I remember Mom saying that a Disposer is "The Last Word" on kitchen appliances.

Get that Multi Cycle Princess (or Empress) next to that Disposal !!!

Love that Kitchen.

GE made some good disposers over the years and also some pretty cheap ones. The only reason they made the series wound motor units was they were cheap to make and took up less space. The series wound motor units were generally only recommended for new construction as it didn't grind the waste nearly as fine as the better induction units as a result they would clog pipes if you had older plumbing in your home.

The Carboloy cutter that GE added to their induction units is probably more of an advertising gimmick then any real advantage and performance I'm sure it added a 10 or 15% advantage but that one little quarter inch square piece of Carboloy sure couldn't have done much, I have seen older GE disposers with the carboy cutter where it was worn completely smooth. The real beauty of the induction units is the little square holes punched in the grinding ring those holes never really got dual and as a result the machines continue to grind well throughout their lifetime.

Even though these GE induction disposers all were quite good I would still rate the Maytag disposers the waste King disposers and the National-Kitchenaid  and the of coarse the In Sink Erator disposers as far ahead of GEs efforts.

That's a 1960 GE set kitchen; we've all seen it before in a multitude of print ads, sometimes it's Petal Pink, sometimes it's Turquoise Green. The oven and the dishwasher (neither Princess, nor Empress, but a very fine "Custom 4-Cycle" with Plate Warmer button) are without a doubt from that year. I'd kill for one of those dishwashers.

I'd love to have a disposal unit, but my septic engineer explained to me that disposers actually do too good a job of grinding food up into small bits and those small bits don't spend any time decomposing in the septic tank but head straight to the leaching fields where they clog up the works. So now I compost which is a smelly, messy chore that I do out of the conviction that I'm doing some small good for the land around me.

BTW, I'm told that the Custom 4-Cycle in the picture below is floating around out there. If whoever has it ever wants to sell it to a good home...

I have a friend in the UK who used to have a Waste King made in Anaheim, would be about 15 years old now I guess.  Very small unit with small grinding chamber and quite noisy but high RPM (I think about 2700) and used to grind very fast.  Would grind anything no problem.  Then she moved to a new home with a big ISE unit that was quieter.  Now she has moved again and has the TOL Insinkerator Evolution model which is very quiet and has the under cutter.

Here in Spain I have the BOL Insinkerator and it is ok but noisy and slow with Parmesan rind and also I have always found that BOL Insinkerator models struggle with lemons.  They do grind lemons eventually but they sometimes get wedged.  Interestingly I have never known a disposal to jam.  I have also never used a batch-feed model.  They are sold in the UK and Spain but I have never used one.  Never seen one in the USA either.

I did once cause the mother of all clogs in a vacation rental house in Arizona.  I put down a whole load of uncooked spaghetti and it did clog in the trap.  So I put boiling water down -- obviously a mistake with pasta!  The result, having left it overnight, was a congealed mess in the trap that resembled concrete!  Pretty easy to remove the trap, then had to poke a stick through to get rid of it LOL!  Other than that, I have never had a problem with clogging except I used to live in an apartment in Brighton, UK and it had a BOL Insinkerator that was installed when the place was built in 2005.  This would clog constantly even with the most basic small amounts of food going down.  I had to get Dyno-Rod out several times.  Presumably something wrong with the plumbing.

My best friend has the TOL Insinkerator Evolution 200 (known as Evolution Excel in USA) and I have the BOL Insinkerator.  Is the Evolution worth it?  My friend would say definitely yes.  It's much quieter and seems to grind very well.  She is very glad she spent the extra money.

Of course, it may not last any longer.  And even if it actually breaks sooner, you could still say it's worth it because it's so much quieter and more pleasant to use.

Some people notice that the sink drains slower and food takes more of a push through the splash guard.  My friend hasn't noticed this.  It's also quite a large unit and will fill the space in the cabinet below. 

I guess it depends on what is important to you and also what you want to pay.

Were cheap, noisey and crude disposers. There is a housing development [ Calverton ] near by where Kettler Brothers built 1800 homes from 1963-1969, they all had GE kitchens with a GE disposall, the first year or so had the GE induction units after that they all had the cheap builder SW units.

Over the years I have been in at least 1/2 of these houses and replaced at least a hundred or more of these disposers personally. The usual failures were, bad bearings, motors that went electrically dead, cutters that broke off the flywheel [ very common, and if you think that these things were noisy you should have seen people trying to use them with just one cutter, the water would dance out of the sink, LOL ] and they also suffered from really flimsy attachment clips that often allowed the unit to just start to fall loose from the sink flange.

The only good thing about these GE SW was that they were the first mass produced units that were basically corrosion proof in construction, before these came around every disposer had many parts made of cast aluminum and as a result most disposer failures were caused by corrosion and leaks. Because of this these GE SW disposalls could last as long as 10-15 years for families that did not use them much and certainly did not try grinding bones and corn cobs, etc.

As Robert [ syndets2000 ]  also mentioned these GE SWDs were not great at grinding food waste very finely, I have a comparison report from Maytag comparing their new disposers with all other popular brands including the better and cheap GE SW units and the difference in grind quality is huge. I also have a similar report from Whirlpool comparing their disposers with both style GE units. I also saw the CRs test where they complained of poor grinding and last but not least I have the GE service manual for their Disposalls where they recommend the SWDs primarily for NEW CONSTRUCTION, I don't make this stuff up.

Using a SWM for a disposer is a stupid idea, SWMs are great motors and work well in appliances like vacuum cleaners where they can run at near full speed and have lots of cooling air going through them. As mentioned SWMs do produce a lot of torque at a stalled condition, but doing this much plays hell on brushes, commutators and on the windings them selves especially in an appliance with NO COOLING system.

I am sure that this is one of the reasons that we replaced so many of the units that were completely dead, often the customer even told us that they tried to grind up most of a water melon etc right before it died. [ and yes we even checked to see if the over-load protector had died, we would replace the OLP if that was all that was wrong with the unit ]

I would have to put the GE SW-Dispossalls in the same class as their use of the cheap shaded pole motors in their DWs for so many years.

But after all  "Profits Are GEs Most Important Product" Along with outsourcing jobs to every country possible.

John L.

Hi Barry, I am really enjoying this conversation about different disposer designs thanks for starting it, but you have never hurt my feelings, put me on the defensive etc, I am only presenting more information for readers of this site to consider.

There are really only two people participating on this thread that have worked on hundreds and even thousands [ Robert syndets2000 ] of home disposers, a lot of the rest is just armchair theory and feel good memories of long gone failed designs.

Please keep the personal remarks out of these discussions, thanks John.