Hi fellow Hiveians,

Today I wanted to appreciate cleaning without nasty chemicals, using things mother nature gives to us!

Chemical Free Cleaning

I wanted to laugh at how some people in society have become pretty lazy when it comes to certain things, everyday important tasks like cleaning!

Sadly I didn't take pictures for the cleanup, so enjoy some other random photos from my photo library :D

The other day my wife was making some food for dinner, a common snack that we like to do is bake a sweet potato in the oven. This time she switched it up a little bit and ended up just wrapping it in aluminum foil and putting it on the oven rack to bake. What she didn't remember or realize though is that when you bake a sweet potato, you have to put something under it! Oops!

So my wife put the sweet potato in the foil, tossed it in the oven and walked away for an hour. She unfortunately didn't realize or remember that sweet potatoes tend to leak out when they are cooked like that, and sure enough the delicious sweet potato goodness leaked out, and onto the bottom of the oven! That ended up being quite the smoky mess by the time she got to it lol. It wouldn't be so bad but for whatever reason our son is traumatized by the smell of smoke and freaks the F out whenever he smells it in the house hahaha. I feel bad but it's overblown, really..

Anyway, that warranted that I would need to clean the oven before the next time we used it. She asked me if I could get some "oven cleaner" and she priced it out at the store to have me go get some. There is one thing that I try to refuse to do though, and it's use chemicals unnecessarily! This time was no different and I knew that I could clean the oven without going crazy and getting that nasty shit that they try to claim cleans the ovens, but also destroys your lungs and puts god knows what type of chemicals all over your food!

I immediately knew what I was going to use for the job and that was the most basic and reliable household cleaners: vinegar and baking soda! Add in a little elbow grease and you've got yourself some fantastic cleaning supplies for almost any kind of mess that you can conjure up! I'm glad that I prefer to use those supplies as well because we have them in pretty sizable quantities at our house, because they are inexpensive and they are also incredibly safe and easy to use when you need to do some type of cleaning like this.

I opened the oven and saw the damage, there was a few big burned spots where the deliciousness of the sweet potato oozed out and got burned on the bottom of the oven. I grabbed the loose stuff and tossed it before getting to work on the larger stuff and getting that fixed up. What I did was also just say screw it and cleaned the whole oven while I was at it. If I'm going to be doing some work like this, I might as well spend a few extra minutes and go all in, so that's what I did. I poured the baking soda and vinegar combo all over the glass door and let that stuff soak while I was also taking care of the bottom part of the oven. I made sure to be very careful and not get the stuff in the back of the oven, since this is one of those obnoxious electric ovens (I much prefer gas, so much cleaner and easier to use!) I didn't want to unnecessarily shock myself, and shocking myself with a 40 amp circuit that powers an electric oven is pretty brutal and likely deadly lol.

One of the most important things with this whole process is to just get in there with some elbow grease! I scrubbed the stuff with a sponge and a dish rag to get it off. I got the offending burnt sweet potato cleaned up and made my way to the next bits of other caked on crap at the bottom of the oven. What I learned when I cleaned one of the greased up pans earlier in the year was that a little bit of water and baking soda, with a rough sponge will clean up almost all of the grease stains that the machines have on them. If you use vinegar with the baking soda, it breaks down the particles a bit and gets it ready to clean and wipe up but the vinegar baking soda combination ends up just fizzing and foaming a lot. The baking soda provides the gritty texture necessary to really grind the shit out.

I spent about 25 minutes cleaning the inside of the oven, the glass and the walls of the oven. I used just water, baking soda, vinegar, a rough sponge and a hand towel. I cleaned the whole oven in less time than it would have for me to drive to the store, grab the chemicals and pay for it. The added benefit here is that the house didn't smell of horrendous chemicals, I didn't get any shit in my lungs that I really wouldn't want and I learned a little bit more about how to do some additional cleaning around the house! I don't know if I've ever really cleaned an oven when it comes down to it. I've given it a wipe or something but never really got down to the nitty gritty and gave it a nice deep clean. It's nice to do those types of things every once in a while! I'm glad that I was able to handle it on my own, as it also eliminates the possibility of my son eating food that got laced with that bullshit and that was the biggest win and driver for me to do this work.

It's all about the natural ways that we can do things, with the ingredients around us within easy reach! It's definitely a marketing ploy to say "oven cleaner" when all you really need is just baking soda, at the end of the day!

^-CmplXty. _{Real human written content, never AI.}

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