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I haven’t used a microwave for like 10 years or so
Weird flex, but okay.
Is this on purpose?
I just realised it after reading this post and all the responses. Seems like people are kind of attached to them.
Not really on purpose. Lived in an apartment without one for some years and never missed it.
I came to the comments to see what people don’t measure and it’s basically just microwave discussion. Made me realize that not having one might be unusual. I haven’t had one for decades - intentionally got rid of it because it primarily enabled eating junk. Extra kitchen space is a solid bonus too.
Learning how to make stove top popcorn was actually the nail in the coffin for my microwave. Couldn’t give up popcorn but making it on the stove is surprisingly easy, cheap, and better than microwave popcorn. Takes a few extra minutes but well worth it.
I also don’t use one for space reasons. I live in a studio and don’t have any space for a microwave oven. I’m planning to eventually replace my toaster oven with a combo that has a microwave too, but it’s still working so I have no reason to replace it.
The only moment I miss having a microwave oven is when I need to reheat something in a few seconds. It’s just forcing me to avoid ready-to-eat microwavable meals and make my own, which is not that hard, and a bit healthier.
I would end up looking at my microwave thinking “How can the time be 67:36? It’s waaaaaay past my bedtime.”
Add a dash of ADHD memory issues and this is almost guaranteed to burn your house down.
I set my microwave to 2:00 and I’m always back in time to open it at exactly 1:59. So I think I’m going to use this hack.
I think you should probably heat your food for more than 1 second
Hm, I guess it would be more impressive if my internal clock allowed me to heat for exactly 1:59 seconds and open the microwave at 00:01. Maybe heat-pulsing food isn’t the answer?
I often put things on the microwave for like 20-30 minutes at power 2-3, just because I know I’m going to lose track of time (and things are usually better cooked slowly in the microwave, I find).
Have you ever burnt tea (to dust from liquid and melted kettle handle in the process) while reheating it?
'tis but one of my life’s achievementsI once left a pot of water boiling for so long that the water boiled away and the bottom of the pan started to melt. When I took it off the burner, parts of the pot dripped on the floor and burned the linoleum.
I have fallen asleep while boiling hotdogs to wake up in a smoky mess with black tar hotdog welded to the bottom of the pot. And it was my brother’s house.
My mom burnt a pot of spaghetti.
Yes, burnt. To a crisp.
I thought only Homer Simpson did that.
Seeing as how you can sinter metal powder in a microwave, that’s not too surprising. Burning food still takes some effort though.
I have learned that some people do like to crisp them, whether that’s intentional or not 😂 glances at my partner
One time I cooked two frozen pizzas at the same time, one melted through the grate while the other was still frozen. Pretty proud of that one.
Oh, and one time I scarred my brother so bad by making Kool-aid with salt instead of sugar that he stopped drinking it forever.
Ahh here we go, I have to admit this.
I’m on my 3rd microwave. Ramen noodles caught fire twice. I forgot to add water once, go figure. The second time, I put them in for 33 minutes and 30 seconds instead of 3 minutes and 30 seconds. Started playing Xbox and forgot until I got hungry again and heard the smoke alarms going off. Flames were coming out of the microwave door so high they burned the cabinets above black, it was a brand new microwave. 3rd time was a metal coffee mug. Who makes a F-ing metal coffee cup so you can’t reheat your coffee. It was cool watching the electric sparks and lines fly though.
No regrets. It was the grandparents microwaves. LOL.
Yeah. I know myself too well to use this “hack”
This but my air fryer
I shop once a week and buy all the food for the week. At the end of the week, I have a nearly empty fridge.
I don’t want to run out of ingredients, so I divide the weight on the package by seven, and weigh each one as I go. So I know I can have 120g of frozen blueberries each day, 60g of parmesan, 120g of broccoli, 90g of brussel sprouts, 30g of cream in my coffee for each of five coffees a day, etc. I’m happy when on the last day I don’t need to weigh anything.
