How a Garburator works
March 03, 2014 - Benjamin Dowson
The Garburator. We’ve all heard of it, but not all of us have seen or used them before. So what exactly is a garburator?
Well, a garburator is an appliance that fits underneath a kitchen sink that allows you to put solids down your kitchen sink. It then chews the solids up and spits them out into the waste drainage, allowing you to get rid of organic material such as vegetables, or leftovers.
There are a few different names for garburators, such as disposal units or even brand names such as
InSinkErator, but they are all referring to the same appliance that sits on the bottom of your kitchen sink.
How Does a Garburator Work?
In a garburator there are 3 blades at the bottom. It connects to the bottom of the sink, and connects to the pipes underneath the sink that takes the waste away. Sitting at the bottom of the garburator is a motor, and the blades are connected to them. They spin at a high RPM so that when you flip the switch, they start to spin very quickly, and when anything touches them it mulches it up and allows it to go down your drain pipe. Obviously, you don’t want to stick anything down that you would not want chewed up such as fingers or inorganic material!
How big and powerful is a Garburator?
A garburator is about the size of a deflated basketball that fits underneath your kitchen sink. There is still plenty of space to store other stuff underneath. There are several different sizes of garburators that you can purchase. They start at about ½ horse power and go up to about 1 horse power for residential. The difference between these types of power is efficiency. A garburator is like a car. You can get a small Corolla and it will get you from point A to point B. Maybe it will not be as fast or efficiently as a Cadillac, but it will still get you there. But if you go out and get a Cadillac, it may be more comfortable, fast, and efficient, but at the end of the day it still gets you to where you want to go. A garburator with a bigger motor can take a larger load and can chew up waste a lot faster than the smaller ones, but a small one in essence can do the same job.
It is important that you give a lot of respect to your garburator. In essence, it is like a table saw in that it spins its blades at a high RPM. If you were to stick your finger in front of that, it would be cut off!