
except lemon or orange, or grease and to always use cold water and let it run
for a few minutes after you turn the disposer off.

Good enough advice to repeat. We put lemon or lime skins in about once a week. I only run it after the end of filling the dishwasher. If the lemon skins have not cleared completely in 2 days I'll put a couple pounds of ice cubes in. That always clears away the lemon skins.

Nothing sharpens the blades because there aren't any blades. There are hammers that pulverize the food and press it into holes on the sides of the disposer. Pull out the black rubber stopper and peek in with your flashlight. The so called sharpeners do nothing but remove gunk from the hammers and the holes.