Things that you shouldn’t put in a microwave

But to answer the OP – waterproof socks! (e.g. sealskin)

I was staying in a hotel room that had a wee kitchenette thing, and after a very snowy and slushy ride I needed to dry out the socks. This will be a great idea I thought, slam them in the micro. But what happened was the liquid heated up, the material bit of the sock obviously got hot too with lots of lovely steam, but the waterproof membrane melted and made an unholy mess.

So, yeah, don’t put wet waterproof socks in!

Kippers. Never EVER put kippers in the microwave.

Unless you really hate your co-workers and it is your last day.

I’ve heard of people putting their pets in microwave before, but that’s a weird pet.

When I put Schrodingers cat in the microwave, when the ding went Pavlovs dog ate it.

I used to work in a phone repair shop and a lady came in with her 11 year old son. He had put his phone in the microwave after watching a YouTube video showing you could charge the phone 100% if you put it in the microwave for 20 secs.

I used to work in a phone repair shop and a lady came in with her 11 year old son. He had put his phone in the microwave after watching a YouTube video showing you could charge the phone 100% if you put it in the microwave for 20 secs.

Don’t leave us hanging – did it work?

I have a family member who hides all the house and car keys in theirs overnight. ?‍

I have mine near the door. I figure, if someone is in the house looking for keys, I’d rather they found them and sodded off than came into the bedroom with a knife demanding them. Plus, y’know, fire.

On another subject, has anyone had one explode on them?

I once had a bowl of tomato soup explode in the microwave at work. It was one hell of a bang, enough to have half the office come running into the kitchen.  Which is a bit daft when you think about it, you probably should be running in entirely the opposite direction.

The tines cause an arc of, I don;t know, microwaves (?)

Plasma, IIRC.

My granny once dispatched a poorly goldfish in a microwave.

Only came to say Gremlins but beaten to it 🙁

joshvegasFree Member
My granny once dispatched a poorly goldfish in a microwave

Jesus. That’s got to smart.

joshvegasFree Member
My granny once dispatched a poorly goldfish in a microwave.

Intentionally, or was she trying to pep it up a bit?

I’ll +1 the egg, out of shell but un-pierced. It blew up and the microwave never worked again. We now have no microwave, it’s apparently good for kitchen worktop space, despite me going at least once a day to use it.

A pork pie. One of those big ones.

I don’t know what the outcome was supposed to be, but I remember the horror well.

Can confirm microwave slippers are fine. Made our microwave smell a bit… oaty?

@fossy – So this was about 25 years ago, I wasn’t as organised as I am today (and even today ‘organised’ is not a word that would be used!)…Had washed my riding gear in a oner, so had no cycling shorts that weren’t dry and clean. Removed from washing machine and into microwave in an attempt to aid the drying…

After a minute there was a definite ‘cooked’ smell coming from the microwave so I stopped the machine, removed the shorts – which did have a bit of steam rising and I left them for about 30 seconds. They felt ‘dry’ so I just jumped into them. I should have had a feel of the chamois rather than just the ends of the legs as although those were ‘dry’, the chamois wasn’t!!!

the chamois wasn’t!!!

So you shouldn’t microwave prairie oysters

Someone where I used to work(not me) managed to melt a Pyrex bowl into the glass microwave plate. Didn’t seem to damage the microwave.

Fire station by the way

Gloves. I once tried drying out some wet ski gloves. Only once.

Other way round, they’re great as cheap metal smelters – lots of YouTube videos of people using them to melt aluminium. Probably best done outside with a microwave you don’t value though.

Clearly you lot are pretty sensible by the fact nobody’s put a firework in one.

My 14-year-old saw an online tutorial about making candles using boiling water in a mug to melt tealights, when the water cooled down, she re-boiled it in the microwave, BOOM.

Sawdust, if its micro/grill combi.  We didn’t find out for months after we sanded the floorboards in our living room, when somebody tried to use the grill function and it caught fire.

Drying out wet toilet rolls, they also catch fire.

There’s a chap on YouTube that uses a microwave as a high temperature furnace. If you use a graphite crucible (I think it is graphite) you can get to some pretty amazing temperatures.

Microwaves: For more than just re-heating leftovers.

I once told an old boss of mine that you can dry clothes in the microwave, the next day I walked into the staff room and he was wearing a rather singed and holey polo shirt.

Of course he didn’t think that you just do it a few seconds at a time.

Oh and a human head + cement

(probably been mentioned but I’m not reading the whole thread, if don’t know what I’m talking about look on YouTube for local lads TGFbro if you want to lose some brain cells)

Can I put one of my neighbours dogs in one ,the little black f@@#**g yappy one just to see if it possible to get it shut up.

The other three make little or no noise but that one yaps all the time,yap,yap,yap,yap,yap,yap.

Do you think it might be poorly?

If i put my dog in the microwave* its would be bloody sparkling before she went pop.

*It would gave to be a fairly big microwave.

I prefer the Dutch word for it; Magnetron! Sounds like you can kill all sorts with it quite legally with a name like that. ?

My son put an unopened tin of beans straight in the microwave in an attempt to make himself lunch. Caught it after 30 seconds – no sparks but the can and contents had actually warmed. I’m not planning on finding out what happens if you leave it longer.

In fact, the instructions on our new Me-Kro-Wah-veh specifically state that you should put a spoon in things like cups of liquid you are heating up as it better facilitates more even distribution of heat in said liquid.

