Clean the cavity by the usual method for its surface, then deal with the part no other oven has: if the door slides away under the cavity, its rail carriage collects grease and stiffens, and that mechanism needs attention no ordinary oven door does.
Neff makes a genuinely distinctive oven and almost everything written about cleaning one ignores the distinctive part. The cavity is BSH engineering shared with Bosch and Siemens, so the general method is on our oven cleaning guide. The door is Neff's own.
Slide and Hide, and the carriage underneath it
On a Slide and Hide model the door does not drop down and stay there. It hinges down and then slides back underneath the cavity on a rail carriage, disappearing so you can stand close to a hot oven without leaning over a door.
It is excellent, and it introduces a mechanism no other oven in a domestic kitchen has: a pair of runners carrying a heavy glazed door in and out of a warm, greasy space, several times a day, for years.
What happens is predictable. Airborne fat settles on the runners and on the carriage. It hardens. The door, which used to glide, begins to need a push. Eventually it slides unevenly, one side leading the other, and at that point people stop retracting it at all and use it as a conventional door.
Cleaning the runners is straightforward and almost nobody does it. With the oven cold, retract the door fully, then extend it and wipe along both rails and the visible carriage with a cloth and a non-caustic degreaser. Dry them. Do not oil them: household oil attracts dust and bakes, and a lubricated runner in an oven is worse than a dry clean one.
If a Slide and Hide door has become stiff, that is almost never the mechanism failing. It is a fortnight of accumulated fat and a five minute job.
CircoTherm and the rear baffle
Neff's CircoTherm hot-air system uses a fan and a rear baffle to push air through the cavity, and like any fan oven the blades behind that baffle collect a hard varnish of old fat. It is the usual source of a smell that survives a spotless cavity clean. Where the baffle is held by a central nut or a few screws it comes off; where it does not, leave it.
It is a BSH oven
Neff, Bosch and Siemens share cavity engineering, so if your Neff has rough dark catalytic panels the same absolute rule applies: they are the cleaning system, not dirt, and cleaning them by hand destroys them. See how to clean a Bosch oven and how to clean a Siemens oven.
The door glass, and why Slide and Hide changes it
A conventional oven door hangs open in front of you when you clean it. A Neff Slide and Hide door has to be brought back out and held at its drop-down position to be worked on, which is a different and slightly awkward posture, and it is why the inner face of a Neff door tends to be cleaned less thoroughly than the cavity behind it.
There is a second consequence. Because the door retracts into the cabinetry below the cavity, its outer face passes through the gap on every use, and the top edge of that face collects a line of grease where it meets the seal of the opening. It is out of sight in both positions, open and closed, and it is one of the few places on an oven that is genuinely invisible during normal use.
Wipe the top edge of the door and the lip of the opening whenever you do the glass. Neither takes more than a moment and neither is anywhere anybody looks.
What actually goes wrong
A stiff Slide and Hide door, blamed on the mechanism and caused by fat on the runners.
An owner who has stopped retracting the door, which means the best feature of the appliance has been switched off by neglect.
A scrubbed catalytic panel, believed to be baked-on dirt.
A smell after a spotless clean, which is the fan chamber behind the CircoTherm baffle.
Should you do it yourself?
Do it yourself for the cavity and, particularly, for the door runners, which take five minutes and restore the feature you paid for.
Get someone in if the door needs to come apart, if a catalytic panel has already been scrubbed, or if a smell survives cleaning. book a clean online or check we cover you on our service areas page.