Don’t think microwave ovens are bad for you but they’re not an essential item anyway.

Felt a bit sorry for a friend, he stayed with us for a bit whilst he was temporarily working in Nottingham. After his first day, he got back from work really late one night, gone 10pm, and he’d picked up a ready meal type thing, one of those ones that takes 6 minutes in the microwave or 90 minutes in the oven. He asked where the microwave was…

Double post

Not essential (what is?) – but very useful.

I wouldn’t be without one in a kitchen.

My company sells really big Microwave (and Radio frequency for that matter) ovens for tempering meat. If you were thin enough (and bypassed the safety circuits) then yes, you could get inside, you’d take about 20 minutes to be done, well, from -20 to about -2 at any rate. Also, sticking your fingers in the control cabinet could get you a belt of 19000V, which would also warm you up nicely.
The emissions levels for these things are set so as not to upset mobile phones. The safe emission levels for people is much higher!

also don’t trust built in web cams – if you have one and wifi, isn’t that another step towards Orwell’s constant surveillance via remote access?

Rubbish.
By the way, your hair’s a mess.

If I’m sat in the kitchen with my laptop (sitting approx 15ft away from the microwave) I lose wireless connectivity as soon as Mrs T switches on the microwave. This happens with every laptop/netbook we have. Wireless returns as soon as the microwave stops.
Should I be worried?

Most microwaves emit, at least some, power in the 2.4GHz band. That’s where your wifi signals reside. Since the microwave will be between 800W and 1200W output, any leakage from any point is likely to significantly upset the wifi which, IIRC, transmits with a power of notably less than a watt. It’s about signal-to-noise ratio, if the microwave leaks even a fraction of a percent of its power, the signal from the router will be mashed. Doesn’t mean it’s unsafe. Cheaper microwaves do seem to do this, but I never seem to have a problem with ours (Though I’ve no idea if ours was expensive or not). It could be noise from the transformer/drive electronics that drive the magnetron that’s doing the wifi in, not necessarily even the microwave “signals” themselves.

Microwaves are remarkably good at what they do, very power efficient (almost all of the power put into them is converted to heat in the food) in comparison with something like an oven.

Microwaves don’t heat from the inside out, they heat roughly evenly throughout.

The microwaves are not tuned “to the frequency of water molecules” – that would be notably higher (approx 5 times higher), they are lower because higher frequency waves wouldn’t penetrate the food very far, heating the skin and not much else. It also heats loads of other molecules like fats and sugars.

As for boiling an egg with a phone… Assuming you could direct all of the phone energy in one direction, which you can’t easily, to the egg. You’d need approximately 15,000 joules to heat the egg to about 80 degrees average temp. At 2W (2J/s, the power limit for moblies) that would mean it would take approximately 2 hours to cook. But that’s all assuming no heat leaves the egg at all, through conduction/convection/radation. Which is virtually impossible too. So in answer to the egg question – no.

HTH

Microwave ovens are very dangerous/bad for you, when you put half a dozen eggs still in their shells, in a bowl of water and then heat them up to produce “hard-boiled” eggs.

When the pressure within the eggs reaches a critical level, they will all simultaneously explode blowing the **** door right off, and showering your kitchen with glass and pulverised egg from ceiling to floor.

The time it takes to clean up the resulting mess, needs to be seen to be believed.

/goes off to find a few eggs

Rubbish.
By the way, your hair’s a mess.

LOL! you must have been looking through the window then.

They’re also rubbish at drying cats.

I wonder how many people who are concerned about microwave ovens are happy to eat food cooked with gas. Anyone mention carcinogens?

Years ago one of my jobs was to go round our site checking the various Microwave Ovens in the messrooms for leakage with a microwave detector, what a waste of time. The door seal would have to be pretty badly damaged to allow any leakage and by them the chances of the door interlock allowing the oven to start would be pretty slim.

People have been killed by microwave ovens, its the DIY idiots that try to fix them it and getting a belt off the internals (before working on them various bits need to discharge-preferably overnight in case bleed resistors have burnt out).

he he. I’ve never used a microwave oven. Ever. I worked in a kitchen for a year and despite them having one, I never used it, (commie chef you see, sauces and veg).

Anyway, this week my wife gave me the chilli leftovers and suggested I heat them up in the microwave at work. So I’m there with a tupperware container of chilli in my hand and the microwave in front of me….

How the hell does this thing work? Now at home I’d heat the chilli up in a pan, maybe quickly reboil the rice. So a microwave must do it in half the time or something, so I put it on for five minutes. It has an auto heat button but that can do one.

After five minutes I pull out the nuked mess. It’s insanely hot and the plastic is melting. Freaking hell! Nice though.

get a grip. use it, eat food, move on. Or don’t.

no, sorry.

EDIT: My uncles brothers sister had a microwave in 1986 that, when switched on, cooked the cat “fluffy” that was in the living room having a nap.

Sometimes I wake up in a pool of sweat thinking about Fluffy and her terrible microwaved demise.

She glowed, you know.