Two weeks ago, our garbage disposal went from making a satifying crunch, crunch, crunch, to a high piched whine. We tried all the home remedies – manually turning the grinder, pushing the reset button, hot water, Drano, you name it. The more we worked, it became clear that the red button on the bottom wasn’t engaging anything. It wasn’t a block. Something inside the machine was broken.
Then came the debate: who do we call to fix it?
We started Yelping for plumbers and handypeople. It was the weekend, though, and we had plans to head up to Summit County to hang out with friends in the snow. So we waited. Then the work week came. And we waited.
I knew I could call the handypeople, but it was so much easier to watch YouTube. I googled “How to Fix a Garbage Disposal” and a handy dandy Home Depot Video popped up. It was only 5 minutes long. How bad could that be? Then I googled “How much do handypeople charge per hour in Denver?” $65 per hour!
The more I researched about the noise the machine was making, the more likely it became that the thing needed replacing. It came with the house, and there’s no telling when it was from. The average life expectancy for a garbage disposal is 15 years. Ours was over 5 years old, and pretty much everything in our house was rode hard and put away wet before we moved in.
My mental calculator started whirring. Two hours of labor = $130. Parts = $100. YouTube made it look easy. Let’s do it.
I went to Home Depot for plumbers putty and a new disposal. $141.70. I had gone on to HomeDepot.com to check out reviews, and I saw the unit I was looking at was $99 online. It was $139 in store…but they price match. At the checkout, I learned that they don’t match their online prices. I should’ve walked away, but I finally had the courage to do this thing! The nice associate took $10 off for the trouble. Lesson learned: planning and online shopping goes a long way.
Taking out the old one was smooth sailing. I used our compost bucket to help catch the thing as it came down.
Lifting the new one in its place proved more challenging. It used muscles in my shoulders that I didn’t know I had. When I thought I had it locked in place, I went to reattache the drain pipes. The dishwasher wasn’t a problem, but the actual drain was about an inch too short! I tried taking parts off of the old machine, but I decided that another trip to Home Depot was in store, for an installation kit reccomended by another YouTuber. I had also learned that I hadn’t gotten the ears of the garbage disposal completely locked into place. I needed a GIANT pair of pliers for that. The installation kit wasn’t in stock, so I bought the pliers and some PVC couplings. Trip #2: $28.40.
Once home, my husband started to help out. The PVC couplings I got weren’t a fit. Instead, we needed a new 12 1/4″ piece of PVC to connect in the drain. Back to Home Depot for trip #3 with the orignal drain piece in hand. Trip #3: $8.75
Finally, once it was all assembled, we tested water through it the next morning and no leaks! I put everything back under the sink, put the plug in and ran dishwater…And found a leak! It turns out, I’d broken the plumber’s putty seal on the drain flange!
Off the new garbage disposal came. Out came the old flange and bracket. In went the new flange coated in copious amounts of plumber’s putty. Up went the bracket, then the garbage disposal. I reattached the drains – now the right size. Then I filled the sink. No drips!
So did I come out ahead?
Here’s the side-by-side comparison:
| Katie | Outsourcing | |
| Materials | $178.85 | $145 (Parts only) |
| Returns | -$10.00 | $0.00 |
| Labor | 6 hours | $130 – (2 hours) |
| Total Cost | $168.85 | $275 |
My savings over outsourcing this project was about $106 dollars, for 6 hours of work. I assume that a handyperson or a plumber wouldn’t have needed to buy the tools that I did. But I’m not giving up my GIANT pliers! Effectively, I “earned” $17.67 an hour for the life energy that I spent on this project. I also feel so accomplished, because I figured out how to do this myself. I’ll call this a win!