Don’t Self-Clean Your Oven Before a Major Cooking Holiday. Here’s Why…

Self-cleaning your oven is a wonderful convenience. Gone are the days of nasty, caustic sprays and practically knocking yourself out with the fumes as you wipe the sludge out of your oven. Of course you want to self-clean your oven just before a big holiday or event....

Just heed my advice and NEVER self-clean just before the big day!

When you self-clean your oven, it will cause the oven to lock down and temps will soar up to 700 degrees or more for 3 to 6 hours and turn any leftover food residue to ash. This function makes cleaning your oven much simpler. This prolonged heat can (and does) cause failures. If your oven is going to go down — and if you are a believer at all of Murphy’s Law — this will be the time.

We always try to prepare for the onslaught of calls for self-clean oven failures by having plenty of oven parts on the trucks, but as we cannot have every part for every brand and model on the trucks it is risky to use it too close to the holiday as sometimes parts are not readily available!

Soooo, either use the self-clean function several weeks before the holiday to avoid any stress of parts not arriving in time or wait until after the holiday to avoid the risk!