Home Improvement Tip: Garbage Disposal Maintenance

As part our sponsorship of Home Ownership, we’re going to be giving a weekly home improvement tip here on our blog. Seeing as it’s week one, we thought we’d start with something simple: Garbage Disposal Maintenance.

Now some of you may already know the tricks listed below, but for those that don’t, try these over the next year to keep your disposal smelling fresh and running clean.

Tip number 1: Throw some ice cubes down the disposal every once in a while! (Note: you must be running cold water when you do this.) The common misconception is that doing this will sharpen the blades, but that is not the case. What the ice cubes do, is clean off any gunk or food that maybe collecting on the edges of the blades. This allows the blades to slice food better in the future. For those that want bonus points, make the ice cubes from lemon juice.

Tip number 2: Have you ever wondered why your dishwasher sometimes smells? The answer is your garbage disposal vents into your dishwasher. So if you’ve ever opened your dishwasher after doing a load of dishes and wondered why despite looking clean, they didn’t smell so hot, you now have your answer. The cure for this problem is to put some citrus into the disposal. Take either a lemon or an orange and cut it into quarters or slightly smaller pieces and then start sticking the pieces down 1-2 at a time and run the disposal. The citrus will get rid of the odor and hang around for a little bit so when you just turn on the water you’ll get that sweet smell as it goes down the drain.

Well that’s all for week 1! We hope we have helped some of you and encourage everyone to test out our tips this weekend!

The Official Sponsor of Home Ownership 2010

We are proud to announce: Back Bay Realty Group is The Official Sponsor of Home Ownership for 2010. Our goal is to help as many people as possible get into the home of their dreams in 2010 and we’ve setup some great partnerships to make that happen. As part of our sponsorship we’ll be introducing new programs and information related to home buying and home ownership for all of our readers. In an effort to make the home buying process easier, we’ll be upgrading parts of our site, and introducing new features so that you can be more informed about the process.

Throughout the year we’ll be posting information on what’s going on in the market so future buyers are better educated on market conditions, and we’ll be doing a weekly home improvement tip. This will give you do it yourself types (myself included) a chance to make improvements to your current homes to make them more attractive in the market. Most importantly, we’ll also be posting information on how to sign up for Habitat for Humanity projects in your area, so that even if this is not the year for you to move into a new home, you can help someone else do it.

We can’t wait to see what this new year brings and we hope all of you do too!