Oven Cleaning Blog

The picture here is that of a Smeg range oven door. This is the smaller oven door that sits side by side with the larger oven. The front of the door has been removed and as you can just about see here the inside has a middle pane of glass which has been slid into rivets leaving a small gap between it and the front of the door. 2 metal plates then hold the glass in place (in this picture they have been unscrewed).

Unfortunately these middle panes of glass are not only slid into place and held there with metal plates but  they are also GLUED into place which mean there is no way of removing them! This would be fine if there was no way of dirt getting between this middle pane and the front of the door but that is not the case. Unfortunately there are small vent holes at the top of the door which allow for drips to run down between the 2 panes of glass.

Smeg have confirmed via email that there is no way of cleaning this area as it is not designed to be cleaned. We can only assume it is a design flaw. Not all of smeg doors have this  design build, there are many that we can clean fully it’s just a shame when a customer pays a lot of money for a nice Smeg range and then discover that it is impossible to clean inside the door fully and be able to view what is cooking.

We had a lady phone up recently who had a bad experience of oven cleaning. A chap from the company turned up with an off the shelf  aerosol and preceded to spray the oven, shelves and door with it. Obviously this smelt the house out and was not to the liking of the customer whom believed that she could have done the same job for a lot less money. She politely asked the gentleman to leave.

Unfortunately the lady in question was some distance outside of  our catchment area so we referred her to another TAAOC member near to her.

The standard of oven cleaning has vastly improved over the last 10 years and people rightly so, expect a professional job to be carried out without the use of caustic aerosol products. Oven Ready never use caustic products inside a customers home. There are never any nasty smells left behind after we have cleaned a customers oven.

From time to time we are asked to clean ovens in strange places. Sometimes in the garden, sometimes in the garage, sometimes in caravans and sometimes on the pavement believe it or not! Last week I cleaned an oven on a boat. The boat was moored up and did not sway like I thought it would when I was trying to clean the oven. However getting in and out of it through a small door whilst carrying the shelves and glass panels was a tad tricky!

The oven was harder to clean than a standard domestic kitchen oven. For a start the oven was not the normal enamel. It was stainless steel on the INSIDE which meant it was very tough work to clean. We only normally come across stainless steel ovens on the inside when we very occasionally clean commercial ovens, such as the Nevada range. In addition the oven was slightly smaller and slightly trickier to dismantle all the removal parts. There was not a great deal of room to move in the boat which also meant a lot of jiggery pokery. The job was completed to a good standard, the only mishap being one of the rubber mats slipping into the water as I left the boat.

Moving house is one of the most stressful times of your life, especially when you move from a rented property. Anyone who rents will know that a significant amount of money is left as a deposit at the beginning of the tenancy. When you leave the rented property, you will want to ensure that you get the deposit back in full. As we know, only too well the house/flat is required to be cleaned to an exceptionally high standard before you hand back the keys.  Here at Oven Ready we can take care of the appliances in your kitchen and clean them to the required standard. New for 2011, we now clean white goods including fridge freezers, washing machine, tumble dryers and dishwashers. This not only benefits the tenant, but the landlord also, it will make every viewing easier to sell. A dirty kitchen in a property will discourage any potential tenants or buyers. So why not give Oven Ready a try, we can take some of the stress away from your workload at competitive prices.

It’s the time of year that brings a smile to everyone’s face. The winter and the long dark nights have passed for another year and the spring and summer is gradually creeping upon us bringing the lighter mornings and longer days.  The crocuses and daffodils are starting to appear and it’s a wonderful time to feel refreshed and vibrant in body and soul. It is a time of new beginnings, new birth and growth. This also applies to your home, a good old spring clean refreshes and de-clutters your living environment.  Spring cleaning your home can seem a major task to some people. You just need to find the motivation and of course, the time to get cracking. Here, at Oven Ready we can help take some of the kitchen spring cleaning away with our new concept of white goods cleaning. Not only do we clean your ovens, hobs, extractors and microwaves but new for 2011 we can clean washing machines, tumble dryers, fridge freezers and dishwashers.  Now that’s a big load of your mind. Giving you more time to enjoy the spring and the nice weather with your nearest and dearest.

