Oven cleaning in Bovey Tracey

Bovey sits right on the line where Dartmoor falls away into the ball clay basin, and the housing changes with the ground. Granite and rendered cottages on the older streets, Victorian villas up the hill, mid century and modern estates spreading east, and smallholdings with paddocks on the lanes running up onto the moor.

The cookers follow the same split. In the estates it is a fitted oven and a ceramic hob, a comfortable two hour job. Up the lanes it is far more often a range, oil fired or cast iron, in a kitchen that also has a wood burner in it, and that is a half day at least.

Both are the same rate. What decides the invoice is the amount of cooker rather than the postcode, and that gets estimated from a photograph before a slot is agreed.

A great many kitchens here have a wood burner or a solid fuel stove in the same room as the cooker, and that changes what is actually on the surfaces. Alongside cooking grease there is a fine soot deposit that settles on everything horizontal, and the two mix into a film that behaves differently from grease alone.

It matters because degreaser on its own smears soot rather than lifting it. The order that works is to take the grease off first and then deal with what is underneath, and it is the reason a hob or a canopy in a wood burner kitchen comes up better with two passes than with one long one.

This is one of the wettest spots in the area, sitting below the moor where the rain comes in off the south west. Houses stay closed up and damp for long stretches, which keeps grease soft and spreads it further from the hob than it would travel in a dry kitchen.

Rural properties here also tend to go a long time between proper cleans, because there is not much of this work done on the lanes. A first clean on a range that has run for several years is a longer job than an annual one and it is priced accordingly, with the hours estimated on what the cooker looks like rather than on what would sound better.

The lanes running onto the moor are single track with high banks and few passing places, and several properties are at the end of a track rather than on a road. There is nearly always somewhere to park once you arrive, which is the compensation for a slow last mile.

Winter is the thing to watch. In a hard spell some of those tracks are hard going, and moving a booking is a better answer than attempting one. A gate reference or a what3words location for the actual entrance saves real time on lanes that satellite navigation misreads.

Craft and studio workshops run through the town as well, and a handful of bookings each year are for small commercial kitchens attached to them rather than for houses. Those are quoted the same way, by the hours, and the difference is usually that the extractor is the whole job and the oven is an afterthought.