Rhonda Bracey: At Random

Did you know that if you don’t use your grill tray and put it (or anything else) on the base of your electric oven, small amounts of condensation get under it and rust out the enamelled bottom of your oven?? Nope. Me neither.

But that’s what’s happened, as I discovered when I cleaned the oven last week then spoke to the manufacturers about the rough stuff on the base of the oven that I couldn’t remove.

It’s not rusted all the way through yet. I could wait until it got worse, but decided to bite the bullet and get a new oven now.

So, if you never use your grill tray, either store it on the lowest level of the oven, or in a cupboard. NEVER store anything on the bottom of the oven. Even if your oven doesn’t have a heating element in the base (mine doesn’t), the ‘metal on metal’ thing isn’t good in the long term.

Lesson learned and reinforced by various people in the appliance stores I visited.

(Aside: When we moved into this house, the previous owners didn’t leave the manuals for the oven, the hotplates, or the dishwasher. I’d downloaded those manuals a while back and printed them off, but only ‘cos I needed to know how the controls worked (back in the day, you used to turn on an oven by turning one knob… now you have to turn at least two!). But I either hadn’t read the entire thing or had totally forgotten about not putting anything on the bottom of the oven. My bad. But in my defence, this was my first electric oven in DECADES — I’ve only used gas in the past 25+ years.