Next Sunday afternoon April 3rd, the Oven Ready team and family members are all off to Wembley for a special treat to watch the ‘Mighty Reds’ (Brentford FC) take on Carlisle United in the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy Final.

As most of us have West London roots it will be a great day for all of us to get together and cheer on the Bees in one of the most prestigous finals in world football.

In true Brentford tradition the team that we all know and love wont bother turning up and we will be left watching an under 15s five-a-side team putting in their flatest performance of the season and losing miserably to another team from oop norf.

Nevertheless, many beverages will be consumed and the result will long be forgotten within 20 paces of leaving the stadium and heading for Nando’s.

COYR.

We clean these on a regular basis. These ranges cost a LOT of money so you would think that they are the bees knees when it comes to build quality and cooking prowess. However, from what our customers say that does not appear to be the case. Upon most visits to a customers property, the customer nearly always has an issue or has just recently had an issue with their Britannia range ovens.

I have lost count of the number of times a customer has asked me if I replace elements on these ranges. This is without doubt the most common problem. Nearly always a customer mentions the fact that they have just had to have the element replaced or they are about to have one replaced, once the range has been cleaned. If that is not the problem then the glass has shattered, or the attachments to hold the glass in place have snapped or the transfers have worn off the knobs. There is always something that has caused an issue. At £200 upwards to get a Britannia engineer to come out and fix a simple problem such as an element change and servicing at £180 these ranges are not cheap to maintain.

I have personally also found that when cleaning them, especially around the fascia panel area you cannot use any tpye of soap pastes as the paint lacquer can come off very easily and cause the fasica panel to look faded. The same applies to the painted extractor hoods made by Britannia. The enamel hob racks also looks very jaded over time and do not keep their shiny jet black look as you would expect.

At the steep prices charged and the pitfalls that come with them they would not be my cup of tea when looking for a new range oven to go in my kitchen.

January has been a busy month for us. Normally it is a fairly quiet month as everyone hurries to have their oven cleaned before Christmas, ready for the inlaws to inspect! People also normally feel the pinch having not been paid since mid December and then spent a fortune on prezzies. This year however has been different with many people deciding to have the oven cleaned after Christmas, infact it’s been just as busy after Christams as it was before, which is rare.

I’ve spoken to other business owners that I know, not just oven cleaning companies, and they have all said the same, business really has been booming during January. Maybe the feel good factor is back and people are spending again enabling the economy to pick up. Well lets hope it is and it’s not just a false dawn.

Now the Christmas rush is over I’ve made a few changes to the Oven Ready website while I had a bit of time on my hands. I wasn’t overly happy with the previous one as it looked a bit plain. I’ve smartened it up a bit and added a few extra images and some videos which demonstrate the oven cleaning process. I’ve made the links easier to follow and put some social networking links on each page at the bottom.
Iv’e tidied the code up a bit and used CSS for as many things as possible but I’m no expert and cannot do the whole site in CSS so still use table format which means the source code is far larger than I’d like and less robot friendly. Maybe one day I’ll get a CSS guru to re-do it.
One thing that annoys me is that the increase of the width of the page means that the flash image at the top does not resize to the new page width in Firefox but it does in Explorer. The only way to resize the flash image in Firefox is to clear the cache, so revisting people using Firefox may see the old smaller width flash file.
I believe it’s important to have a tidy, easy to navigate website as effectively it is our ‘shop window’.

From time to time we are asked to clean an oven in the garage or even the garden. Whilst we don’t mind obliging in the summer, we’re not quite so keen in the winter months! I cleaned an oven recently in a garden as the builders were in the process of fitting a new kitchen. I had no pre-warning and was led along the side of the house  to the garden where the oven sat on the patio.

