It looks so simple on the can. But things aren't so rosy when oven cleaner fumes are assaulting your face.

My lungs are full of chemicals. I'm coughing on the back step, having stumbled five feet from the inside of the kitchen where the gaseous contents of my cooker just invaded my nose and mouth. I only opened the oven door to see how things were going. I wasn't expecting to die.

Ovens present a peculiar challenge to the new homeowner. I am a new homeowner - a relatively new one at least, having moved into a terrace 18 months ago - and thus the laws of this appliance still flummox me. Just how often are they supposed to be cleaned? Assuming they spend enough time above 200ºC to kill anything too dangerous, the answer seems to depend on how much you dislike smoke, how easily you can ignore black crusty bits and how long you can put up with your food tasting like burnt chips. Luckily my tolerance is high.

The problem with this laissez faire approach is that cleaning the oven becomes increasingly tricky with time. Tackle it early and the worst of the grime can be removed with elbow grease and a damp cloth. Leave it too late and you're going to need a hand grenade.

As my cooker fell into the latter camp, I bought myself some "serious" cleaner, from Mr Muscle. This stuff seemed less like a home hygiene product and more like the result of some terrifying industrial process - they warn you of this by decorating the container in the same colours as a poisonous Amazonian frog - but my oven needed hardcore help. And so with kitchen ventilated, I held my breath, decorated the insides of the grubby cooking device with caustic foam and retreated to the living room.

30 minutes later I was getting bored. The can advised half an hour for its contents to get to work, so I headed back into the breach for a status update. The kitchen seemed disarmingly safe, so I leaned down, opened the hatch and peeked inside.

It was like poking my head into the Chernobyl sarcophagus. Toxic fluff coated the walls, an unholy mush of beige and brown, dripping ominously. Involuntarily, I inhaled. Acrid fumes stormed my airways like a squadron of microscopic Spitfires. I slammed the door shut and raced outside, choking with the unbridled enthusiasm of a man who has just inhaled an ant hill. Somewhere, out in the ether, three months tumbled off my life expectancy.

A few minutes passed before I mustered the courage to return. Exercising more caution this time, I donned rubber gloves and wiped down the irradiated cooker. The result was frankly disappointing. The foam certainly came out browner than it went in, implying progress of a sort, but the final state of the post-nuclear appliance was annoyingly close to its pre-war appearance. Some of the crusty bits were slightly smaller.

So I threw my oven cleaner away - shortening the lives of several binmen in the process - then bought something which didn't look like it could be used to kill cattle. It worked very well. Hopefully it'll still be working when it's time to clean the cooker again. In about two years.

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