When I bought my house, it came with a self cleaning oven. Apparently, all I need to do is push the “auto clean” button and walk away and in two or three hours my oven should be clean. My questions are: does it work, if so, how well, and how does it fare against a cloth and soapy water?
We’ve used these for years in three different homes (with four different ovens). They all worked very well.
If the oven is lightly soiled, then the soap and water treatment should work all right, is quick and does not use any electricity. If it is really grungy, the self-cleaning works wonderfully, just leaving a little pile of gray ash that you can wipe up with a damp cloth.
Because of this, we don’t use it alll that often, waiting until it is really dirty before running it.
Cons: It does use a lot of electricity. It does make the kitchen pretty hot (although later models are better insulated and not so bad), and each one we had left a strong oder in the house.
We always always set the timer to start it around 1:00 A.M. so when we get up, it is all done.
You have to set the safety lever, so the door can’t be opened, or it won’t work. Each one seems to have a different setup, so read the manual first.
Try it, you’ll like it.
It works, but IMO it’s a huge waste of energy. They work by heating up to 900° and turning stuck-on residue to ash. Any big spills and larger food bits should be cleaned out manually before you start the cleaning cycle. The oven has an interlock that won’t release while the temperature is over five or six hundred degrees, so your oven will be out of commission for about three hours altogether.
If you’ve never tried an oven cleaner like Easy-Off, try that first. That stuff liquifies stuck-on oven messes and allows you to wipe everything off in about 20 minutes.
Self-cleaning works by pushing your oven way past its normal operating temperature with the door sealed shut. It basically turns itself into grunge crematorium and everything in it that wasn’t build to handle those temperatures gets cooked to ash over the course of a few hours. If it is really dirty, it will easily beat soap and water because baked on food and fat is hard to clean well that way. If it isn’t that dirty, self-clean will still work but it will use a buttload of juice so you be the judge.
Just a note, I’ve had 2 self cleaning gas ovens (and one continous clean gas over - but that’s a different story). If you run the cleaning cycle during heating season the cost of energy is basically free - as the heat from the oven will offset the heat generated by your furnace/boiler. That is as long as you don;t superheat your kitchen.
This also applies for electric ovens IF you heat with electric resistance heat.
Self-cleaning is best done when it’s open windows weather. Depending on how tightly everything on the oven seals, and how sensitive your smoke detectors are, self-cleaning ovens can set them off.
We had a case where the homeowner set the oven to self-clean and went for a walk. A neighbor heard the smoke detector beeping, couldn’t get an answer at the door, and dialed 911. The homeowner returned to an engine and truck company, and three police officers, and was pissed off that we’d booted in their front door.
I’m probably an over-conservative safety person, but having my oven heat up to 900 deg F is not something I’d do while I slept.
God forbid the insulation was insufficient, or the oven was never properly installed, and it set your house on fire.
I think I’d want to keep an eye on my oven when it was self-cleaning.
If you don’t want to be around it, at least set it to self-clean when you’re out of the house. Then if your house goes up in flames, at least your family is not asleep upstairs.
Newer ovens have sensors that monitor the exhaust for smoke - the idea being that once it stops smoking, it’s clean.
This results in two things - the first is that a cleaning cycle will have a variable length, depending on how dirty the oven is. The second is that if you can pre-clean a bit and scrape out the big blobs, you can lop a significant chunk of time off the process and save some gas.
No, don’t do that unless you have checked the manual very carefully; most self-cleaning oven manuals advise you that conventional oven cleaners will ruin a self-cleaning oven.
The other problem with doing the self-cleaning oven thing as you sleep is that it emits a strong smell which would probably wake you from a deep sleep. I know that if I try to do it first thing when I get up at 5:30 a.m., the smell will awaken and greatly displease Mr. brown.
Its a tradeoff between chemicals and electricity. Personally, I’ll go with the chemicals. Think about it, you are paying $$ for a can of Easy Off. You cannot possibly be spending that much on electricity for self cleaning.
Except, as I said before, for many if not all self-cleaning ovens, if you use the Easy Off you will ruin the oven. If you’re convinced you’d rather get down on your knees with a pair of rubber gloves and wipe gunk out manually, go for it, but don’t buy a self-cleaning oven.
What is the wattage of a electric oven, that will help clear up which is cheaper (easyoff vs electric self clean). And for that matter gas ovens, which may go up to 20,000 BTU’s (both 10,000 BTU burners operate on one of my gas ovens)
It’s also a way to restore a really f’ed up cast iron pan so you can reseason it, FYI. I mean, if you’re running the self cleaning oven anyway.
Of course, you could put a telfon cookie sheet under anything you cook in your oven, and wipe up spills before they get baked on. Oven cleaning is a job that is easy & best to be avoided.
Just in case the OP doesn’t have the manual that came with the stove anymore: Our manual says to empty out the drawer underneath the oven before running the self-clean cycle. You should also not have anything sitting on top of the stove.
We use our oven a lot, and we have a fair amount of grease and crud build up in there over time. Running the self-clean for 3 hours, twice a year, is worth any additional costs in electricity (and we do always run it during heating season) so that I don’t have to have my head stuck in an oven full of Easy-Off fumes for 45 minutes. Also, the self-clean gets my oven a lot cleaner than I was ever able to get previous ovens clean using Easy-Off, although maybe I just have poor oven cleaning skills or something.
I cannot use cleaning products on my self-cleaning oven, so there you have.
I run the self-cleaning option two or three times a year, depending on how dirty my oven is.
Frankly, this is my first self-cleaning oven, and I never want to go back to the chemical method. God, I hated cleaning my old oven.
Has a self-cleaning oven been featured on an episode of CSI yet? Seems to me it’d be a handy way to reduce a dismembered body to an easily-disposable bagful of ash.
Great for grill grates too. I just did mine yesterday.
I’ll have to throw mine in next time, it’s pretty bad as I’ve neglected it for several years.
Another tip is to start the self clean after you finish using the oven. It’ll be hotter longer (or on for less time depending on when the timer starts) if you start the cycle when the oven is already at 350 degrees.