It was very cold and the sky was dark. It was only a matter of time before the heavens opened. I had a double oven cooker with hob to clean before I froze or before the rain came down. The rain soon came and one of the builders put up the gazebo to cover myself and the oven.  Although the oven was not getting too wet I was, but no great shakes, I’m used to getting a bit wet when I go back and forth to the van. Being used to sitting in a nice warm kitchen this was not the norm for me and after time the cold really kicked in.

The double oven was a tricky one to clean as the main oven had a total of 4 self cleaning panels, 3 of which are connected together via corner brackets. The roof panel on these ovens is also a nightmare to remove and replace as they only have tiny pin holes for the screws and trying to locate them while you are holding the panel against the roof with one hand and then trying to insert the screw with the other hand can be frustrating. This particular oven had an  aluminium back to it, behind the fan, rather than the standard enamel, which made it harder to clean. As the oven was very old, the door to the main oven had 4 panes of glass and there must have been about 30 screws and numerous plates  all holding the door and glass together, probably one of the hardest doors I’ve ever had to take apart and then put back together again! The job took me longer than I ever hoped for.

Now it is November we are definitely drawing a line on cleaning ovens out in the elements.

The Ryobi CFP-180FM Flourescent Light is a great tool when cleaning ovens. It illuminates the whole oven allowing us to see exactly what needs to be cleaned. It provides more light than the standard oven bulb and also means we can turn the oven off at the wall. This prevents the oven tripping should we come into contact with the oven bulb whilst using fluids or wire wool.

Although I’m not a great fan of Ryobi power tools these lights work very well and are cheap, along with the battery packs, in car charger and replacement bulbs they are very economical. However in their infinite wisdom Ryobi stopped manufacturing them over a year ago. We have plenty of bulbs and battery packs but we only have a couple of the actual torches left. Apparently there was lack of demand, yet they still sell the spotlight version which is not much good to us.

Makita & DeWalt do a similar Flourescent Light but are much more expensive and so are the battery packs and in-car chargers. As an experiment I have purchased a £10 allin1 version from Aldi! Light, built-in battery & car charger. I don’t hold out much hope for products at that price bought from a non-hardware store but will see how it goes. Ultimately I will end up buying the DeWalt version, everything included at about £250. I just hope they don’t discontinue it one year down the line…

We receive a lot of phone calls from companies trying to sell us advertising. The truth is in my opinion, most advertising doesn’t work but the sales people have a job to make you believe it does.

Some of these advertising companies use underhand tactics and slight of tongue with plenty of jargon thrown in to try and get you to sign a contract. My worst experience happened back in 2008 with a company called Yellow Partnership. They also trade under other names such as Strawberry Education. They had some real fast talking, aggressive people hiding behind their phones lines. Like a some other companies who call me, they claim to be working on behalf of  charity organisations and a percentage of their profit goes to good causes. After receiving the spiel from their sales adviser about my advert being placed in one of their calendars or wall charts I said I would think about it (ie I would check their company on the net and see what experiences other people had had with them, all of which I  found to be very bad so did not get back to them).

A week later I received a calendar with my companies logo & phone number on it, which they had pulled off the website. It was nothing inspiring but it came with a covering letter thanking me for agreeing to advertise with them and an invoice to boot. The calendar was one of 200,000 that was being sent out to people in my area, allegedly. I wasn’t impressed and phoned them up to tell them I had not agreed to advertise with them. The sales person agreed and then went on to advise on the large volume of calendars that would be distributed, but would not give specifics on who exactly these calendars would be distributed to, just ‘people in my area’. Then the emotional blackmail with her soft tone and almost crying/wining type voice and constant repeating of “We’re doing this for the kiddies”. This can be very affective, unfortunately I’ve heard it dozens of times before from other ‘fund raising organisations’. Genuine fund raising organisations such as RSPCC just don’t use tactics like that.

In the upcoming weeks the invoices kept landing on the door. I kept phoning to tell them I would not be paying for something I did not agree to. The advisor told me I had agreed verbally over the phone and I was now tied into a ‘verbal contract’ which was legally binding and they have the recording on tape. They would not let me listen to the tape, they said it was for their use not mine. Now, if I had agreed which I know I did not then the simple thing to do would have been to let me listen to the recording.

