Handle with care: most oven cleaners are very effective, but the ingredients that make them effective also make them dangerous. (Test: oven cleaners).(Product/Service Evaluation)

Publication: Choice (Chippendale, Australia)

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COPYRIGHT 2003 Australian Consumers' Association

It's not a pretty sight--an oven covered in baked-on grime and grease. If you haven't been wiping up food spills after using the oven, you'll need a lot of elbow grease or a specially formulated oven cleaner to deal with it. To find out which oven cleaners deliver a sparkling-clean oven without you having to work hard, we tested all available products from major supermarkets.

We uniformly stained specially prepared enamel panels with a mixture of grime and fat, which we then baked. We compared how effective the cleaners were at removing the grime after the recommended short cleaning time and/or a longer 24-hour cleaning time (see the notes on page 39 for more test details).

ACTIVE (BUT DANGEROUS) INGREDIENTS

One of the most common oven cleaner active ingredients is sodium hydroxide, known as caustic soda, or simply caustic. It's active because it reacts with fats, converting them into water-soluble soapy compounds that you can wipe away.

However, sodium hydroxide is dangerous stuff. It's highly corrosive, even in dilute forms, and can attack organic matter. So if it comes into contact with skin or eyes, it can cause severe irritation, deep burns or even blindness.

The active ingredient in the most effective non-caustic products is ethanolamine, also called monoethanolamine. This solvent has its hazards too--it can cause coughing, headache, shortness of breath, sore throat, asthmatic reactions and it can affect the central nervous system--and that's just the effects of short-term exposure.

Other oven cleaners contain diethyl glycol alkyl ethers, a group of chemicals also known as ethylene glycol ethers or EGEs. Some of these have been implicated in causing birth defects when long-term exposure has occurred. Others in this chemical family appear not to have this adverse effect, although some of them have been shown to have destructive effects on blood cells.

We asked the manufacturers of products that contain EGEs which type they use. Both EASY OFF and both MR MUSCLE products...

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