Drip Pan Burner Cleaning with Just 3 Ingredients - The Gardening Cook (2024)

Clean up an ugly stove by using just three common household ingredients. This drip pan cleaning works over night to give you sparkling burner pans easily without a lot of elbow grease.

One of my pet peeves is seeing my electric stove drip pans and knowing I have to make a trip to the store and shell out $16 for four drip pans.

The burner drip pans on your range can get really messy while you are cooking. No matter how often you watch items cooking on the stove, some do spill over.

Once the spills burn onto the burner drips pans, you will have a challenging cleaning job ahead of you.

Cleaning stove drip pans in the past was a hit and miss project. I first cleaned them the best way I could but eventually, bit they would still look horrible and I’d have to pay for new ones. I had been doing this several times a year.

Until today that is. I’ve heard about cleaning the stove drip pans with household ammonia but the fumes always got to me and I never could do it for long.

The good news is that you don’t have to whip out any toxic chemicals! Here’s how to clean stove top drip pans with hyst a few common household items and a (little) bit of elbow grease. In no time at all, you’ll have sparkling burners pans with very little effort.

The trick is to let the fumes work for you, not against you. And this takes a bit of time, so it is a project for when you won’t be cooking on the stove top for about a day.

(You can do the same sort of process with your microwave and a lemon. Check out this tutorial for cleaning a microwave here.

Drip Pan Cleaning – How to get sparkling burner pans

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You are likely to have everything that you need for this drip pan cleaning project at home right now. All you need are three common household supplies.

That’s right. Some ammonia, a gallon zip lock bag for each drip pan and a Scotch bright sponge with a non stick pad on the back are all you need.

If you do a lot of cooking like I do, your burners will probably look something like mine before I started. The drip pans were caked with spilled over water, oil and what not. They were a real mess!

It’s easy to see which burners I use the most, isn’t it?

I use two main burners the most often but all of them were bad. These were the worst two (right side of the stove front and back.)

How to clean stove drip pans with ammonia

I placed each of the burner drip pans in a large gallon plastic bag, and added 1/4 cup of ammonia to each bag, and then sealed the bag.

I left them for about 24 hours. When I opened up the first bag, I was VERY disappointed. I thought there would be some overnight magic.

But this is what I saw:

Not a lot of difference, right? I almost tossed the stove burner pans in the trash can in disgust. But then I took the next step with my scotch bright pad and wiped over it.

The dirtiest spots on the oven drip pans needed the scourer but not with any real elbow grease. The lighter spots just wiped off with the sponge and removed the grime. I was amazed.

This is the clean stove drip pan after wiping and a bit of scouring:

Totally amazing! I simply could not believe it. Three of the four cleaned up extremely easily with just some easy wiping and a few scrubs with the plastic sponge back.

Why do some burners need more scrubbing?

The worst one took a bit more scouring but it was still night and day compared to the work that I put into cleaning them on previous attempts using steel wool and a scouring cleanser.

The reason the fourth burner drip pan was hard to clean was because the it had been previously cleaned with steel wool, so the surface had been damaged and gave the gunk a key to hold on to.

I’ll probably replace it so that the ammonia will work more easily on it next time.

My clean stove top after is like night and day from the before picture above.

And a close up of the drip pans:

I know it is hard to believe, but try it and see for yourself. I will update this article once I have cleaned them a few times to see how easily it is after they’ve been cleaned several times.

The ease with which they cleaned up makes me believe I may not be shelling out for new burner drip pans in future!

Total cost to me was about $1.25. Far cry from $14 for four burner drip pans!

NOTES on the burner dip pan burner cleaning process:

1. These burners pans were new and had never been cleaned before.
2. Subsequent cleaning worked okay but not as well as the first time especially in the drip area.
3. The dirtier the pans are, the more you may need to scrub, so I would recommend doing this fairly often, so as not to get them too dirty
4. If you use a metal scourer, it will leave grooves in the metal which will make subsequent cleaning far less effective.

So my recommendation is to do the cleaning fairly often, and if they pans have been cleaned and scoured previously and are really dirty, it is time to get a new set, as this will not work well.

But for the first cleaning on moderate dirt, even baked on, it worked just as I showed above.

Would you like a reminder of this post for drip pan cleaning? Just pin this image to one of your Pinterest Household boards so that you can easily find it later.

Admin note: This post for drip pan burner cleaning first appeared on the blog in July of 2014. I have updated the post to include some new photos, a printable project card and a video for you to enjoy.