Oven cleaning in Exeter

Exeter is small enough to cross in twenty minutes and varied enough that no two bookings in a week look alike. A Georgian house off Southernhay has a wide kitchen in what used to be a service room, usually with a range cooker sitting in a chimney breast that was built for something else entirely. A terrace in the older central quarters has a galley kitchen in a rear extension with a fitted single oven and a four burner gas hob. A student house near the university has a freestanding cooker that six people have shared for a year. A new apartment on the quay has a fitted double oven at eye level and an extractor that recirculates because there is nowhere to vent it to.

All four are the same method and the same hourly rate. What differs is how long the job runs, and after a while you can call it within half an hour from a photograph. The Georgian range is a half day. The terrace galley is inside the two hour minimum. The student cooker is usually two to three hours and the surprise is always the grill pan. The new flat is quick on the oven and slow on the extractor, because a recirculating hood hides its filter behind a panel that nobody has opened since it was installed.

The kit for this work comes in and out of a van, and it is not one small box. Degreaser, soaking trays, hand tools, sheeting and a bag of cloths make several trips from the vehicle to the kitchen and back again. In most of Devon that is nothing. In Exeter it is worth a sentence.

Permit zones cover much of the older central housing, and streets around the university fill up by mid morning in term time. It is worth knowing before the day whether there is a driveway, a resident's bay that can be freed up, or a loading spot that will not attract a ticket in the ninety minutes the van needs to be near the door. It does not change the price. It changes whether a booking that was pencilled in for nine can actually start at nine.

Exeter has an unusually large private rental sector for a city of its size, most of it turning over at the same moment. Late June and early July are one long run of check outs, and the oven is the item that decides more deposit disputes than anything else in the property.

For a tenant, paying for the clean is almost always cheaper than the deduction, and the before and after photographs are the part that matters as much as the work. For a landlord or an agent, a void period is short and an oven clean fits inside it easily because it needs nothing but access, power and water. Several properties in the same part of the city are easier to do in one run, and the diary gets arranged that way when it can be.