Grease removal

[Unintentionally Blank]

I've got a turkey fryer pot that, after years and years, is coated with nasty baked on grease.

I'm also lazy. I've scrubbed the heck out of it in the past to get it clean and I don't feel like doing that now. Especially as it's been sitting out on the back porch for a month and a half.

Anybody got any easy methods for returning it to clean, pristine, condition? I have a pressure washer.

[Purgatory Creek]

My husband swears by this stuff for the grill. I've no idea how environmentally toxic it is, though.

[Valgard]

How about oven cleaner? I've used it to remove years of grease from an old Coleman stove and it also removes pitch from circular saw blades very nicely.

Scrape off as much of the loose crud as you can, then spray on the cleaner, let it sit and scrub it off with a scotch green scrubby pad (wear rubber gloves). Repeat if necessary. Rinse and dry thoroughly.

[Unintentionally Blank]

We may have some of the oven cleaner laying about...

Here's an odd question (on the surface it appears stupid, but upon consideration...) Is Oven Cleaner bad for the environment? If I sprayed it on outside, then rinsed the pot out, would the leftover water kill the plants where it ran out? Soapy water isn't particularly bad (the phosphorous...phosphates..? is supposed to help), vegetable oil is organic...so...would the oven cleaner be nasty too?

[dropzone]

Plain ol' baking soda. Moisten the surface, shake some on, wait a while, and the stuff will slde right off.

[Nametag]

That depends on the oven cleaner. Most oven cleaners are highly alkaline, and work by saponifying fats. Old oven cleaners used hydroxides, which would definitely kill your plants; modern "fume-free" products use lesser bases like monoethanolamine, which is still plenty nasty, IMHO. Purgatory Creek's "Power Dissolver" has both, as well as surfactants. Degreasing products like Simple Green or 409 contain surfactants with strong solvent properties, like alkene glycol ethers. Such products are made as non-toxic as possible, but you may not want to dup that in your garden either.

[gotpasswords]

I recently resurrected a grotty old barbecue with an orange-based cleaner called Nature's Orange, made by Trewax. Anything left behind was handled by Carbon-Off!.

Carbon-Off! comes in an orange can, but it's definitely not mild - read the label - gloves and eye protection are advisable. You'll need to go to a restaurant supply shop for this stuff. Try the orange cleaner first - you may not need to bring out the big, more toxic, guns.

If you're in an eco-friendly mood, you want to use as little as possible of whatever chemicals - scrape off as much grease as you can first. Hit it with the orange cleaner, let it sit, then agitate the gunk with a scrub brush. IIRC, the diluted runoff from this product can go right onto the ground*. Lather, rinse, repeat (Literally!) as needed. It took three or four rounds to get the really cruddy stuff off.

* I was working in a ratty semi-dead section of the back yard, so any grass damage would be inconsequential. I wouldn't recommend doing this in a flower or vegetable garden.