Two things before you buy anything. You probably do not need the 1 horsepower unit the salesman is pointing at. And if you live in a pre-war Long Beach bungalow with original cast-iron drains, you may not want a disposal at all.
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The horsepower question, answered honestly
Disposals are sold on horsepower because horsepower is a number that can go up, and numbers that go up are easy to charge for. In a normal household kitchen, a 1/2 hp unit handles everything you should be putting down there. A 3/4 hp is a reasonable step up if you cook a lot or you have a big family, mostly because the bigger motor jams less often and runs quieter.
A 1 hp unit is for a household that genuinely grinds a lot of hard waste. Most people who buy one are buying quiet, not capacity, and the quiet comes from the insulation and the multi-stage grind rather than from the motor. If quiet is what you want, buy quiet. Just know that is what you are paying for.
Continuous feed versus batch feed matters more than horsepower. Batch feed only runs when the stopper is in place, which is genuinely safer if there are small children in the house. It is also slower and more expensive, and most people find it annoying. Your call.
The cast-iron problem, which is a real Long Beach problem
Rose Park, California Heights, Carroll Park, the older streets running off Fourth. Those houses were plumbed with cast-iron drain lines, many of them still original, and cast iron corrodes from the inside until the bottom of the pipe is thin and rough. A disposal sends a continuous slurry of ground food and grease into exactly that pipe.
The slurry catches on every rough patch, and it builds. A disposal will not put a hole in your cast iron by itself. What it will do is accelerate the day the line clogs, and it will make that clog happen further out where clearing it costs more.
So: if you own a 1920s or 1930s house here and nobody has ever put a camera down the kitchen line, do that before you install a disposal, not after the first backup. And if the camera shows a line that is already half its original diameter, the honest advice is to skip the disposal and use a compost bin. That is not the answer anybody wants. It is cheaper than what happens otherwise.
The knockout plug, which is the most common new-dishwasher call in the trade
Every new disposal ships with a molded plug sealing the dishwasher inlet, because not every disposal gets connected to a dishwasher. If you are hooking a dishwasher into it, that plug has to be knocked out with a screwdriver and a tap of a hammer, and the fragment has to be fished out of the grinding chamber.
Forget it, and the dishwasher will not drain. It is not a broken dishwasher. It is a plug. This single oversight generates an enormous number of service calls, and it is worth knowing about whether you install it yourself or watch somebody else do it.
What it costs
- The unit itself: $100 to $180 for a solid 1/2 hp. $200 to $350 for a quiet 3/4 or 1 hp with good insulation.
- Straight swap, existing disposal, same brand and mount: $150 to $300 in labor.
- First-time install where there was no disposal before: $300 to $600, because the sink strainer comes out, the trap arm usually has to be reworked, and the drain height changes.
- Adding an electrical outlet and a switch under the sink where none exists: $200 to $500 on top, and that is an electrician’s job, not a plumber’s.
- Removing a failed unit and going back to a plain basket strainer: $150 to $250, and sometimes it is the right move.
The unit is the cheap part. The plumbing under the sink is where the money goes, which is why a first install costs double a swap.
How to not kill it
Cold water, always, and keep it running for fifteen seconds after the grinding stops. Cold water keeps fats solid so they get chopped and flushed rather than melted, coating the pipe, and setting up again downstream where it is cold. Hot water is the single most common mistake.
Do not feed it grease, coffee grounds, eggshells, celery, artichoke leaves, or pasta and rice. The fibrous things wrap the impellers. The starchy things swell. And nothing you have read on the internet about ice cubes sharpens the blades, because there are no blades. There are two blunt lugs that swing on a spinning plate and smash food against a grind ring, and they were never sharp.
Questions
It hums but does not turn.
Jammed. Kill the power at the switch, put the hex key that came with it into the socket underneath the unit, and work it back and forth until the plate turns freely. Then press the little red reset button on the bottom. That is a five-minute fix and it does not need a plumber. If it hums with nothing jammed, the motor is done.
Do I need a permit?
Not to swap a disposal. If the job means running a new electrical circuit for it, that part is permitted work through Long Beach Development Services.
How long should one last?
Eight to fifteen years. If yours is leaking from the body of the unit rather than from a connection, it is finished. Nobody rebuilds a disposal. Under-sink leaks that turn out to be the drain connections, though, are cheap to fix and get misdiagnosed as a dead disposal constantly, so have someone actually look before you buy a new one.
Related work
If the kitchen sink is already draining slowly, fix that before you add a disposal to it. See drain cleaning, and for a grease-coated line, hydro jetting. For what plumbers charge here generally, read plumbing repair in Long Beach. Back to the Long Beach plumber overview, or browse all plumbing services.
Send your Long Beach disposal details
Tell us whether you are replacing an existing unit or starting from a plain sink, roughly when the house was built, and whether there is already a switch and an outlet under there. Those three answers set the price.