Illinois, If You Have A Self-Cleaning Oven, You Must Do This

Some safety concerns are part of your Spring cleaning plans.

When we're deep cleaning our homes or apartments, we're busting our tails cleaning the baseboards, scrubbing off mysterious old stains, or working hard to clean (my least favorite room), the bathrooms.

But one convenient feature a lot of us have when it comes to kitchen cleaning are self-cleaning ovens. A lot of ovens have the feature where they can get really hot and burn away any food that's lingering in it.

But if you plan to flip that on, you must take a certain precaution first.

Before You Put The Oven's Self-Cleaning Feature On

First off, any night after you've put the oven in self-cleaning, you probably want to just order takeout for the fam. The self-cleaning cycle can take anywhere from 3-5 hours. But according to OvenClean and Consumer Reports, there are a few things you're going to want to do before you switch on the self-cleaning thing.

A lot of brands warn about what you need to do before you put the oven in self-cleaning. You need to run a wipe through it to make sure there's no fats or oils pooled at the bottom. And most of all, you need to open up your windows first. Maybe run an air purifier if you have one too.

There are plenty of self-cleaning oven horror stories but experts agree that opening your windows before putting the oven in a self-cleaning cycle can prevent carbon monoxide poisoning. Research has found that self-cleaning ovens can actually emit carbon monoxide, which is odorless, colorless, and as we know can be fatal. Plus there are a bunch of fumes released into the air when an oven self-cleans that are just ick.

You'll also need to remove the oven racks and actually scrub those by hand, it's not a good idea to leave those in there during the self-cleaning cycle.

Happy Spring cleaning, friends.