12th Nov 2008
People with three arms prefer Kenmore
I’ve cleaned ovens two ways.
- Incredibly corrosive chemical that made the kitchen reek for days but certainly did dissolve gunk in the oven
- Self-cleaning cycle, in which oven totally chars everything inside until there’s just a light layer of ash to be brushed out
There’s really no comparison between the two methods. One requires vigorous scrubbing and probably brain damage from the fumes. The other requires pushing a button and walking away for a while, with the added bonus that you can watch the burnt syrup from your Mock Apple Pie gently catching fire and turning to dust.
Either way, though, oven cleaning isn’t something that happens frequently even if you were to use your oven every day. Even a bad spill of, say, Mock Apple Pie filling, can still go through a few more baking cycles before it really needs to be addressed. The only compelling reasons to clean the oven (even if you have a self-cleaning one) is if it’s so dirty your house fills with smoke whenever it’s on, or if your mother(-in-law) is coming to visit and she’s one of those strange women who judge your worth as a human being by the cleanliness of your kitchen appliances.
Most modern ovens are self-cleaning (which makes me wonder just how old that piece of crap in my first apartment actually was), but it was still a pretty new innovation in 1971.
via Found in Mom’s Basement
One thing that bothers me about this ad: she broke more than ten fingernails while cleaning. How many fingers does she have?
I also like how Mr. Giant Face ignores her passive-aggressive bitching and instead concentrates entirely on the Sears service plan.
The oven/range in that apartment was like something out the dark ages. There were circular rings of rust around the burners. (We never could figure out why they were rings, with the interiors apparently undamaged. But it was definitely damage from the flames, since there was less damage around the less-used burners in the back.) To cover up the rust, somebody had tried to paint the whole enameled stove top with latex paint, which made a wonderful matrix for smoke particles to collect in. And inside the non-self-cleaning oven, the heat sensor was banged up and barely functional; to get the temperature you wanted, you had to set the oven 50 degrees higher
Old times, huh?
I wonder if Jim ever replaced that damn oven
Didn’t a burner collapse a couple weeks before we moved?
Did your new, improved self-cleaning oven burn off congealed grease on the stove window? Someone in my family roasted a giant turkey with prodigious amounts of butter 4 months after our new oven was installed 3 years ago, and there have been unpleasant and very stubborn fossiized grease drips on my oven window ever since. I even tried straight ammonia, which cleaned them up a bit but not the truly stubborn majority of the splatters. I haven’t yet run the self-cleaning function, but I suppose it’s worth a try?
p.s. Maybe it was 10 fingernails and 4 toenails that she broke? (How important was that clean oven, anyway?)
@Historiann — honestly, I’ve never had that much congealed grease on the stove window itself, soooo I’m not sure. But it’s absolutely worth a try. The gunk on the floor of our oven when we last ran the cleaning was a mix of pizza cheese, sugar syrup, and random other drippings; it’s all ash now. Give it a shot, the worst that could happen is it simply doesn’t work.
You can tell by the look on his face. Dewd just doesn’t get her.