Self-Cleaning Before The Holiday Can Lead To Disaster!

As the holiday season approaches, everyone is making plans for friends and family to visit; this means large gatherings, meals, parties, etc. Basically, who ever is hosting that year is putting their house on display more during these holidays than any other time of the year. This much traffic in the house only means one thing to several home owners: TIME TO CLEAN!

Of course the rest of the house will be eyed top-to-bottom to be cleaned, fixed, adjusted, etc. But one single appliance, in one single room tends to get a lot of this attention during the holidays as it is the star of all these shenanigans - the all mighty oven. Unfortunately, it typically gets thought of to be cleaned last minute. As the month of November flies by and you get caught up in ensuring the cleanliness of the entire house; typically a day or two before the feast is when it finally comes to thought that maybe the oven should get cleaned. "Oh, well I have a self-cleaning oven," you might think. DON'T DO IT!

As convenient as the self-cleaning feature sounds in the moment of panic, it is a bad idea to use this feature the day right before the festivities. If you are going to use this feature, make sure  you use it a couple WEEKS before, and this is why...

Self cleaning ovens typically reach more than nearly triple the temperature during the cleaning process - this is very hard on your oven. Using the self-cleaning feature usually leads to some kind of oven complication, whether it be blowing a fuse, breaking the handle, or any other sort of damage. It is very common for something to break or go wrong, which means you will have to have time for repairs. People don't normally think about allowing time for repairs "because their ovens are too reliable and haven't had anything go wrong before", but if you break the oven before the day of the feast, you've got a huge problem on your hands.

My point is, if you're going to use the self-clean option, please make sure to do it several weeks before the event. Don't worry, if you forget, you can always look up homemade recipes that will be safe to use in your oven that will take care of the mess without creating a new problem. You  might have to use a little elbow grease, but that's a lot cheaper and way more convenient than purchasing a new oven or a service call.