Then came the debt collection letters and threats of bailiffs visiting my premises to recover monies owed. Then came the phone calls from someone claiming to be from Kingston Bailey Debt Collection Services. Their phone number was one digit different from Yellow Partnership so they were obviously in the same building  and collaborating together. They were loud and aggressive shouting down the phone at me. “We are going to bankrupt you then we are going to put your company into liquidation if you don’t pay”, blah blah blah. I couldn’t believe the crap they were throwing at me, they really were cowboys hedging their bets hoping that I would do what others might do and give in and pay them their dirty unearned money. I openly invited them to take me to court and to bring with them their tape recording of their verbal contract. I never heard from them again.

As an aside I did contact their Finance Director by phone posing as an interested advertiser and politely quizzed him on the percentage of profit that his company give to charity organisations. Needless to say he was extremely edgy and went all round the houses explaining what a great job his company does for charities and because they have new projects on the horizon he could not give me any figures for the current year. I asked him for percentages and actual amounts from previous years that were given to charity organisations and he got bolshy and wanted to know more about my business and who I am. He was never going to divulge so I hung up.

It is companies like this that give legitimate advertising companies and genuine fund raising organisations a bad name. For this reason Oven Ready never advertise with companies that call us. If we want to advertise with you then we will call you.

I have just done a quick google on the Yellow Partnership after writing this and have found that they were folded down in 2009 in the High Court. About time too, they traded for 10 years and took a lot of money from many small businesses.

http://blogs.mirror.co.uk/investigations/2009/03/end-of-the-road-for-yellow-par.html

http://blogs.mirror.co.uk/investigations/2010/10/two-jailed—at-last—for-the.html

http://www.blagger.com/db4/company_id/2652/companyname/Yellow-Partnership.html

The most bizarre thing happened to me yesterday. I was cleaning an oven and hob in a property that was being prepared for a new tenant.  I carried the racks to the van facing each other, as that prevents them from sliding all over the place when I carry them. I placed the enamel hob racks into the dip tank for de-greasing.

An hour later I removed them from the dip tank only to find they were stuck together quite rigidly. Normally they would just slide apart, be washed down and then placed back on the hob. These racks were having none of it. Nope, they were not budging one bit. The curvy parts that point towards the round hob plates were entangled so much that I could not move the racks up, down, left, right, away from me or towards me. I have to say I was baffled and had never encountered this problem before.

I continued struggling to pull/push the hob racks apart without causing any damage to the enamel. I figured that if they went together easily then they must come apart easily, but not the case. I thought that maybe the heat from the tank had made them expand slightly causing them to become stuck and washed them down with more cold water. Realistically there was no way the dip tank could  have expanded them though as it is only heated to 90 degrees.

Anyway, after 40 (FORTY!) minutes I eventually prized the hob racks apart and placed them back onto the hob. As it was last job of the day it didn’t have too much impact time-wise, except my chili-con-carne had to be left in the oven a bit longer by the wife. Needless to say all hob racks will now be placed into the dip-tank separately

As we now cover most of Buckinghamshire, South Oxfordshire, Berkshire and parts of the LU postcode area it is getting increasingly difficult to accommodate every customers required cleaning date.

We aim to endeavour to accommodate where possible. All booking dates are subject to location and as long as the logistics for the day are ok, we will be able to cover. At the time of writing this we are currently scheduling  jobs 2 weeks in advance dependant on location.

To avoid disappointment this Christmas we are advising our customers to book well in advance as October, November and December are our busiest time of the year. This year I shall be  calling and sending reminder leaflets to our valued regular customers to make sure they have the opportunity to have a clean before the festive season. Most are extremely grateful for this service as we do not like to turn away our  repeat customers because of the Christmas rush. The ideal scenario would be to have your oven cleaned after Christmas so we can get it looking sparkling for the new year after all the turkey trimmings have been devoured!

This week we experimented with a product called Avalanche Oven Cleaner. It is non-toxic and designed for domestic and industrial use. We tried it on two domestic ovens only, located in our garage. One was very dirty with well baked on carbon and the other was of average dirtiness equivalent to 6 months of grease and carbon.

