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We tried and failed to find performance differences in our twenty-six microwaves
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- Title
- We Tried and Failed To Find Performance Differences in Our 26 Microwaves: Why You Can Choose One Based on Power, Design, and UI
- Authors
- Michael John Wood
- Published
- Jul 2 2024
- Word count
- 3447 words
Wow, I'm impressed with how thorough their experiments were.
Yeah, this is about what I would have expected. They really are all about the same. The reason why people tend to hate their microwaves is simply because they don’t know how to use them effectively.
One thing I was always surprised at is that “mode stirrers* never really took off outside of commercial models. I’ve always been irritated by microwave turntables. You have to have the items offset from the center for best heating performance and if you are lucky the cycles are synchronized to stay the same for every minute, but they often are not. Even if they are, the food is pushed off to a far side, and when it is time to clean it you have this giant glass plate to remove, which is never quite as stable as you would like it to be and usually has a tendency to not be set right when replacing it.
I remember the Toshiba microwave my family bought in 1994. The turn table rotated at exactly 6 RPM. Every 10 seconds the item was back at the door. And it also ran the turntable after time expired, if needed. So if you cooked something for, say, 1m04s, it would run the turntable for 6 extra seconds to return to the starting position.
No microwave I’ve had since does this.
The other thing that was notable about that microwave is that it came with a comprehensive guide on how to cook various dishes, including advice on how to place aluminum foil over certain parts of the food to shield it, like chicken feet. I was always told never to put metal in the microwave (but of course I did for fun, don’t tell on me). But this official guide said it could be done.
I wonder if that manual is online somewhere…
If you know the model there is a decent chance you can find the manual. There are multiple sites dedicated to hosting the manuals of just about every appliance out there. I've found manuals of old second hand washing machines that helped me repair them.
Furthering this, I recently got into photography with my dad’s old film camera from the 70s and you can absolutely still find online manuals comprehensively listing every feature. I’ve only ever found it in black and white, but honestly it might have been printed that way back then, so I’m not complaining.
I sort of figured at this point all microwaves are made in the same factory (or handful of factories) with different branding slapped on the outside.
What I will say is that a good differentiating factor is a dial input. Have that on my current microwave and it's actually faster than hunting and pecking on a keypad.
Faster than a 30sec increment/start combo button? Those seem pretty swift to me.
I thought the same thing when my workplace got a rotary dial microwave, but the ability to do small increments at the lower end and higher increments on the high end is weirdly intuitive and I love it too. Wish I had it at home, with the first increment being 10 seconds for heating up kid leftovers.
It also has one of those, lol
A keypad wouldn’t be so bad if it were actually physical buttons you could feel. I honestly miss the old microwaves from my childhood because they had cheap tact switch buttons. Right now the thing that bugs me the most is the power selection is just one button, and you can’t press it too fast or it won’t read all your inputs. You have to press it 5 times to get 50% power and 8 times to get 20%! I just want buttons that actually work.
That's a strange design if you have number buttons; on every microwave I've had, you were able to press Cook Power (or whatever) and then 1 through 0 to set the power in increments of 10% (so press 5 for 50%).
Fully agree on tactile buttons. I feel like especially in cars, this will start to become a differentiating factor for me (though I'm not currently looking at cars new enough to be in the "one big touchscreen in the middle" era).
I've been forced to use a dial microwave ever since I moved to Germany and I could not disagree more. It's more or less impossible to put things in for an amount of time that's specific down to the second without separately timing it either in my head or on my phone, and the dials themselves are not close to precise enough.
Are you using a microwave with an analog dial and ticks at time estimates? Yeah, those aren’t great. I am pretty sure OP is talking about a digital dial microwave. It would more accurately be called a rotary encoder.
Yeah I think mine is just a manual dial (at the very least, there's no indication it's anything but manual). I can see a digital version being better, that makes sense!
Anyone who's worked on microwave ovens knows this. Beyond the control panel they're all the same. They all use the same magnetron, power supply, safety interlock switches, and cavity for cooking. You could replace the whole control panel with one switch and it would still cook the same.
Agreed. (Thank you for the PSA :-) ) There's high voltage and if one screws up remounting the magnetron to the chassis, there is hundreds of watts of 2 GHz RF going where it shouldn't, possibly causing burns, blindness, etc.
I don't think the headline agrees with their methodology nor their conclusions (though the byline does somewhat address this). I think it's a good and useful writeup, but I think that the headline is just wrong. And it doesn't even seem like it's trying to be clickbait.
They explicitly normalize for power, which is a pretty important performance-based metric. If you don't care at all about how long your food takes to cook, then sure, all microwaves are roughly the same.
