All of which, by the way, leads me to say - um, what’s so bad about not cleaning your oven? I don’t have a lot of spills, but I had my old oven (came with the house) for a year before I replaced it and never cleaned it, and now I have a self cleaning gas oven, and is there really a reason to clean it even if I did have a bunch of spills? Would it be dangerous?
Not so much dangerous, but when you cook, all those spills let off a lot of smoke which smells bad and fills the house. Not to mention that it could ruin the taste of the food.
Since I’ve worked in alot of Commercial kitchens over the years I yet to figure out this American Habit.The most I have ever seen an oven cleaned in in a commercial kitchen is a floor mop ran over the floor of the oven to pick up the goo from some overflowing Blueberry Pies.I’m sure a woman chef will respond soon on a different tack.Next time save yourself some time and money.Turn the oven to 500 for 10 minutes let the oven cool and sweep out the ashes with a small broom.
Doing the math for my oven:
220V oven, 30 amp circuit. Assume it draws a full 30 amps for cleaning, which I’m certain is too high, but is the definite upper limit:
Power = Voltage x Current
220 x 30 = 6600 Watts = 6.6kW
run for 3 hours, get 19.8kW-hours.
19 cents per kW-hour (the rate for Newton, Massachusetts), gives an upper limit of $3.76 for a cleaning cycle. Personally, I’d happily pay that much to avoid doing the whole Easy Off treatment.
Well, of course the manual would say that - the self-cleaning oven manufacturers want to put the chemical cleaners out of business so that everyone has to buy expensive self-cleaning ovens! 
In practise, it would likely be less than a third of that. Once the oven reaches temp, all it has to do is maintain it which, if the insulation is any good, shouldn’t take that much energy.
This brings me back to the continous clean oven which I brought up earlier. It is a coating that is suppose to allow gunk to burn off with normal use of the oven. This is for home use. In a comercial oven, I would wag that the constant use of the oven would have the same effect. Also when people spill things in the oven, it is normally at the end of the cooking cycle, and the oven is on it’s way to cooling off. In a comercial oven it runs far longer, giving stuff the chance to burn off.
I was wondering about that. I have a vague memory of some horror story that ensued when someone left the turkey in the oven and then started the self-cleaning cycle… and then couldn’t stop it when the heat and interlock were on.
I’ve never lived anywhere that had a self-cleaning oven. Does the self-cleaning cycle have an Emergency Stop button?
How does that work again? What is the heat doing to the pan?
The old-fashioned way to “restart” your pans is to build a fire, stick the pan in the hot part, and come back the next day. The idea is to burn everything off it and start over again.
For an electric, “fuse box” (or rather, “circuit breaker” in this day and age).
For a gas oven… good question. There’s electric ignition and thermostats and so forth; am I right in imagining that there’s a failsafe for when power is lost? If that’s the case, then there’s no provision for using the over when the power fails. Back in the old days, one could use a chimney match to start them. Of course my oven is electronically controlled, so without power there’s no way to even set a burner level.
On mine, I can cancel the cleaning cycle, but the interlock won’t let me open the door until it cools down to a reasonable temp.
I’ve heard that they can also emit fumes that can be dangerous to pet birds. I don’t have a cite, but I have pet birds, and I’d be wary.
Sailboat
Fumes from what?
I’ve heard the fumes from teflon (heated to very high temps) can kill birds, but I’m not sure about fumes from anything else mentioned in this thread.
Most every gas oven I had, well all of them, require electricity to continue running. Barring that shuting off the gas valve for the oven or the house would work.
Oh sure. It just seemed that some posters in the thread thought they were spending hundreds of dollars to run the self-clean cycle. I was just pointing out the absolute upper limit that the appliance could draw without tripping a breaker or causing a fire would still only be a couple of bucks. I’d actually be shocked if it’s more than 50 cents of electricity.
One time a friend of ours threw a baby shower for my wife and invited about 30 women from the church to her home. She was making an egg/cheese casserole, but accidentally set the oven to self-clean instead of bake. By the time she realized her mistake, smoke was pouring out of the oven and it was locked. The whole party had to move outside and her husband came home to a foul smelling house and a not-insignificant amount of smoke damage in the kitchen.
I don’t know why she 1)apparently engaged the safety lock to cook a casserole, or 2) nobody thought to flip the circuit breaker.
Well can’t speak for the safty lock (though one oven I had had a auto lock - it engaged when the oven was on clean and exceded some preset temp - if it failed the clean cycle would stop), but why not just turn the dial to off or press cancel? Resorting to the breaker or gas valve is more for when your oven become self aware and decides that human dwellings must be destroyed.
I’d better get home and clean my oven NOW, before the crud in it evolves into something that decides to do this.
I can’t answer #1, but for #2 I suspect that most people haven’t faced this sort of situation, so don’t have experience with how to fix it. And a kitchen full of smoke is going to make a lot of people panic, in which case they’d be unlikely to think to go for the circuit breaker.
I tried cleaning my self cleaning oven with soap, water, and a stiff brush. It got off some gunk, but it was still nasty- especially the glass in the door.
I decided to use the self-cleaning feature this past weekend and it worked very well. It took 3 hours to bake the stuff, one hour to cool down (auto lock disengaged), and about 3 minutes to clean it up. I did have to wipe up a tiny bit of ash on the bottom of the oven, and I did have to use a scraper to take off tiny grey ash flecks that were left on the glass. I opened a few windows and had two fans going in the kitchen to get the smell out during the process. The smell was totally gone about one hour after the cleaning.
Some warnings came with my 2 year old Kenmore Oven:
- Dont use oven cleaner
- Don’t use cleaning materials on the fabric oven door gasket.
- Remove the oven racks and stuff from the oven drawer- racks will turn blue
- Remove excessive spillovers on the oven floor or else it will smoke up.
- Outside of oven can get hot, keep kids away, don’t try to pry open door
- Move birds to a well ventilated room, fumes can be harmful.