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April 18, 2014 3 mins

What does it take for an oven to clean itself? A whole lot of heat! Marshall Brain explains how these special ovens use intense temperatures to burn off baking spills and debris in this episode.

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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Welcome to Brainstuff from hastaff works dot com where smart happens.

(00:32):
Hi Am Marshall Brain with today's question, how does self
cleaning ovens work? The basic idea behind any self cleaning
oven is burn baby burn. The oven gets up to
a very high temperature about twice normal and incinerates everything
that's inside the oven and stuck to the walls. Self

(00:52):
cleaning ovens use an approximately nine hundred degree fahrenheit or
four degree celsius temperature cycle to burn off spills left
over from baking without the use of any chemicals. A
self cleaning oven is designed with a mechanical interlock system
patented in two that keeps the oven door locked and

(01:14):
closed during and soon after this high temperature cleaning cycle,
which can take approximately three hours. The door stays locked
to prevent people from accidentally burning themselves with a blast
of nine hundred degree air when they open the door.
The interlock will let you open the oven door again
after the oven cools down to approximately six hundred degrees

(01:37):
fahrenheit or three fifteen degrees celsius. If baking spills are
not wiped up after baking, there may be some smoke
during an oven cleaning cycle. It's a good idea to
remove any pets from the area when running the oven
self cleaning cycle because of this smoke and also because
of poisonous vapors. There have been reports of oven he

(02:00):
did teflon coded items releasing odorless fumes that are deadly
to birds. Self cleaning ovens have the added benefit of
more installation around the oven to keep that nine degree
heat in and this helps the energy efficiency for regular baking.
This is a similar concept to an increased R factor

(02:21):
in a home's insulation. You'll also save energy costs by
using the self cleaning cycle right after baking something else
to make use of the already partially heated oven. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, is that
how Stuff Works dot com, and don't forget to check
out the brain Stuff blog on the house stuff works
dot com home page. You can also follow brain stuff

(02:43):
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