Today I clean Oven. Domestic victory!

I usually treat cleaning the oven a bit like I’d treat a visit to Chernobyl. I cover up everything. I put on long rubber gloves, I wear my oldest long-sleeved top and long pants, I put on a pair of enormous industrial safety glasses and I even put my hair up under a scarf like a good Soviet era babushka. I open the oven, I turn my face away while I spray the toxic sludge around and then I close the oven and rush out our open back door to gasp some fresh air and try and get the fumes out of my lungs. I do not like cleaning the oven; it always makes me feel a bit like I’m working in some old mine tailings slush heap or in an old-wold Welsh coal mine. You know, up to your elbows in toxic batter, breathing in chemicals and covered in filth.

Once I’ve finished with the oven I strip next to the washing machine, put everything in it, put it straight on and then I hop in the shower. Obsessive compulsive much? Probably.

But you know what? All these years and I could have avoided the chemical wretchedness of the whole process by using some simple non-toxic products. And the same actually goes for a lot of household cleaners. Companies want to sell them to you, you believe the companies’ slick advertising and nice packaging (although I’ve never bought Easy-off Bam because the TV ads make the man look like he has two wives, both busily cleaning ), and hey! the products do work. But in a number of cases so do baking soda and vinegar.

The fact is that a lot of what you clean your house with, you will also end up washing down the sink, out of the pipes, into the world. Not that I actually know what’s in most of my household cleaners. My Ajax lemon floor cleaner, for example, tells me that it ‘Contains cleaning and sudsing agents and solvent to dissolve grease. Ajax contains no phosphorus.’ Well, I’m glad a cleaning product contains cleaning agents, I’m really happy for it, and I’m sure sudsing agents are very useful, as is solvent. But it’s not exactly a specific list of what’s in the damn bottle. I'm glad there isn't phosphorous too – for me it just conjures images of chemical-ridden hollow-cheeked match girls going on strike in Victorian London:



But what has got phosphorous in it these days?

My Mr Muscle proudly declares on the front that there is NO AMMONIA in it, but it fails to mention anything that is and the Jif lists ‘surfactants’, polishing particles’, ‘alkalis’ and ‘perfume’, so really there could be anything in there. Does arsenic work as a surfactant?

Eco-products seem to be a bit more candid about what goes into them and my Greenworks glass and surface cleaner lists: ‘filtered water, coconut-based cleaning agest (non-ionic surfactant: alkyl polyglucoside), soda ash, corn-based ethanol, glycerine and fragrance with essential lemon oil. Contains no phosphorous. Contains no bleach’.

I’d rather use the product that actually tells me what’s in it, for sure, but it seems to me that even better than that is the product you make yourself from things you have at home.

There are a number of websites with information on how to do this:

http://eartheasy.com/live_nontoxic_solutions.htm

http://www.wendylsgreengoddess.co.nz/Cleaning_Recipes.php

http://www.bininn.co.nz/cleaning.htm

Binn Inn even has a cleaning forum:

http://bin-inn.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=14&sid=56a78285a35eed98cd77a15dcbf84e3f

Of course my house is full of things it would be wasteful to just throw away, so I decided to start with the oven because I didn’t have oven cleaner and I’ve always hated it anyway. I followed Wendyl Nissen’s instructions at:

http://www.wendylsgreengoddess.co.nz/Cleaning_Recipes.php

 and, waddaya know? It worked a treat.

I sprinkled my washing soda (you can get washing soda crystals from the supermarket, although I did have to walk up and down the cleaning aisle about three times before I found them) and baking soda mix on the oven last night and turned it into a sort of lumpy white slurry with water as instructed.

During cleaning

When I came back this morning (OK, early afternoon by the time I’d got myself organised) I added some vinegar on the really revolting bits, and there were a few of these) and I scrubbed all the black paste away. It was still messy, it was still a grimy greasy job, but I didn’t feel like I was about to be asphyxiated on poisonous gasses or suffer from chemical burns if a square centimetre of the stuff got on my skin.

After shot: I really should have got a before shot. I need to point out here that the oven looked FAR worse before I cleaned it, but I didn't think to take a before shot. Also the oven isprobably about as old as I am, so for it this is clean. 

 

It wasn’t perfect in the end. There were some patches that were just too stubborn for me to get off, but to be honest I don’t think that matters. What’s the point of a perfect oven if the stuff you use to make it that way makes you feel like an employee in a P lab?

I think I’ll be making more of my own cleaning products in future. The air in my lungs is fresh! The oven is clean (ish)! I'm looking forward to using the last of my commercial cleaners and never needing many of them again.