This should get filed under “Why do they let people who don’t clean appliances designappliances?”.
You probably have an oven like ours, which has two panes of glass in the door. The vents at the top front of the oven door are there to allow heat/steam to escape, but they also allow any food drippings to slide right in. And the occaisonal spider web and pet hairmanages to get in there too. Sobetween the steam residue and the bits of gravy that manage to stick to the inside of the glass, the oven door rarely looks clean.
We’ve tried a few things. We once took the entire door apart, which took a lot of effort and well over an hour. We’ve tried a few internet tips. Using a piece of strong wire, we duct taped a cleaning cloth to it and gradually fed it up through the bottom vents bending and straightening it as needed. The wire had to be flexible enough to be reshaped as it was fed along, which meant it wasn’t sturdy enough to apply pressure to the farthest edges of the inside glass. And the cloth kind of just flopped back and forth on the wire. That left us with partially cleaned glass and lots of streaks. And once, out of desparation, we sprayed hot cleaning solution through the top vents using a garden sprayer. That actually worked best of all, but we had to put down loads of towels to catch all the water spilling out underneath but didn’t address bigger stuck-on residue that needed some scrubbing to remove.
After all that, the thought of cleaning the inside of the oven door always made me want to clean the refrigerator instead. If company was coming over, I’d just hang a large kitchen towel on the oven door handle to block the view.
But that was then. We’ve finally found a solution that doesn’t involve quite as many weird body contortions just to clean the middle of the glass. Using a stainless steel telescoping back scratcher(Amazon Link), a sponge and a rubber band (the strong purple ones that come with produce like asparagus), we can now clean the glass in a matter of minutes. The sponge cleans both sides of the glass at once, and the “fork” of the back scratcher allows you to put a little extra pressure on areas that need scrubbing.
- Attach a sponge to the telescoping back scratcher by folding it over the “fork” and securing it with a rubber band. Lightly dampen the sponge withcleaning solution.
- Remove the storage drawer beneath the oven door.
- With the telescoping back scratcher fully retracted, insert it into the oven door through the bottom door vent.
- Completely extend the telescoping back scratcher and apply pressure as needed to clean the glass.
- Repeat as needed through each of the three vents located at the bottom of the oven door.
