self-cleaning ovens

Say you've roasted a few greasy ducks and the inside of your oven looks like, uh, well, pretty bad, and you've scrubbed it until your fingers came apart. Do you use the self-cleaning feature you've been warned against? You can't take the smoke from baking anything, but self-cleaning will make some really bad smoke. You decide you'll be out of the house for four hours one day, and you go for it, extra fans in place.

I tried that yesterday. We returned after seven hours, and after we opened some more doors and windows, I could sort of be inside, which brings us to the resurrection of the bedwarmer we made back when I tolerated one (1) blanket and had to sleep with all the doors and windows open to the 40 F (5 C) air.


Before you, you see a cot strung with rope (the cover stank) with fifty feet of copper tube, a pond circulating pump, and a little immersion heater in a stock pot. You also need a little hose and a hose clamp to connect the tube to the pump, and the meat thermometer reads about 110 F in this picture:



What I learned today is that if you use this system outside, you need a second immersion heater, but I didn't find that out by getting cold. I found that out by feeling the tube when I woke up at 5 am because some one of the neighbors started doing laundry. (5 am!!) Fortunately, the house was fine again by then, leading us to the conclusion that self-cleaning is all well and good, but it takes between 12 and 18 hours for the house to be ok again.