Oven cleaning in Exmouth

Exmouth has a lot of holiday lets, and a holiday let has one immovable fact about it: the guests go out at ten and the next ones arrive at four. Everything that happens to that flat happens in between, and the oven is the item most likely to fail an incoming guest's first impression.

A let kitchen has a specific pattern of dirt. Very heavy use for a week, then nothing, then heavy use again, with nobody who lives there taking responsibility for the grill pan. Fat gets spattered and baked hard in short bursts rather than accumulating gently, which is why a two year old cooker in a let can be in worse condition than a ten year old one in a family house.

These are booked as fixed slots between lets rather than as morning or afternoon windows, and the cooker is left running and ready rather than cooling down as the next party arrives.

This is one of the most exposed towns on the estuary, with two miles of open seafront and south westerlies coming in off the water unbroken. Salt reaches further inland than people expect and it settles on everything, including the stainless steel in a kitchen with the window open in summer.

On appliances it shows as pitting and dulling on cooker fronts, hood canopies and hob trims, particularly in the front ranks of housing along the seafront. Cleaning removes the grease that holds it and polishing brings the finish back, but salt pitting that has already bitten into the steel is damage rather than dirt and it stays.

Behind the front, the ground climbs steeply towards Orcombe Point and the older housing is Regency and Victorian villas, many of them long since converted into flats. A converted upper floor tends to have a small kitchen fitted into what was a bedroom, with an under counter oven, a two or four burner hob and a recirculating hood.

Access is the thing worth mentioning. Two or three flights of stairs, no lift, and a narrow landing at the top is a normal Exmouth booking and it is entirely fine, but it does add to the time at each end of the job. The suburbs at Withycombe Raleigh and Littleham are the opposite: driveways, level access and ordinary family cookers that are quick to turn round.

The newer waterside development around the docks and marina is well built and tightly planned, and in most of those apartments the hob has nowhere to vent to. That means a recirculating hood with a carbon cartridge behind the metal filter, and in a flat with limited natural ventilation, a spent cartridge is very noticeable.

The metal mesh soaks and comes back like new. The carbon does not wash and there is no point pretending otherwise, so the useful outcome of the visit is knowing which model is fitted and what replacement it takes.