Smoke Coming Out Of Your Oven? Here’s Why

The last thing you want when you’ve got guests over for dinner is smoke coming out of your oven. Aside from the embarrassment it can cause, smoke isn’t exactly a flavour you want accompanying every meal you serve.

There are a number of reasons why you might have smoke coming out of your oven, so if your gas or electric oven is smoking right now and you’re trying to figure out what’s going on, read on to find out what it could be.

Causes of Smoking Ovens
Factory coatings or chemicals burning
If your oven is new, this is the most likely reason that it’s smoking. When being manufactured, it’s common practice for ovens to have an oil based coating that can cause smoke as it burns off when the oven is operational. It’s for this reason that manufacturers recommend that you ‘burn in’ your empty oven by running it on a high heat setting for between 30 minutes and an hour.

Once the oven has been burned in, you should notice that it no longer smokes as the factory coatings will have been burned away.

Leftover cleaning products
Another type of chemical residue that can cause your oven to smoke and get you worried; leftover cleaning products are often the culprit. Cleaning your oven with chemical cleaning products such as foaming sprays will inevitably leave residue that will burn up when the oven is on and create smoke that isn’t just unpleasant but also filled with chemicals that you probably don’t want to be breathing in in excess.

To avoid this, make sure to always thoroughly wipe down the internal walls, floor, and ceiling of your oven with a damp cloth once you’ve used cleaning products in it.

Broken heating element
A broken heating element or an element that’s just about to fail can also cause smoke in your oven. Whether it’s the grill or a main electric heating element, a large build up of excess heat can short your oven and produce smoke. You can test whether this is the case by turning your oven off and back on again and then waiting for 15-20 minutes to see if the heating element (grill or main) glows red.

If it doesn’t and you’ve confirmed that your heating element is broken, it’s time for you to book an oven repair or order a replacement part to be fitted.

Food remains
Most of us probably have experience with an oven smoking due to leftover food remains from a previous meal. This can either be chunks of food or drops of liquid that have fallen or overflowed while being cooked and burned up on the hot floor of the oven, or it can be an accumulation of months or years of cooking grease on the inside of the oven beginning to smoke as it’s heated to a high temperature.

The appliance is especially likely to smoke if you haven’t used the grill in your oven for a while.

While food and cooking liquid are a non-issue – simply clean the oven once it’s cool – a build up of grease can potentially cause a fire so make sure to take action immediately if your oven is smoking due to grease.

High gas pressure
If your gas oven is smoking and you don’t know why, don’t rule out the possibility that the gas pressure in your home is too high. High gas pressure can overfeed the flame that heats a gas oven, causing it to enlarge and emit smoke while it’s reaching its upper temperatures.

You can consult your oven manufacturer about smoking due to high gas pressure, or speak to your gas provider for assistance.