I didn’t use to be this way, it just sort of happened.
Sometimes it’s hard to control the tisms.
I once heard of someone who would do a regular shopping, and take everything and put it in a stew. Meat, vegetables, fruits, cheese, bread… Whatever was bought that day. I guess that’s one way to avoid measuring everything separately.
Take it one step further and set up Grocy
So the opposite of never measuring anything!
Five coffees a day?
Decaf.
i don’t like to move my finger around, so all my microwave times are of the 44, 77, 2:22, 4:44… format
That 77 is hurtig my brain.
Sometimes, just to be insufferable, I’ll microwave something for one minute, but instead of entering 1:00 I enter 0:60.
If you have a microwave that doesn’t start one minute when you push 1, so you have enter the zeros, then you’re actually being more efficient doing 60 because it skips a number press.
any number between 1 and 99 is just interpreted as seconds, no need for French Revolution era microwave
I don’t have numbers at all. I push a button to insta add 30 seconds. Or spin a wheel to scroll up in time.
I had one with a swipe bar a while ago, talk about bad UI.
Same vibe but I only use the +30s button to enter cook time. Bonus points to microwaves that automatically start when you press +30.
Mine, each number does that number of minutes when pressed, so it’s all increments of minutes. It also has a +30s, but I usually just set it to the minute above and stop early.
The perfect microwave would have +30s, +10s, +5s, +1m, +5m, and a stop/clear button. Nothing else really needed. No clock, no power levels, no food buttons. Oh, and no cooldown at the end.
Hell yea brother!
+30s gang rise up!
I returned a microwave I bought that didnt auto start when you press +30. Like im supposed to +30 THEN hit ANOTHER button? Fuck no!
My microwave automatically starts when pressing 1-6 and then the +30sec button is the start button.
The max I can do with two button presses is 6:30.
If the microwave wasn’t underpowered it would be perfect.
Bonus points to microwaves that automatically start when you press +30.
Yep, the cooking gets going while I press the +30 button additional times, saving precious second. Wish I could also change the power level while it’s running. update: It does work! +30 all the foods!
Our new microwave has that and the buttons 1-6 will start that number of minutes immediately. We were pretty excited about it because our old microwave didn’t even have the 30sec button.
what brand is that?
good to acknowledge when companies actually improve products rather than just enshittifying them
Both microwaves are GEs. The first was from 2007 and came with our house in 2015. It still worked when we left it in that house earlier this year so despite not having the 30sec button we didn’t really have any complaints about it.
My last two have had that, both GE
I like the 30 second button. I loathe the 1-6 minute buttons. Time entry club forever!
I wish that function only worked on 1-3. I hate that I have to push the cook time first if I want 45 seconds. Do I ever put something in for 4 minutes straight? Absolutely not. If something needs that long to heat up, it probably needs to be on a lower power/defrost, or it’s a thick soup that is 2 minutes, stir, then 1 minute increments until just right.
I have leaned that is what the “cook time” button is for.
My wife does that. Early on, I asked her…
“Why do you set the microwave to 1:11?”
“Because it takes less time than 1:00.”
“I’m pretty sure it doesn’t.”
“🤦🏻♀️”
On my Samsung microwave the start button does 30 seconds of max wattage. Pressing it multiple times increases the timer by 30 seconds. I just press the button a bunch of times usually
Or microwave has a +30 seconds button, so I always just mash it until it’s close enough. I usually have to add a little extra anyway, since it’s a 1000 watt microwave and instructions usually are calibrated for 1200 now.
wow what country do you live in? in the UK all microwave instructions I’ve seen are for 800-900W
USA, although now that I’m thinking of it they might be for 1100 watts? Not 1000 on a lot of packages, anyway.
In the US I think they range from like 800 to 1200.
The lower ones are usually also smaller so they fit better if you have limited space.
