Goo Gone Oven Cleaner

Overall rating: 3 out of 5

We just moved to this duplex and I swear, the oven here us about 30 years old, if not older. It is the same as what my mom had when we moved into our house 20 years ago. It is one of those really old, dial style General Electric. It works pretty well except it is really hard to regulate the heat.

Anyway, so this stove has been used, and that is easy to tell. Used and cooked and I do not know if it has every really been cleaned. The grease and stains are literally "baked" on. So, we headed out to the store for an oven cleaner that had mild to no fumes because of our little girl. So we saw the Goo Gone Oven Cleaner and decided to give it a go.

 Here is our background with Goo Gone, though. My husband and my mom love the brand, swear by it almost. I, on the other hand, am not so convinced. My last job before I became a stay at home mom was in a retail drug store. On my days that I was exhausted from carrying a growing child inside my belly, and did not want to do anything strenuous, I would clean the shelf strips. We were told to use Goo Gone to get the sticky off of the strips, but I would use rubbing alcohol because I would have to scrub with Goo Gone to get the sticky off and then the paper towel would be destroyed in no time and I want to conserve the paper towels. Plus it would leave behind some residue that made the strips look even worse. The rubbing alcohol on the other hand, seemed to work so much better it was quick, easy and the paper towel lasted so much longer.

So in our experiment with the stove, we took it all apart and soaked what we could in a sink full of water and the Goo Gone Oven and Grill Cleaner and soaked the oven by spraying it down as much as we could. We let it soak for several hours before tackling it with as bad as it was. With the oven itself, there was a little difference, but very little. The see in window was a little clearer, but the door was still black. The bottle shows a picture of a grill rack that went from dirty to almost brand new. I was not expecting that degree of change with the Goo Gone, but I hope we might see at least spots of silver under the black. Wrong, it wasn't even touched.

I did see a difference with the silver rings though. There was not a huge improvement, but I did see improvement but I am sue they are probably newer than the stove is. The water that they were soaking in turned black after a full day of soaking, so it was easy to tell that it was getting some of the grime off. So then we scrubbed them and did see a difference even though there was still quite a bit of black on the rings.

So, my conclusion is that the Goo Gone Oven and Grill Cleaner can take several layers of grime off of cooking surfaces, but when it comes to hard to get off, years of caked on grime, there just is not much it can do. I may have given it an impossible task, and I did take that into consideration but I did expect more improvement than what I saw even though it was obvious that it had been able to do some work.

As a side note, if you use this product, make sure you clean it off all the way. Our stove will not let us take the hot metal rings out of the stove and so it was difficult to clean off all of the residue of the Goo Gone. So when we cooked on it the next day, it developed white spots on the hot rings where we must have left some of the Goo Gone and now I am not sure if we can get rid of it. So just be cautious of that.