You can get superheated “pockets” of liquid within a mug of tea / coffee and when a spoon is placed into the mug it suddenly all mixes and can explode up the spoon and cover you in boiling liquid. Needs some kind of stirrer left in it to provide a point of disruption and allow more even heating.

Toddlers shoes in an attempt to dry them out. Something I’m reminded of 30 years later!!!

You can dry marijuana in it  apparently.

Also apparently, you place it on a microwavable plate and put a paper napkin over it, and apparently microwave at 10 second intervals.

Or so I’ve been told.

I used to work in a small shop that sold white goods many years ago and an old chap bought a microwave from us then brought it back about 6 months later saying it had stopped working. We had a look inside and there were lightening strike marks all over it and we asked him what had he been doing? He said it was working fine until he started drying his jeans in it!

Ghosts, notoriously bad to microwave

I have mine near the door. I figure, if someone is in the house looking for keys, I’d rather they found them and sodded off than came into the bedroom with a knife demanding them. Plus, y’know, fire.

Unless the fire is near the front door and the key to the back door is on the same keyring.

But I do leave one set (that has the key to the car someone would want to steal) by the door for the same reason as you, but we always have another set in the bedroom at night.

Hale & Pace would say a cat.

Similar to others, I did try drying a pair of cycling gloves that hadn’t dried in time naturally (on a radiator). 20 second blasts did no good at all and then the gloves melted. Made a horrible mess of the aparthotel’s microwave. Went out a bought new gloves for my bike ride.

At work a long way back some guy upset one of my team.  He was in the kitchen later, while i was making my lunch he put his in the MW next to me and went of to chat.  While he was engrossed in his conversation i added 20mins to his original 2 mins on the timer.  I went off to an adjacent meeting room to work.

20 odd minutes later i heard the MW ping …..

he avoided me from then on

I prefer the Dutch word for it; Magnetron!

The magnetron is the microwave-creation bit, every microwave oven has one.

Unless the fire is near the front door and the key to the back door is on the same keyring.

The back door key, which is the same as the front door key, is typically in the lock.

While he was engrossed in his conversation i added 20mins to his original 2 mins on the timer.

That reminds me.  I used to work with a guy, he’d press the ’30 seconds’ button, stand there watching it, then as soon as it went ding he’d jab it again.  Rinse and repeat for the however many minutes his lunch took.

The shop assistant wrote that bit of the list in biro.

Nothing in life better than that…

When I put Schrodingers cat in the microwave, when the ding went Pavlovs dog ate it.

*lol*

My stepfather was one of those polymath type wunderkinds. Involved in all sorts of amazing post war research and development projects some of which he shared with a very young me, other stuff he was not allowed to (time spent at Aldermaston). One of the lines he worked on was magnetrons.
I digress.
Aged 16 or so Son No1. once sent me a link to the cool bisected tomato/ grape arcing effect. I liked it, it was well cool even if perhaps a tad potentially bugger up the microwave type fun.  lots of sparks etc so I was glad it wasn’t mine but Hey Ho, someone else’s problem. Until I realised it was not, it was my blummin’ kitchen in the clip he’d filmed, full of arcs, sparks and smoke.
This was not his first bit of microwave fun. When he was very young, maybe 18 months old. MrsAmbrose woke me on a Saturday morning. She was off out doing her thing and had left Son #1 downstairs watching ‘The Lion King’ on video. You’ve gotta love parenting by VHS. Get up she told me, care for your first born, the continuation of our line, the future of House Ambrose.
My thought processes perhaps were not very worthy. I was still sleepy and as i le the cup of tea she had brought me cool I slowly drifted back to sleep thinking that it will be fine, it’s a long film, I’ve got a couple more minutes…
When I heard the smoke alarm blasting out, in my sleepy state I ignored it because it was summer, and I knew that we didn’t have the fire going. So, everything was fine, and I tried to doze off again. Those pesky alarms are quite persistent though, so I eventually decided that I needed to deal with it.
Downstairs, in the kitchen I found the boy sat on the worktop close to the microwave. It (not the boy) was smoking, sparking and emitting flames and being generally dangerous. Boyo was very loudly telling me, yelling even ‘Microwave on pire, microwave on pire’, a mispronunciation a bit too close to the truth and really rather uncomfortable tbh. The cabinets above were not happy at all and were telling me so by way of nasty stinky smoke coming from the charred MFI chipboard.
I finally did the right thing and removed Boy1 to safety, unplugged microwave and took it outside. Inside it I found my quart silver tankard with the flip top lid a la pirates of the Caribbean. I was hot but otherwise intact even though we quite easily might not have been. A rather sobering experience. When I go, I’m leaving it to him in my will.

Ford Capri. Not the new one, the classic model.

For the woodworkers on here you can use the microwave to steam bend small components, for example in the use of inlaid stringing, or larger section for different components.

With stringing, most hobbyists will stick to straight section, but if for example you want to put it around a center marquetry panel inlay, it’s probably the quickest method, as opposed to setting up a steam generator/tube/box

.

I was looking for some examples on you tube for steam bending in the micro, but also found that you can use a microwave to ‘quick dry bowl blanks for turning green wood. So instead of 6 months or a year waiting with a partly turned bowl sitting on the shelf to dry out, you can dry it over the course of a week or less, dependent on how big the bowl is.

I’ve only ever turned dry seasoned timber, so it’s nice to find you can do this.

The magnetron is the microwave-creation bit

Fun fact – invented as part of efforts to make bombing the right bit of Germany at night easier.