The product has to be  brushed on liberally to a warm oven and left for 30 minutes, which is a bit too long for our liking, as it means twiddling your fingers while the formula gets to work. The product was applied fresh with no previous blading or scraping of the oven. Then a green scourer and wire wool was used to try and remove the carbon. Some of it came off in both ovens without too much elbow grease but there was still a lot of remaining carbon that was solid. So it worked in patches.

Other surfaces of the oven were then scraped and bladed and the solution applied to the remnants left. Solution applied liberally again and left for 30 minutes. We attempted to remove the remaining carbon using green scourers and wire wool. The ovens did become clean after some hard elbow grease, however the product is no better than our current  method whereby we do not have to wait 30 minutes while the solution gets to work.

Pros : Can remove some baked on carbon without any elbow grease.

Cons : Very expensive.  Cannot be used on the glass or aluminium parts. Can cause skin irritation.

Some  oven cleaning companies do not have the resources to employ office staff and therefore have to take the telephone calls themselves whilst on the job. This can prove an issue as a lot of people prefer to book immediately and not wait for a call to be returned possibly within the next day or so.

A small number of people do not like to leave voicemail messages especially when it is not personalised.  The same applies to emailed enquiries, if a callback or email hasn’t been responded to within a set timescale, most potential customers may go elsewhere.  We  have office staff available to answer any enquiries and take bookings during office hours and have been praised by our customers that they do not have to speak to a robot. Oven Ready prides itself in aiming to answer telephone calls immediately and email enquiries within an hour. We also have a personalised voicemail in the event that customers phone outside office hours.

We tested this product recently on two different ovens located in our garage. The product is similar to the product we currently use but has a courser cutting action.

Both ovens were bladed and then the paste applied. We got straight to work cleaning the oven as there is no waiting time like some products.

After 30 minutes dirt was removed form both ovens, one very dirty with hard carbon, the other only had 6 months soiling and grease. The ovens cleaned up nicely, although there was quite a lot of gritty resiude from the paste which took a short while to remove with wet cloths.

The product works in a similar way to our current product but it is twice as expensive as our current product. Dirtbusters paste has a nice lemon smell leaving the oven smelling very fresh. Overall we liked this product a lot and will be obtaining some more to continue further testing on different types of enamel to decide if it is worth persuing in the long term.

Pros : Works as well as our current product.

Cons : Cannot be used on glass or stainless steel.

Most self cleaning ovens contain liners made from a pyrolytic material. Depending on the oven there may be a cycle to run for a few hours which then heats the oven up in an attempt to disintegrate any carbon residue on these liners. Other ovens do not have this function and are designed to self-clean as you cook. Unfortunately self-cleaning liners are good at disintegrating some food substances but really struggle with others. For example they struggle to dislodge roast dinner fat.

We have spoken to a some of the manufacturers regarding the cleaning of self cleaning ovens. If the liners are not self cleaning any longer then they advise that they should be soaked in warm soapy water. If that does not work then they need to be replaced. If the self-cleaning liners are not removable then the oven needs to replaced!

At Oven Ready we place the removable self-cleaning liners in our heated dip tank for cleaning, if that is, they require cleaning. We find this works better than the manufacturers advice of warm soapy water, which we found did very little.

To clean above the grill element inside the oven we use scraping tools to remove the carbon. Scraping around and in-between the element taking care not to damage it.  Then we apply our paste and leave for a small amount of time whilst we clean another part of the oven. We then resume by scrubbing the paste using wet wire wool to remove the remaining grease and carbon. Any remaining solution is then wiped with a wet cloth and then dried. We do not clean the element itself as this can cause damage to it.

Some elements inside an oven drop down after removing a screw or bolt, usually located at the front centre or either side of the element. Other ovens, generally the older models have elements that just pull out. Obviously if the element does drop down or is removable then it makes the process of cleaning the roof of the oven a whole lot easier and is then just the same process as cleaning the bottom of the oven.