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Nuts
If you ever find yourself about to dump several handfuls of peanuts down your garbage disposal, take a moment to consider how peanut butter is made: Handfuls of peanuts are dumped into a grinder, where they’re spun and mashed into a sticky, thick paste. And your garbage disposal is an excellent appliance-sized version of a nut grinder. Limit the amount of peanuts (and other varieties of nuts) that drop into the disposal and you’ll be far better off.
Peanut butter works on sandwiches and in mouse traps, but a disposal lined with peanut butter is a pain to clean out and a potential clog to your drain.
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Onion Skins
Chopped, diced, or in chunks, most onion waste shouldn’t be a problem for your disposal. The problem comes with the thin membrane that lies just below the dry, outer-most layer of an onion. That thin, wet layer is often removed before the onion is chopped, and thrown into the disposal. But the layer is so thin that it can pass through the disposal, missing the blades and wind up wedged in the drain, where it acts like a cargo net on a pickup, catching more items and holding them in place.
Luckily, it’s fairly simple to avoid this problem. Just drop the thinnest outer layer in the trash, or cut it up before dropping it in the disposal. It’s a few seconds of work that can save you hours of work or an expensive visit from a plumber.
If you’ve got a stinky dishwasher, here’s how to eliminate dishwasher smells.
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Egg Shells
Can you put eggshells in a garbage disposal? Sure. But should you? No. You may have heard that it’s a good idea to drop egg shells into the garbage disposal. The idea is that the shells somehow sharpen the blades mounted on the disposal wall. It’s hard to say where this theory got started, but if you stop to think about it, when was the last time you’ve seen anyone sharpening knives and lawnmower blades with a carton of eggs?
While eggs don’t do much to help your disposal blades, at least the shells themselves don’t do any damage. However, the next time you crack an egg, take a close look at the shell. You’ll see a thin membrane on the inside of the shell that can (like that thin membrane of an onion) get loose and lodge in the drain or around the impeller (the rotor that throws waste against the wall-mounted blades).
If you still don’t like the idea of tossing egg shells in the trash, you’ll be happy to hear they can be used in your garden.
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