Waste King Appliance Repair In Vancouver

A jam. The motor is energised and the grind plate cannot rotate. Switch it off at the wall before doing anything else - leaving it humming will trip the overload at best and cook the windings at worst.

Waste King units take a hex wrench in the centre of the underside. Work it back and forth until the plate frees. Then press the reset button, also on the underside, which will have tripped. This clears the large majority of jams with no parts and no visit.

No hum means no power reaching the motor, which is a different fault from a jam. Check the reset button first - it trips on overload and stays tripped. Then the breaker, then the switch, and on units wired to a plug under the sink, the outlet itself.

If power is confirmed at the unit and it is still dead, the motor or its internal overload has failed. On a disposal that is usually the point where replacement beats repair, and we will say so rather than quoting a motor.

The leak location tells you the cost. At the sink flange on top, the plumber's putty seal has failed - the unit comes down, gets re-bedded and goes back, and the disposal itself is fine. At the dishwasher inlet or the discharge elbow, it is a gasket or a cracked elbow, both inexpensive. From the bottom of the casing, the internal seal has gone and water is getting into the motor. That one is not repairable and the unit needs replacing.

We identify which before quoting, because owners are routinely sold a new disposal for a flange seal that costs almost nothing to put right.

This is not a disposal fault at all but it presents as one. A new Waste King ships with a knockout plug sealing the dishwasher inlet, and it has to be driven out before a dishwasher can drain through it. Miss that step and the dishwasher backs up on every cycle while the disposal works perfectly.

It is a two-minute fix with a screwdriver and a hammer, and the plug must be retrieved from inside the grind chamber afterwards or it becomes the next jam. If your dishwasher started reporting a drain fault immediately after an install, check this first.

Usually something in the chamber that should not be - a bottle cap, a spoon, a piece of bone. Kill the power at the breaker, look inside with a torch, and retrieve it with tongs rather than fingers.

If the chamber is clear and it still grinds, the impellers or the bearing have worn. On the permanent magnet Legend units a worn bearing is audible well before failure, and at that point replacement is almost always the economic answer.

Look past the disposal. A slow drain with a working disposal is a blockage downstream in the trap or the branch, and it will not improve with a new unit. Running the disposal hard against a blocked drain pushes ground waste further into the restriction and makes it worse.

On a septic system it is worth dealing with promptly rather than living with. More on garburator repair.