Me too! I totally set the microwave time based on vibes and just push the same button over and over until I feel like it’s the right amount.
44, 222, and 66 are the most common.
The sentence is life in prison but each offender only has to serve a couple years and then they get swapped out with the next one in the queue.
I’ll sometimes take a nap, 30 min before I have to go out. No alarm.
Bold
This would drive me crazy, just seeing that start blinking non stop instead of the time like sane people.
Ours doesn’t blink, so if it’s more than a minute of time on the timer it literally just looks like the time is set wrong
We had a power outage a couple months ago: when the power came back, the clock on the microwave stopped remembering the time. You set it for 1:30pm for example, then look at it ten minutes later and it’d be something like 5:26am, ten min later and it’s now 2:48pm, and on and on.
We unplugged it a couple times, but it wouldn’t fix it; time was still jumping all over the place.
Had another power outage last week. Power came back: Suddenly it’s working perfectly again. 🤷🏻
That’s really quite strange. Probably not the issue but some electrical devices use the frequency of electricity to keep track of time.
Easily fixed with a strip of electrical tape.
Just microwave everything for a M.I.N.U.T.E. Mean Ideal Nuke Unit Time Estimate. That’s how the minute was invented back in the 1950s.
I wish I could do this, but my microwave resets to zero after about 3 minutes of being left with any residual time.
I’m also a 2:22, 55, 77, 99, etc. user.
I was visiting the last GF I had, about eight years go. First time in her house. She’s in the bedroom, and I go out to the kitchen to heat something up. She hears me pushing the buttons, BEEP, BEEP, and comes running. She told me I had to set a time that ended in 55 or 99. I asked her why, and she just said “my house…”.
It probably had that secret exploding feature if you didn’t.
You’d think by now someone would have made a microwave that’s like 2€ cheaper and has a single on/off button.
I would totally buy one.
Some commercial microwaves have a single knob you spin to set a time and you can open the door, or spin it back to stop it. This is how the first microwave I used worked, back around 1980.
How much microwave exposure does one get whem opening the door of a running microwave oven? Obviously the machine stops, but not instantly.
Basically nothing. Microwave radiation isn’t ionising like x-rays or UV are, the danger is just that they can heat you up in the same way that they heat your food up (and that there’s a heap of electricity involved in running the machine)
Words to live by:
Don’t jump in front of a naval radar dish.
I knew a guy years ago who worked security at Vendenberg AFB. He said on cold nights, when they’d do the rounds, they’d linger for a bit in front of the microwave transmission tower dishes to warm up. Always gave me the willies.
How did the chocolate in their pockets do?
You mean I’m not the only one who doesn’t like to be far from chocolate?
I’ve never much liked chocolate myself (aside from the occasional craving), but supposedly the invention of the microwave as a cooking tool happened when a researcher walked past a microwave dish with a chocolate bar in his pocket and found it to have subsequently melted.
That’s pretty bizarre.
And I mean about not liking chocolate, not the microwave thing.
I’ve never claimed to be normal, but your username makes me suspect you’re biased.
My guess would be roughly zero, but I’m interested if there is a more concrete answer
It’s not roughly zero, it is zero. The only way a microwave oven can hurt you with microwave radiation is if you rig the door switch and put a body part in.
And all that’ll do is burn you.
But microwaves can kill you if you try to take them apart due to the capacitors needed to run the magnetron. Same reason you shouldn’t ever take apart a CRT monitor.
yup, quite a few people managed to kill themselves trying to burn wood with electricity:
Weird answer: body parts! I have what i have and measuring it isnt going to make me feel better. I do the things i need to do to increase muscle, decrease fat, and maximize happiness and longevity.
Measuring leads to comparison leads to disappointment
I measure my body so I can order clothes that will fit correctly. But I agree with the other stuff.
“Comparison is the theif of joy.”
But your one was fine too, I guess.
Firemen love this one simple trick!
