How To Get The Bad Smell Out Of Your Garbage Disposal

A kitchen is a place where families get together to enjoy meals and spend quality time with their families. But, once everyone has done with eating, all the leftover on plates goes into the sink and ultimately to the garbage disposal. Because of this, over time you will start getting some pretty awful smells from your kitchen.

The reason behind the smelly sink and kitchen is generally the garbage disposal. All kinds of foods go down there and get shredded into small pieces. The sink strainer covering the drain hole catches the larger food particles, but the smaller particles get washed down into the garbage disposal. If not cleaned regularly, these small food particles will start to decompose inside your garbage disposal.

There are a few methods which you can try to get rid of the bad smell out of your garbage disposal.

2 Step Process to Get Bad Smell Out of Your Garbage Disposal

Materials Required

• Ice Cubes
• Baking Soda
• Vinegar

Pull out the drain cover or retainer and if you see any dirt around it, then clean it first and also clean the area where this rubber retainer sits.

Step 1 – For this step, take a bowl full of ice cubes. Take a handful of ice cubes and fill up the garbage disposal with it. Now, switch on the garbage disposal and run the water for a few minutes until you stop hearing any sound.

As the garbage disposal grinds up the ice cubes, the ice cubes clean the food particles that are deposited on the disposal blades. As the ice gets shredded, the disposal will throw the ice pieces all over the place, which is nothing to be worried about.

If you have some ice left with you, you can repeat this process couple of times to clean the garbage disposal thoroughly. Ice cubes not only cleans and removes bad smell but also sharpens the blade of your garbage disposal.

Let us move to the next step.

Step 2 – For this step, we are going to use the old school method of combining baking soda and vinegar. Back in the days, as we used to make volcanoes using the same combination, the same principle works here as well.

Take half or one cup of baking soda and pour it down the drain. Now, put the sink cover back on and start pouring vinegar. Pour the vinegar slowly and the mix will start foaming in 10-15 mins. You do not want to pour too much vinegar as it will wash out quickly. What you want is to have it sit in there for a while to react with baking soda.

Probably by now, your sink will start to smell like vinegar. Now, switch on the garbage disposal, run the water, and let the mix wash out.

You could repeat this step a couple of times if you want. And if you feel that the vinegar’s smell is to bitter, then you can use little pellets that have a citrus scent. Just drop in a few of them and you are done.

Other Methods to Get Bad Smell Out of Your Garbage Disposal

1. Using Citrus Fruits – Citrus fruits can prove to be extremely helpful in getting the bad smell out of your garbage. It is a pretty straightforward method. Just take a lemon or any other citrus fruit like orange, cut it down into small pieces, and throw them into the garbage disposal. Now, run the garbage disposal. As the lemon gets shredded, the citrus scent will remove all the other bad smells.

Using citrus fruits is an easy and cost-effective solution, but it offers only temporary relief. If you chose to use this method, you might have to do it frequently.

• Using Dish Soap – Using dish soap and water is the simplest and most effective method.

Remove the sink cover and pour down dish soap down the drain into your garbage disposal. Switch on the garbage disposal and turn on a little bit of water. You will start to hear the soap reacting with the water to create suds.

The suds will form a coating inside of the garbage disposal and will start killing of bacteria down there. Now run some more water and you will see that the suds start to come through the sink drains which means these suds are making their way through the rest of the pipes in the system. They are not only cleaning your garbage disposal but also your pipes.

Cleaning your garbage disposal regularly is extremely important to get rid of the bad smell. Next time your kitchen starts to smell bad, just ask yourself when was the last time you cleaned your garbage disposal.