Hoping to take on an oven clean? Here’s a couple of tips we’ve gleaned from years of experience.
Everyone knows that smell.. the pool of a sticky or fatty spillage smoking in the bottom of the oven when it gets hot. Even if you haven’t got time to go for a thorough clean, get a few pieces of kitchen towel and mop up the worst of the spillage before you turn the oven on again – the more times you ‘cook’ that spillage the harder it will be to get off. Better still, prevent spillage by putting a baking tray underneath the usual suspects.
Stick it to the sticky stuff
A Which? Best Buy report from 2012 rates the leave-it-over-night gel cleaners as generally the best performers, heralding Oven Pride as the most widely available top product for its removal of tough baked on grime, a little bit of scrubbing will still be needed on the oven walls of course. In my time, when I had to get an oven done without the luxury of leaving it over night I used to use Mr Muscle Oven Cleaner and leave the spray foam to soak but this still requires a lot of elbow grease to help Mr. Muscle’s muscles along. All of these products use caustic chemicals to dissolve the dirt, leaving a very bad smell in the air and risk of damage to your clothes and any other surfaces that are not the inside of your oven. It can also mean that your oven will smell for a few days while the chemicals in your oven burn off, even with plenty of rinsing this is hard to avoid.
Eco alternatives
To eradicate the need for chemicals you must to start as you mean to go on: cleaning your oven on a monthly or bi-monthly basis. Although there are many eco-alterntives on the market, none of them can cut through hard burnt on grease to the same extent as sodium alkyl ethoxy sulphate and sodium hydroxide.
There are a few brands who offer a mineral based paste that you can spread on and wipe off, normally made of a vegetable soap and mineral abrasive, here’s one from Astonish. Or you can make your own paste with bicarbonate of soda and ‘bake’ it on. If you are planning on doing the scrubbing regularly, you might want to soften the grime first by putting a bowl of water in the oven and setting it to 100℃ for 30 mins to steam, this also works well in microwave ovens on a short 4 or 5 minute setting.
Oven cleaning is one of our Helpful Add-on Services.
When you speak to your cleaning manager they can arrange for this to be added to an existing clean for an extra cost, some of our other add-ons include cleaning blinds, taking duvets to the laundry or washing down walls; those jobs that no-one ever seems to have the time to do.
