Friday, March 23, 2012

One Hour of
Wet Baking Soda
Is Not Nearly Enough!

I got an email from a man not too long ago
who stated that he had a big problem with
carbon build-up on the bottom of his oven.

His solution? Make a paste out of the baking
soda, and put it soaking wet on the bottom
of his oven for one hour.

One hour is not nearly enough! The baking
soda method of cleaning your oven works very
very slowly!

In addition to soaking with baking soda for
one hour, he went to the hardware section of
a store and bought some kind of paint scrapper
to get the black stuff off.

He said it worked and I suppose it would. Since
baking soda is a mild abrasive, using baking soda
with a paint scrapper might work.

For many different reason, I would be totally
unwilling to use a paint scraper on my oven. For
one thing, it could harm the oven surface. For
another thing, it is total overkill.

I wrote back to the man and suggested that soaking
the bottom of the oven with baking soda paste over
a 3-day period might make more sense. I suggested
that he re-wet the paste each and every day.

While 3 days is good, a week might be even better.
In any case, you are really not done soaking the
baking soda with water from a spray bottle until
the black carbon stuff wipes off easily with a cloth.

If it doesn't wipe off easily, you are not done yet.
That's my personal experience. Other people have
experienced the same thing.

Commercial oven cleaning solutions exist for a reason.
If you cannot wait a few days for your oven to be clean,
the best solution is probably to use commercial oven
cleaner.

Sometimes, when you are moving out of an apartment, you
do not have a few days to clean your oven. In that case,
commercial oven cleaner may be your best bet.

Every problem has an ideal solution. Baking soda is not
the ideal way to clean your oven if you only have 24 hours
before the job has to be done.

Ed Abbott

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Cleaning Oven Vents With Ammonia?

A woman wrote to me today about
her oven vents being dirty:


Ed,

I thank you for the awesome advice on cleaning
the inside of my oven with baking soda. I hate
the toxic fumes that are left behind from store
bought cleaners.

I do have another problem, though. The vent holes
at the top of the door on my double oven are an
unsightly mess. I have tried toothpicks and
tweezers to remove the residue, but most of the
accumulation is greasy and sticky.

Any suggestions on what I can do to clean this
area?

Ruth



I'm going to suggest something I've not tried
myself: ammonia and water.

In browsing the web, I find several sites recommend
ammonia as a natural degreaser. It seems that ammonia
cuts grease.

My best understanding is that both ammonia and water
evaporate. I'm going to speculate that that is why
ammonia and water are frequently used to clean glass.
Glass is not really clean if there is any cleaning
residue left.

Since ammonia and water eventually evaporate into the air,
I'm guessing that this is why ammonia and water make a
good combination for cleaning glass. Since the cleaner
itself evaporates, there is nothing left to stick to your
glass and streak your glass.

The reason I'm leaning towards ammonia and water is
because the person who wrote to me describes their
oven vents as being greasy and sticky. It
sounds to me like her problem is largely a problem
of grease accumulation.

If this were my problem, I might gather the following
things to clean the vents:

  1. Gloves to protect my hands
  2. Ammonia purchased at the grocery store
  3. An empty dish soap bottle
  4. A cleaning sponge

I would wait until I've used up a bottle of
dish soap. I would then save the empty
bottle.

I would then put on my gloves and take the
empty bottle and pour ammonia into it. I
might only fill the bottle half full in
order to make it easy to work with.

I would then pour small amounts of ammonia on
my sponge and start cleaning the grease around
my oven vents. I would be careful not to do this
to a gas oven (natural gas, for example) as ammonia
can be explosive if it is heated to too high a
termperature.

I suppose I might feel at liberty to try cleaning
with ammonia if the oven's pilot light were off.
However, if I was not absolutely certain it was
off, I'd probably be better off skipping the use
of ammonia altogether.

In any case, I'd use as little ammonia as possible
to clean the vents. I'd probably make frequent trips
to the kitchen sink to wring out the sponge and get
the grease out of it.

The whole strategy here is to clean around the vents
without allowing foreign materials to enter the
vents. Since both ammonia and water are said to
evaporate, having a little bit of ammonia and water
enter the vents might not be as disastrous as having
other substances, including baking soda, enter the
vents.

A special concern I have with oven vents is that
they can be the gateway to the air layer that
sometimes lies between two layers of oven glass.
You don't want to clean your vents only to see
streaking on the inside layer of your oven glass.

The inside layer of oven glass is unreachable
from both the interior of the oven and the
exterior of the oven. The last thing you
want to do is to preserve streaks of cleaning
fluid forever between layers of glass.

All of this is speculation on my part. I've
not personally ever tried to clean my oven using
ammonia.

I would think you'd want to be especially cautious
if you have a breathing condition, such as asthma.
I've read that ammonia is quite irritating to both
the eyes and to the lungs. It is for this reason
that I'm suggesting that you use as little ammonia
as possible.

That, in part, is why I'm suggesting using an empty
dish soap bottle. Just as you use a dish soap bottle
to control how much dish soap you use, so you can use
it to control how much ammonia you use.

One more note of caution. Never mix ammonia and chlorine
together. If I understand correctly, the two together
form chlorine gas.

When I was in high school, my friend Charlie did this very
thing. He was mopping the kitchen floor at the restaurant
where he worked. He wanted to improve the ammonia formula
that he was using by also adding chlorine to his mop bucket.

If I recall right, his boss stopped him from doing this just
in the nick of time. Charlie telling me this story in high
school was the first time I learned that ammonia and chlorine
together form chlorine gas --- the stuff used to kill soldiers
in the trenches in World War I.

So don't do that. Don't try to improve your cleaning formula
with chlorine.

All of the above is pure speculation on my part. In searching
the Internet for solutions, I found no solution that addressed
oven vents only. It seems that oven vents are a very special
problem.

I would be disinclined to use baking soda on or around oven
vents. There is a danger of getting baking soda between layers
of oven glass. After this happens, it seems the only solution
is to disassemble the entire oven door to clean between the
two layers of glass.

Please be cautious if you try any of the above suggestions. This
is all uncharted territory for me. There's a big difference between
trying something that has never been tried before and trying something
that is tried and true. Consider the above suggestions as suggestions
only and as something that has not been tried before.


Ed Abbott