A few weeks ago, we shared some photos that reader Susan sent us of her new Kitchenaid oven. Its new-fangled self-cleaning system was pretty terrible at a key function: actually self-cleaning. “So… every time you want to clean your cool new oven, you’ll be scrubbing it yourself!” she wrote. That’s not a very good feature.

After sending pictures in to us, Susan followed up with Kitchenaid and parent company Whirlpool, but found no help there. Who did help her? A frequent Consumerist target and store where she originally bought the oven: Sears!

She updates us:

Kitchen Aid was no help. Whirlpool, the parent company was no help. Sears, where I purchased the oven, has come through, as we would all hope dealers and retail outlets would.

Sears gets 5 stars ***** from me for exchanging the oven I was so dissatisfied with for a similar product with an old fashioned ultra-high temperature cleaning system that will truly be “self-cleaning”.

Cheers to Sears!

Great news, Susan. Enjoy not scrubbing your oven.

Reader Jenny encountered the same problem with her oven from the same company, and has a bit of advice for anyone who is stuck with an Aqualift oven that just won’t clean itself properly. They should take up a new hobby. No, not scrubbing.

I tried scrubbing my oven with the sponge, scraper, and magic eraser type thing that came with the stove. After a few minutes of serious elbow grease I gave up, deciding that I bought a manual clean oven after all. If I didn’t love everything else about it so darn much I would have already been on the hunt for a different stove.

The only thing that does work? Baking artisan bread. All that preheating the oven to 500 degrees 15-30 minutes before baking the bread did wonders for my stove. Perhaps not so oddly enough, this is (generally speaking) what the non-breakthrough “technology” stoves do during their self-clean cycle.

My suggestion? Check out any one of the new artisan bread at home books from you local library and start a new hobby. It’s oodles more effective than “Aqualift” and much more tasty than scrubbing it out on your own.

Well, that, or you could just super-heat your oven without baking bread. Where’s the fun in that, though?

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