Your range hood is right in the line of fire in your kitchen, pun intended. It gets blasted with hot, greasy steam each time you cook. And unlike ovens, where high temperatures bake splatter into smooth stains, range hoods just get sticky and gross, says Cindy LeBow, the founder of Great Green Cleaning.
LeBow has been cleaning homes in New York City for more than four decades, and she has learned that the best way to clean a gunky range hood is with an oil-based cleaning agent. “Oils are a solvent,” she says, “and what a solvent does is, it dissolves things.”
LeBow also relies on two special types of gentle yet effective scrubbies, as well as a trick derived from years of hands-on experience: Once you’re done, go back with fresh eyes and clean the whole thing again.
