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How to Clean Your Oven

How to Clean Your Oven
Cleaning the oven with detergent and rag

For as long as people have been cooking indoors, which is a long time now, cleaning the over has been one of the most hated household chores. That’s not unjustified, generally speaking, it is very un-fun and can take some serious time to get it totally cleaned. The self-cleaning oven was originally invented all the way back in 1963 and worked primarily by heating up the residue inside it to the point that it would carbonize and turn into ash, which is easier to clean up afterward. But no self-clean can truly take the place of a solid hand-done deep cleaning. Your oven is a very expensive piece of equipment and regular deep cleaning is just going to help ensure that it keeps working great as it should. We’ve compiled some of our favorite tips here so you can get the best deep clean done on your oven. As professional Charlotte Maids, we’ve cleaned a lot of appliances in our days and are quite familiar with the best practices needed to get one spotless. A lot of people just don’t have the experience or knowledge we do, making oven cleaning a much harder and less rewarding experience for them.

Use Natural Cleaners

Right off the bat, you need to go ahead and grab some soda and vinegar to get yourself started. Since vinegar is an acid and baking soda is alkaline, using them together will create a chemical reaction that will help lift off those super stubborn baked-in stains that never seem to come off. Believe it or not essential oils are also great to use, especially the lemon variety since it acts as a degreaser of sorts. Your run of the mill cleaner isn’t going to be able to do much with tough stains like this.

Take out your Oven Racks

How to Clean Your Oven
Young woman cleaning oven, view from inside

You probably assume your oven racks themselves are pretty clean, but chances are good that they’re actually one of the dirtier surfaces in your oven. The best thing for them is just a good scrub with soapy water and a gentle scrubbing pad. A bathtub actually works perfectly well for immersing your racks in soapy water. If scrubbing can’t get your grime off, you may have to resort to ammonia. You can seal your racks in a heavy-duty bag with half a quart of ammonia and let it sit overnight. Then open it outdoors, let it air out, then dry it. Your racks should be absolutely spotless after that.

Clean the Sides

Start by adding ¾ of a cup of baking soda to a bowl, then add ¼ of a cup of water to make a thick paste. Generously coat the inside of the oven with the paste, you can apply it with your hand or even with an old toothbrush. Once you’ve covered as much of the interior as you can, let it sit overnight to dry. You can either scrape the paste off or remove it with a moist sponge/cloth. Repeat this step until the interior of your over is clean and streak-free. This should do more to help get your stains up than any of your run of the mill cleaning gear.

Clean the Bottom

Let your cleaners do the scrubbing and breaking down for you, don’t sit there scrubbing non-stop for an hour as soon as you apply your cleaners. One thing we highly suggest here is sprinkling on a nice thin even coating of baking soda. Then, with a spray bottle, cover it with vinegar and it should start bubbling. Let sit for at least a few hours before you wipe it up, and it should take care of any stains or messes on the bottom. The chemical reaction that occurs should help lift up just about any mess you may have stuck down there.

Cleaning the Oven Door

One of the best things for cleaning the glass inside your oven door is a magic eraser or other good quality cleaning pad/sponge. Just make sure whatever you’re using is non-abrasive and won’t scratch your glass. The main thing collecting on your oven door will probably be grease, and if it’s been a long time since you cleaned you may need to even invest in some de-greaser just so you can get it all off. You should get off years and years of grime and grease quite easily in doing all of this.

Don’t Neglect the Outside of the Oven

Just wiping down the outside of your oven can do great things when it comes to improving the appearance of your oven. If you do a good wipe-down every time you cook or use the oven, you should have zero problems keeping the outside looking fantastically clean. Don’t forget to take a look at the warmer at the bottom of your oven, which most people just use to hold pans. That can have tons of leftover crumbs and burnt parts in it, so don’t forget to give it a clean whenever you’re cleaning the rest of your oven.

Hire a Maid to Tackle the job for you

Oven cleaning is one of the most often requested extra services that we get, and for good reason. It’s a big cleaning job that, like it or not, will end up taking some serious elbow grease. That alone can put it out of reach for a lot of elderly or busy people, not everyone is able to do such work. If you need a special cleaning done, contact the organic maids, and let’s see if we can get you sorted out. Our professional Charlotte Maids come in and can clean out anything you need, from appliances to trouble spots if need be, just let us know.