What a garbage disposal service call actually covers
Under the kitchen sink, a disposal is a motor, a grind chamber and a set of connections to the drain and (usually) the dishwasher line. When something's wrong it's almost always one of five things: it hums but the flywheel won't turn (jam or seized bearing), it trips the reset button and won't restart, it leaks from the bottom (worn seal, common once a unit passes ten years), it leaks from the sink flange (failed plumber's putty or a cracked mount), or it's just dead — no hum, no lights, nothing.
Sheltons Construction handles both ends of that: freeing a jam and resealing a mount takes minutes and saves the unit; a dead or corroded disposal gets pulled and replaced with a properly sized one, connected correctly to the dishwasher drain and disposal with a new trap if the old one's degraded.
When do you actually need this, versus just waiting it out?
- The unit hums but doesn't spin — don't keep hitting the switch, that burns the motor out. This is often a five-minute fix with an Allen wrench in the bottom port.
- Water pools under the sink after you run it — a leaking disposal left alone will eventually soak the cabinet floor and start rotting the particleboard base, common under older Portland kitchen sinks.
- It trips the breaker or reset button repeatedly — sign of a failing motor or something jammed against the grind ring.
- It's original to a house built before 2010 — most disposals run 8–12 years. If it's original and struggling, replacing before it fails on Thanksgiving is the cheaper path.
- You're remodeling the kitchen — new sink, new disposal, sized for the household, done in one trip. See kitchen plumbing.
- No disposal at all and you want one added — needs the right outlet wiring and drain configuration; we check both before quoting.
If the smell, backup, or leak looks bigger than the disposal itself — slow drains elsewhere in the kitchen, gurgling, or standing water — that may be a drain line problem, not the unit. See drain cleaning or, for a look at what's actually happening in the pipe, sewer camera inspection.
How the visit goes
We ask what's happening — humming, leaking, dead, smell — before we arrive, so we bring the right parts. On site: test the unit, check the mount and connections, run water through it to confirm the leak source. If it's a jam or seal, we fix it there. If it needs replacing, we pull the old unit, match the new one to your sink's mounting style and your dishwasher's drain hookup, install, and run it under load before we call it done. Most disposal calls — repair or replace — finish in one visit.
What affects the scope of the job
- Age and mounting style of the current unit. Older three-bolt mounts and newer quick-lock mounts aren't interchangeable with every replacement disposal; sometimes the sink flange has to come off too.
- Horsepower needed. A single-person kitchen and a household that runs a disposal daily with a garden or a lot of cooking scraps need different motors. We size it to use, not just swap like-for-like.
- Dishwasher connection. If there's a dishwasher, the disposal has a knockout plug that has to be removed correctly and the drain hose reseated — missed on cheap installs and a common cause of dishwasher leaks later.
- Cabinet and plumbing condition underneath. Corroded shutoff valves or an old trap sometimes need replacing at the same time to do the job right, which we'll flag before starting, not after.
- Electrical. Adding a disposal where there wasn't one before, or replacing a hardwired unit with a cord-and-plug model, can mean an outlet or switch adjustment.
What's specific to Portland kitchens and water
A lot of the metro's housing stock — Southeast and North Portland bungalows, Craftsman kitchens in Milwaukie and Sellwood, older ranch homes further out in Gresham and Clackamas — has cabinets and undersink plumbing that were never built with a disposal in mind. Mounting hardware, outlet placement and trap height often need adjusting on a retrofit, not just a straight swap.
Portland's water is soft, which is easy on disposal motors and seals compared to hard-water cities, but soft water doesn't stop grease and fibrous scraps (celery, corn husks, coffee grounds) from building up in the drain line past the disposal — a factor in why a "disposal problem" is sometimes actually a drain problem further down. In older homes with original cast iron or undersized drain lines, we'll say so before installing a disposal that'll just back up behind a bottleneck it can't fix.
Why call Sheltons Construction
Sheltons Construction is the Oregon plumbing license working Portland, Beaverton, Hillsboro, Gresham, Tigard, Tualatin, Lake Oswego, West Linn, Oregon City, Milwaukie, Happy Valley, Clackamas, Wilsonville, Troutdale, Sherwood and Salem. We diagnose before we quote, size the unit to the household instead of defaulting to the priciest model, and check the drain and dishwasher connections while we're already under the sink — not just the disposal in isolation.
What to do now
If it's humming and won't turn, stop flipping the switch and contact us — that's often a same-visit fix. If it's dead, leaking, or original to the house, we'll quote a straight swap. If water's actively pooling under the cabinet or backing up elsewhere in the kitchen, treat it as emergency plumbing and call. Check our FAQ for more on how visits and pricing factors work.
We serve the disposal and full kitchen plumbing needs of homeowners across Portland, Beaverton, Hillsboro, Gresham, Tigard, Tualatin, Lake Oswego, West Linn, Oregon City, Milwaukie, Happy Valley, Clackamas, Wilsonville, and Troutdale.
Related work we also handle in the kitchen and beyond: faucets & fixtures, water pressure problems, leak detection & pipe repair, toilet repair & installation, bathroom plumbing, whole-home repiping, sewer line repair, hydro jetting, water heater repair & installation, and tankless water heaters.