Monday, December 3, 2007

Dirty Jobs, Cleaning the oven

My oven, has been happily cooking stuff for about a year, getting cruddier and cruddier as time went on. It finally got so bad as to offend even me. I'm not a real neatnik. Christ on crutch. I needed a 1/4" Spintite, pair of long nose pliers, razor blade window scraper, shop vac, mechanic's trouble light, to say nothing of the old standbys, Easy-Off, rags, Brillo, and newspapers. Took all afternoon. It's gonna have to get really cruddy before I do this again. The Eazy-OFF does awful things to your hands.
Just out of curiosity, why, after doing the outside of the range in white, can't they do the inside of the oven in white, giving you half a chance to see what you are doing while cleaning? I had to use one hand to hold the trouble light so I could see, and the other hand to wipe the brown slime of spent Easy-Off out of the oven. If the damn thing was done in white porcelain instead of dark gray, so you could see something, I could have used two hands to wipe off, and not needed the trouble light that I use working underneath cars.
Why not have a plug and socket for the bottom oven heating element? To remove said element, so I could d0 the oven floor, I had to undo a pair of sheet metal screws with the Spintite, reach both arms into the dirty oven to wrassle the brass terminal lugs off the heating element, and then go fishing for the wires which immediately buried them selves in the fiber glass insulation behind the back wall of the oven.
Granted, it's a 24 inch range, a size only purchased by builders, which means it's made as cheaply as possible. Real consumers who buy ranges, always have enough kitchen to take a 36" standard range. So all the fanciness, automatic cleaning, continuous cleaning, stuff is only available on the larger range. If you have a compact kitchen, that needs a 24" mini range, you are SOL for auto clean ovens. Back to the Easy-Off, you peasant you.
How about some clever designer doing a removable oven. Make the oven liner is a one piece steel stamping that slides clean out of the oven for cleaning. Take it outside, spray on the Easy-Off, and then take the garden hose to rinse the slime off. Is that so hard?
Women do the bulk of American oven cleaning. Does the fair sex have some secret for cleaning el cheapo ovens that they are hiding from us bachelors? Do they have the tools to pull the bottom heating element or do they just wipe around it?

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