How to Clean Your Range Safely

Cleaning a kitchen range is not something that people typically look forward to, but it tends to be a cleaning task that people wish they did more often. When your oven range is clean and sparkling it can make the entire kitchen look nicer. Likewise when it is dirty despite spotless counters a kitchen can still look like it needs a good scrubbing. Here are some useful things to keep in mind the next time that you can get around to cleaning your oven range.

The first and best tip I can offer, that is not always that easy to follow, is that it is a good idea to have this task done regularly. While I use to attend to my range 3 or 4 times a year, I find it a lot easier to accomplish if I do it every 1 to 2 months, or if it simply has had a lot of spills. The longer you wait to clean up a spill the more difficult it will be to clean, plus it will get tiresome staring at a dirty range every time you have to cook, or even just enter your kitchen. Once you get a routine for kitchen cleaning maintenance cleaning the range more often will become a breeze and not a dreaded task. Other things can help with this as well.

Probably one of the reasons that so many people put off cleaning their oven range is because it can be a particularly big project. Unlike simply wiping off a flat surface, like you do with your counter tops, you have to disassemble all of your burners and drip pans and depending on the stove that you have this can be particularly difficult. However, my second tip is to stay organized and have a game plan. Developing an organized procedure will make the cleaning process effective and efficient. Determine the extent of time the process with take, if you know the drip plans will need to soak, do not start the process an hour before you have to use your stove. Make sure your sink is empty so you will have plenty of room to wash everything, keep track of which burner goes where and avoid harsh cleaning tools that could damage parts of your range. Steel wool should not be used on non-stick surfaces and any cast-iron portion of your oven range should be cleaned off after each use and maintained by re-applying a coat of oil to avoid rust and keep it safe to use. With a good cleaning procedure in hand all you will have to worry about is safety.

Perhaps this next tip should have been listed first, but by all means keep safety in mind before, during and after cleaning your oven range. If you have heated up any of the burners to make cleaning them off easier, make sure they have completely cooled off before disassembling them. Also, do not bring the plug-in burner coils themselves over to the sink, or you might be tempted to submerge them. This is absolutely not an option, since it will impossible to remove all moisture from the portion of the burner that hooks into the electrical plug on the range and you could shock yourself or start a fire. Since the cleaning portion is enough to keep you from wanting to clean your range you do not want the risk of getting burned or shocked to be a factor. This will most certainly keep you from regularly cleaning your range. When you get into the routine of cleaning your range regularly and by following these tips you can make cleaning your range easier and safer.