As a mum, nothing gives you greater joy than serving the best meals to your family. This necessitates investing in the best oven. Even so, you, like most mums, might have failed to give your oven’s interiors a thorough clean. When you search online for tips on how to clean oven, the task might seem daunting and discourage you from taking some time out to thoroughly clean your oven. In the past, cleaning an oven was challenging for some mums. Thankfully, it is no longer so with the right commercial oven cleaner to ease the task. Cleaning your oven is not just about giving your mind the satisfaction of using a clean appliance. There are several dangers associated with the use of a dirty oven. Below are some of these dangers.
Greasy meals
One of the most disgusting things you will deal with when cooking in a dirty oven is its greasy and grimy walls. When using the oven, these walls only get worse. The accumulated grease and grime will drip onto your food, thus affecting its quality. Even if the food comes out of the oven looking like you envisioned, it will smell like something you previously cooked in the oven and somewhat greasier than it should be.
Exposure to germs
Your dirty oven can become the best breeding ground for germs in your home. When left unattended, the grease and grime attract pests that introduce germs in the oven. The common pests in dirty ovens are rodents and cockroaches. When you heat the oven, a few of the germs in it might be killed but remember that most germs can survive high heat. These end up in your food and lead to different gastrointestinal diseases. This means that your home-cooked meal can kill you when you have a dirty oven.
Risk of fire
One of the biggest safety hazards of a dirty oven is an increased risk of fire. When the grime and grease spread as you continue using a dirty oven, they sometimes reach the oven fan or heaters. At this point, the heater might start burning the grime and grease when you switch on the oven. Moreover, the heavy fan laden with dirt might fail to suck in the steam your oven produces. These two effects can ignite a fire in your kitchen. Unlike some household fires that you can easily put out, oven fires fuelled by grime and grease are hard to extinguish.
Release of toxic fumes
The grease and leftover food in a dirty oven will burn when you switch it on to generate smoke. The smoke produced not only damages your oven but also affects the health of your home’s occupants. This is because it comprises harmful gasses like carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide and sulphur dioxide. Other than these toxic substances, the smoke might contain pollutants like methane and carbon that harm the ozone layer. As such, you might be destroying the environment with your seemingly harmless dirty oven.
With the above dangers, you can no longer afford to skip oven cleaning. Thankfully, a good commercial cleaner can loosen the grime stuck on your oven’s walls, so you only wipe it off. If your oven is really dirty, you will use the cleaner a few times before you can get off all the grime and grease. Once the oven is sparkling clean, ensure you keep it this way. Some oven manufacturers recommend placing aluminum foil under the coil to catch drips, but this will not work for a gas oven. It is advisable to always clean the oven after use to keep grime from accumulating again.
