Traditional lye-based oven cleaners can be a serious danger to people and the environment.
What if somebody offered to pay you £100 if you agreed to spread a toxic substance inside your refrigerator? No way, right? You wouldn’t want a dangerous substance anywhere near your food.
While that may seem like common sense, millions of households in the UK still use toxic oven cleaners. Though some substances are more toxic than others, oven cleaners can still be pretty bad.
Swallowing traditional oven cleaners can be fatal
The US Environmental Protection Agency points out that swallowing traditional, lye-based oven cleaners is “usually fatal,” and warns that safety equipment must be worn when using them. However, even the correct application of the product is potentially dangerous to your health. According to the US National Institutes of Health, some of the symptoms following inhalation of fumes or touching the product can include:
-
Breathing difficulties
-
Loss of vision
-
Severe pain in the nose, eyes, ears and mouth
-
Bloody vomiting
-
Severe blood acid level change, which can lead to organ damage
-
Burns
Toxic oven cleaners also hurt the environment
In addition to the potential dangers to your health while cleaning as well as using a toxic product in an area where you prepare food, traditional oven cleaners have another downside: some of the chemicals they contain can harm the environment by getting into the water supply, especially in large doses, which may alter the gene function of organisms.
Nowadays, a lot of ovens have a self-cleaning feature but that is problematic as well. There are hundreds of recorded instances of birds dying from the fumes released by self-cleaning ovens.
Choosing a safe alternative
Fortunately, there are plenty of safe alternatives available. As a professional oven cleaning service, we only use non-toxic, eco-friendly, biodegradable products that don’t give off fumes. With more than 10 years of experience in the field, we can assure you that they get the job done.
One of the reasons people feel the need to use traditional “heavy duty” cleaning products is that they wait too long to tackle the task of cleaning their oven. By that time, things seem to be so bad that only the toughest product will help.
Oven cleaning is primarily about very hard physical work and not the type of cleaner that you use. You can make things easier by cleaning your oven more frequently or by using an oven cleaning service.
If your oven needs a real clean, please contact us and we’ll schedule an appointment. You can be assured that we’ll clean your oven without any product that is harmful to you, your family, your pets or the environment.
