OK - I was sitting on hold last night, waiting for the phone company’s DSL Tech Support line to answer (took about 2.5 hours) when my wife called me down to the kitchen to put out a fire.
You see, she had turned our oven on to pre-heat and forgotten to take out some dirty dished we had stored in there. Long story short (too late!) one of those dishes was a plastic storage container and it melted all over the bottom of the oven and started to flame.
I put it out with baking soda, and we let it cool. Now we have a mess of hardened plastic covering the bottom of our Whirlpool Contiunous Cleaning Oven.
My wife called the company and they said that the oven is garbage (!) because:
[ul]
[li]We can’t pick off the plastic without using a metal scraper and that will scrape off the coating of the oven wall, causing it to rust. Within a year, the oven’s integrity will be ruined.[/li][li]We can’t just clean it because it is a contiuous cleaning oven, not a self-cleaning one.[/li][li]Easy-Off (or some other oven-cleaning product) will amount to the same results as using a metal scraper.[/li][/ul]
I am hoping that someone here will be able to provide a solution that does not involve buying a new oven - Keep in mind that the advice I received so far comes from someone who stands to profit if I buy a new oven.
Hmm.
So there’s some sort of coating on the inside of your over that prevents things from sticking to it? And you can’t scrape the plastic off without taking the finish off?
Has the plastic bonded to this finish? If not, then it would seem that you would have a chance to get the plastic off, either by chemical means or temperature. After all, temperature got the plastic there, I would think it could get it off.
But if it is bonded to the coating, then I would think it would be impossible to get off. And the labor involved in stripping the old coating and replacing it with a new one would probably exceed the cost of the new oven.
Just a thought, but what about cooling the plastic? I don’t mean room temperature — I mean REALLY COLD.
Perhaps start with just household ice on the plastic puddle. At the same time, turn on the oven to just a gentle heat and see if the diffence in temps allows the plastic to pop free. If ice doesn’t work, maybe find something even colder. I’m thinking of the same sorts of things one would do to get gum off an object.
Also, rather than try Whirlpool’s help, try a local appliance company. Often, they know tricks that will help. You can’t be the first person to have done this.
Good luck. Personally, I try ovens like guns. I was always taught never to point a gun at something you didn’t intend to shoot. The same philosophy applies to ovens: Never put something in the oven you don’t intend to bake. Of course, this has probably crossed your mind already.
How thick is the plastic? Could you maybe use a plastic picnic knife or putty knife to gently pry off some of it? Then maybe just regular continuous cleaning could deal with the residue? You might just have fumes for a couple of days?
Could you turn your oven on really low, and then use a plastic putty knife to scrape the plastic off when it’s turned to goo? That won’t get rid of all of it, but what’s left would eventually burn away.
Your ability to remove the plastic will have to do with whether the poly-propolyene (or whatever) the plastic container is made out of can be spot re-melted and removed with a teflon scraper or spatula or if the plastic has completely carbonized and is no longer “meltable”. If carbonized you only hope is to freeze the plastic with dry ice or a component cooler spray and try to chip it off the over surface with a plastic tool of some sort. A dremel moto tool with a brass brush and a cutting wheel could probably remove 90+ % of the mass of the melted clump without requiring that you actually touch the over surface. The remaining hill and walleys could be further carbonized to removable dust with a small propane torch. It might still be dis-colored but at least the oven would be useable and the surface integrity wouldn’t be compromised.
Try using a heat gun, available at any hardware store.
Or even a hair blow dryer, if it gets hot enough. This way the heat is localised where you want it and you can lift off the plastic as it slowly melts.Use a wooden spatula or stick to pick up the liquifying plastic,then just set your oven on high and open the windows to burn off the remainder.
…er
did you get through to the DSL guys or what? What happened? I can’t just sleep now?
Oh and the other thing? Liquid Nitrogen and a spatula. Just make sure you handle it right…
I am going to try:
[ul]
[li]heating the plastic just a bit (by turning on the oven) and prying the plastic off with a spatula or spoon, then[/li][li]using a hair dryer or heat gun to attempt the same thing, or[/li][li]the fancy, complicated, really cold ideas involving things only my chemistry teacher has.[/li][/ul]
Thanks for all the suggestions so far… keep 'em coming.
(I guess I could have called this thread “Evil Nazi Oven Cleaning”, no?)
I tried turning the oven on low… no good. It just turned the plastic into sticky goo and then it caught fire because the lower element was too close.
Bad result.
So I bought a heat gun and a plastic scraper and spent 2 hours tonight heating and scraping.
Woo Hoo!
I got most of it off and then turned the oven up to 500 for about an hour and a half. Most of the gook turned to char and we’re going to go at it tomorrow with soapy water.
