Cleaning Tips For Belfast

How to clean your oven extractor hood filters

These can be a bit of a problem. Clearly their job is to remove smoke and smells caused by cooking in the kitchen, and sometimes boy do we need them on. The filters are made from a variety of things including carbon or charcoal, and their purpose is always to trap something, beit smells or fat or debris. Each filter has a recommended shelf life, beyond which time its effectiveness is lessened, probably as capacity is reached. At this point they either need replacing or cleaning, and some of them can be very expensive like mine.

Taking the filters out of their containers isn't that difficult in my extractor, but the filters are round discs, maybe 20cm in diameter and probably 6cm deep. Scrubbing the outsides isn't a problem but at this depth the insides of the filters are still clogged and laden with fat and grease. There is no way of opening them up as they are sealed units, so the best way to clean them out thoroughly is give them a good soak. The problem is that there is a covering over the filter gauze that looks almost like cotton, which got very upset with a good soaking on a previous set, so now I tend to soak them as little as possible, which means any soak needs to be effective.

I firstly give them a wash in washing up liquid, this lets me clean the edges and sides and gets some degreaser into the centre parts of the filter - I make sure the water is very hot as well. After that I rinse them and then pour on some baking soda followed just a little water – enough to take the soda into the filter itself. I give that a few minutes then drop into some water laden with baking soda for a final few minutes soak, before rinsing off in clean fresh tap water. Leave to dry and place back into the filter. This is the best I can do with my type of filters but it probably means I can use the same filters three maybe four times over, saving me plenty. Now, other types of filters, especially the long flat sheet looking ones will love this process and last many more times over.