How to Clean My Stainless Steel Range Hood in 4 Simple Steps!

Before you even begin planning to clean your stainless-steel range hood, there are two things that we need you to remember:

✦ Whenever you are cleaning stainless steel, make sure you are not using any kinds of abrasive cleaners or bleach on your range hood. Such chemicals tend to harm the metal, and you might get a discolored, rough, and scratched-up range hood.

✦ When rubbing your sponge, brush, or cloth, make sure you are moving in alignment with the direction of the grain. The grain is basically tiny fragments in which the metal is designed; you can feel it once you take a deeper look at your range hood. Cleaning in this direction will help you get the tiniest particles of dirt that might have stuck in the grain.

Things You Need While Cleaning Your Stainless-Steel Range Hood

The materials that you would require to clean your stainless-steel range hood completely depend on how dirty it is. If you have been cleaning it often, it might not have any stubborn stains, and a simple DIY solution would work. However, if not, then you might need to get some strong cleaning solutions to get through it.

1. The DIY Solution

We call it DIY because anyone can do this one themselves; all you would need is some dish soap solution with water and a microfiber cloth, and it will do. Next, you would need to dampen your microfiber cloth in the soap solution and gently rub it over your range hood.

Make sure you follow this routine every day so that your range hood will be free from all harsh stains and will not require you to follow any strenuous cleaning routine. The best part about this routine is that neither does it need you to get any special cleaning formulas nor does it take you hours to spend on cleaning your range hood. It could simply be done within a few minutes.

A pro tip here is to rub a clean, dry piece of cloth after the wet one to ensure all the soap and water have been dried out of your stainless-steel range hood.

2. The Vinegar Solution

If you want a cleaner finish than the water and soap solution, here’s another DIY solution. Simply take a spray bottle and fill it half with water and half with vinegar, and there, you have your very own cleaning agent.

Most people don’t know this, but vinegar is one of the best cleaning agents you can find in your kitchen and is especially recommended for cleaning stainless steel.

Take this spray bottle and splash it once or twice. Simply rub it off with a microfiber cloth, and there, you will get your stainless-steel range hood all clean and shiny!

We are sure if you followed this routine every day, you would be able to see a reflection of yourself on your stainless-steel range hood!

3. The Hard Cleaning

By hard cleaning, we do not mean the level of difficulty you will face. We mean to address the hard-to-clean areas of your stainless-steel range hood, such as the oil spots or rusty areas. Well, to clean these areas, you would need to up your game with the materials you will be using. This type of cleaning would require two rounds of cleaning;

✦ Rubbing acetone on the spots with a microfiber cloth. Here, you would need to apply a little pressure and scrub the areas to build grease. Keep scrubbing the cloth until you feel all the spots are cleaned properly. Moreover, please make sure to open one of your windows in your kitchen before using acetone as the fume of the chemical could cause difficulty in breathing.

✦ Once, the acetone has done its job and you have all the spots cleaned, you definitely need to rub off the acetone from your stainless-steel range hood. For that, take soap water solution and a sponge and rub it all over the surface of your range hood to get rid of all acetone. Finally, rub it all off with a clean, dry cloth to get all things cleaned up.

4. The Stubborn Spots

If your stainless-steel range hood is not used to getting clean, it must have a few stubborn stains on its surface, and by these, we mean really stubborn stains.

Cleaning such stains could be a tough task and might require you to adopt an even more harsh cleaning technique.

However, taking these stains off is not impossible. They are just a little more work than your usual stains. Here, you would need to use a soft scrub with a scotch Brite pad. However, make sure that the scrub does not use any of the abrasive chemicals or bleach, as we mentioned earlier.

Apply the scrub to the surface of your stainless-steel range hood, and start scrubbing it with the scotch Brite pad in the direction of the grain. To get the hardest stain off, use an old toothbrush and brush the scrub onto the stain to create grease to get it off.

Once you feel like the stain is 80-90% off, clean the scrub with a microfiber cloth and repeat the soap water routine to get the rest.

Are These Tips for the Inside Too?

Well, if you are wondering if you can use the methods mentioned above for cleaning the inside of your range hood as well, sadly, you cannot. These methods are highly focused on cleaning the exterior of your stainless-steel range hood. The reason is that the inside has the filters, and cleaning those filters is a whole different process.

If you want to know how to clean the filters of your stainless steel range hood, take a look at our article or check out our YouTube Video. Both these resources are focused entirely on range hood filters, and will help you with all the information you would need to clean the inside of your stainless-steel range hood, i.e., the filters.

KEY TAKEAWAY!

If you want to avoid any stubborn stains on your stainless-steel range hood, the most important thing to do is follow the basic soap-water routine every day. If you keep cleaning it every day, you will not give a chance for the excessive oils or grease to find their place and turn into harsh stains.

Other than that, if you are not satisfied with just the soap water, you can use a few cleaners, but you should know that all bottles that have a cleaner’s label are not suited for stainless steel. If you want to opt for a cleaner for your stainless steel range hood, take a look at the top 5 stainless steel cleaners we have gathered for you!