With summer behind us, it’s almost time to close up the grill for the winter. On occasion, winter grilling can be fun, but let’s be realistic, once that intense Canadian winter sets in, you’ll likely be leaning on your oven to prepare most of your family’s meals. While the passing of summer is always a bit melancholy, there are lots of great things about Fall and Winter. Fresh root vegetables are available through the winter and these are easy to season and cook and also extremely healthy. Baking is also a great way to pass the time and make everyone happy – whether it’s your family, your co-workers or your friends, everybody loves cookies.
It makes sense to grill in the summer to keep your home nice and cool, but once it gets cold, the warmth of the oven makes the kitchen a super cozy place to be. Hopefully, however, your oven isn’t heating up the kitchen too much – if it is, it probably means you’re losing heat that should be cooking your food, which is certainly not energy efficient. While refrigerator repairs and oven repairs are certainly specialties in our wheelhouse, we also like to impart practical tips to our customers for maintaining their appliances and getting the most out of them.
Without further ado, here’s a quick list of tips to treat your oven right:
How to clean your over: If you haven’t cleaned your oven since the end of last winter, chances are it needs a decent scrub-down. Here is an effective three-step cleaning process to get that oven sparkling and clean. First of all, you can wipe the oven down with a baking soda and water solution to get off easy to clean grime. Secondly, you’ll want to apply some dish soap to your rag and give the oven another wipe-down to take care of the grease. Finally, wiping it down with a mixture of vinegar and water will get it shining and kill any remaining germs. We strongly recommend unplugging your oven while cleaning it for safety purposes.
Proper self-cleaning oven procedure: The great thing about many convection ovens is that you can run the self cleaning setting to help yourself out. Just because it’s “self cleaning”, however, doesn’t mean you should leave the house while this is happening. The oven gets extremely hot, and you wouldn’t leave the house with the oven on, so run it at a time when you’re planning on being home anyway. Wait at minimum six hours before you give it an additional wipe down.
Don’t clean under the oven knobs: It can be tempting to spray cleaning liquid under the oven’s control knobs to get rid of dirt buildup, but it is extremely ill-advised. These knobs are connected to an electrical system – which could end up shorting out, or even worse, electrocuting you.
Lay down a protective barrier: If you’re baking something messy, like a pie or ribs for example, lay down some tin foil to catch the runoff that falls down. This stuff builds up over time, creating a nasty swamp in the bottom of your oven that’s not fun to clean.
Good luck with your new tips, if at any point your oven simply refuses to turn on and sits there lifeless, or if you are experiencing malfunctions that you cannot personally fix, call our appliance repairs experts and we’ll be there in a jiffy! If summer happens to hang on a little longer this year, we’re still on call to repair your air conditioner as well!