Just imagine a car review guide saying "we compared a fully loaded semi truck and an F1 racecar, and there were no performance differences when accelerating at a rate of 0.5 m/s^2." Technically true, but ignoring an important aspect of performance.
I agree, but its still good to know that i can look at the wattage, and thats all i need to know when it comes to performance when it comes to shopping for a microwave.
But it makes perfect sense to normalize for power. Power is like temperature in an oven. It doesn’t make sense to bake a roast at 800°F for 10 minutes instead of 400° for 30, just as it doesn’t make sense to microwave a hot pocket at 1200W for 30 seconds instead of 600W for a minute. You get worse food - the outside burns or dehydrates while the inside remains cold. Its not good.
Although, almost all of my microwave usage is to reheat a bowl of ~90% water. The microwave is not going to cook my leftover soup (it's probably already simmered for at least half an hour while I was making it; even if I really cranked it and got the bowl to a rolling boil, it would do very little additional cooking), so the output power is overwhelmingly going to dominate performance. A 1200W microwave will have me eating my lunch in half the time of a 600W microwave.
Yes, so in your use case scenario, you should buy the higher wattage microwave. But for the vast majority of people, soup is not the majority of the food they heat in a microwave, and every single microwave I've ever seen defaults to 100% power. Why would a person want to buy a microwave that will default to rubbery, dehydrated, and burnt food? In fact, when America's Test Kitchen tested Microwaves, their recommendations were specifically to buy a 1000W microwave to save on the premium because there wasn't really much benefit to going over it.
Power isn't the same as temperature in an oven though. Microwaves can penetrate the food (1-3 cm according to their mashed potato test) and heat from the inside. Ovens only heat the surface, and require the food's thermal conductivity to heat the inside. This is why you can have a hot pocket out of a microwave that still seems cold on the outside but is full of boiling lava on the inside. You cannot achieve that effect with a conventional oven.
A 1200W microwave will deliver 1200W of power directly to the contents of the microwave (hopefully mostly into your food, but some also goes into your plate). If you have one hot pocket, it'll get most of that 1200W. If you have four hot pockets in there, they'll each get roughly 300W and will take 4x as long to cook. An oven set to 350°F will heat your food from the outside, and whether there's one hot pocket or four hot pockets, they'll take the same amount of time to cook.
I also disagree with your premise that a single hot pocket at 1200W for 30 seconds is worse than at 600W for a minute. As long as the microwave completes a whole number of rotations of the turntable, and as long as your food is less than 3 cm thick (as is the case with hot pockets), I don't think there will be any apparent difference. If there are partial rotations, some hot spots may be hotter than others.
I think you misunderstand how microwaves work. MIcrowaves can penetrate food, but what gets heated depends on what it is made up of. When a microwave hits water or other polarized molecules, it is absorbed and converted to heat then and there. The microwaves can get to 3cm deep, but it likely won't because most of the food we eat is filled with water. You are sort of right about hot pockets - the exterior is dry and it has a crisper sleeve that absorbs some of that energy to brown the outside. But really, the reason why hot pockets are cool on the outside and boiling on the outside is because they were cooked incorrectly - usually at the highest wattage possible, notably. And to be clear, I don't blame anyone for doing this because the instructions that you find in most microwave meals are absolutely horrible and ruin the the food you're supposed to be enjoying.
Incorrectly heating at the highest wattage setting is generally the reason why the microwave has such a bad name in the culinary world. It's the reason why things heat unevenly - it's being given energy faster than it has the ability to transmit through thermal conductivity. That also makes the surface dry out, which makes meats and other proteins taste rubbery and unpleasant.
Hot pockets are kind of a bad example for the wattage claim because they are meant to be crisped with the crisping sleeve, so higher power is generally better (You're probably not going to get a microwave strong enough where it would cause burning). Microwaving it at 600W would not give the crispy crust that you want, and that's also why they don't recommend cooking more than one at a time via this method. Because of the requirement to have a crispy crust, a microwave is actually probably one of the worst tools; you should use a toaster oven instead, which will provide a much more consistently crispy crust.
In any case, it's not a premise; it's a pretty well known microwave cooking technique. Try making a big bowl (3-4 servings worth) of plain oatmeal in the microwave. If you cook at 1200W it will puff up and make a mess before it becomes creamy, and you'll get splotches of cooked-on oatmeal. But if you cook it low and slow it will turn out fine.
Okay, but that wouldn't be true even technically though. An F1 car and a semi truck are going to have wildly different performance characteristics even when accelerating at the same speed. If anything, doing a test like this would do a better job of highlighting performance differences between the two other than their ability to accelerate quickly because it would be controlling for that variable. The car landscape would be utterly unrecognizable (and car shopping would be a lot simpler) if the only difference between any two cars was how fast they can accelerate.