Garbage Disposal Won't Stop Running

Garbage Disposal

• Your garbage disposal sits beneath your sink. When you turn it on, blades within the disposal unit churn and chop up any food debris that has washed down the kitchen drain. Water from your faucet flushes the chopped-up food waste down the drainpipe and into the sewer system. The unit is designed to run for short bursts of time. Prolonged running, like when a garbage disposal won’t turn off, wears on the unit and can cause it to overheat.

Causes

• When your disposal won’t stop running, the problem is electrical, rather than an issue with the disposal itself. The most common reason a disposal won’t stop running is that it is plugged into the wrong electrical socket. This problem commonly occurs when you’ve just installed or performed maintenance on the unit. If the disposal just refuses to turn off one day, then the entire electrical switch might have gone bad.

Solutions

• If you’ve recently done work on your disposal, look under your sink at the electrical receptacle the unit is plugged into. There are usually two sockets you can plug the unit into; one supplies continuous power, and the other supplies power only when an electric switch is flipped. Try plugging the garbage disposal into the open socket. If the wall switch now controls the unit, the problem is solved. If it doesn’t matter which socket you plug the disposal into because it still won’t turn off, then the electrical switch that should be controlling the unit has gone bad. Contact an electrical professional to discover the reason the switch has stopped working and to replace whatever is needed to make it work again.

Considerations

• Don’t try to avoid having to pay for repairs by just plugging your garbage disposal in and out of the electrical socket whenever you need to run it. The unit isn’t designed to operate for very long, so you will run the risk of burning out the motor. When you are crouched under the sink plugging the disposal in and out, you aren’t monitoring what is happening in the sink, either.