[Georgie66]

So glad to have found this site......thought I was the only crazy person to be in this business!!    We mainly do commercial cleaning but one of the offices we clean is a letting agents and we have been getting a lot of end of tenancy cleans.  Can anyone suggest a really good oven cleaning chemical.  Have used the normal domestic stuff, mr muscle etc but some of the ovens are so dirty it dosent seem to do such a great job!! any suggestions would be much appriciated.

[John Kelly]

If you are going to do a lot of this work then invest in a good quality steam cleaner, preferably one with a integral vacuum. Good ones are not cheap but some at the lower end are just toys. The steam eats through the grease etc and the time saved will ensure the machine pays for itself.
In fact to give it a try, go to B&Q and by a steam wallpaper stripper with all the attachments which will include a handle with asteam jet, brush & scraper. This in itself will make the job much easier and will give you an insight into what a proper steam machine could do.
Pre-treat the cookers with a high alkaline de-greaser but beware of damaging painted surfaces.
Hope this helps.

[The Oven Cleaner]

If you do decide on a steam cleaning unit try and purchase one which allows you to lower the pressure, without this it becomes very difficult to see inside the oven chamber.

Before i purchased our units i hired one from HSS to see if it was a good addition to our proceedures. I still scrape and scrub the surface prior to degreasing and steaming to loosen any severe burnt on carbon.

Commercial oven can be tricky and can take up to 4hours to get a proffesional finish.

Hope this helps

Andrew

[The Great One]

Hi

Do not waste your time with a steam cleaner, they are crapus maximus, anus collapsus.

Even chefs use caustic substances on their oven (ovenu don't apparently?)

Anyway I have cleaned end of tenancy for about 2 years now and I use (caustic Soda in extreme cases) S20 is a caustic gel. All oven chemical are caustic even over the counter ones.

With these substances always use due dilligence i.e. gloves, goggles, long sleeves and a large plastic container for moving the racks around.

Regards

Martin

[Georgie66]

Thanks for all your replies, much appreciated

[The Oven Cleaner]

The debate on steam cleaning has, and will go on for ages . The machine is used to finish the ovens we clean, as i said above we still use good old fasioned elbow grease to remove the tough stuff.  As around 60% of our cleans are domestic we tend not to use caustic so its scrubbing and finish with steam.

For commercial cleaning there are alternatives to caustic, we tested Carb'n'off which is a solvent based cleaner which we found to work well, same safety precautions but a bit quicker.

And by the way welcome aboard from another newbie

[House Angels]

Hi

We use Brillo Gel Oven Cleaner, it is expensive but the time it saves makes it well worth while.
All the pieces then get washed of in a Brillo soap solution
Works for us

Regards

Terry