Hacker News Reader

Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> I've lost track of the number of times I've lamented "did anyone actually use this?"

We have a combination oven and microwave (yes...) that seems to have been designed with the primary purpose of enraging the owner.

The microwave can only be set in 15 second increments. But you can fine-tune it, in five-second increments, by spinning a dial. Except that you can't do that while the oven is on.

The microwave makes a noise while it's operating. When it's finished, it will beep unobtrusively and then continue to make the operating noise. You can stop it from making the operating noise by opening the door.

The microwave can't be replaced, because it's part of the oven.

View on HN

> by spinning a dial

When we moved into our current house, it had a microwave like that. When we replaced it, my primary requirements were 1. multiple fan speeds, and 2. a nice, simple touch pad for entering the time; preferably one where you didn't need to press a button before starting to enter the cooking time.

The dial thing is... infuriating. It never once found a situation where it made using the device better, and in most situations it made it worse.

> The dial thing is... infuriating. It never once found a situation where it made using the device better, and in most situations it made it worse.

Digital dials can be nice in some cases.

My parents had an oven with a dial for the temperature. Spin it either way to increase or decrease the temperature by extra 5 degrees. I loved it. It was so much better than the touchpad design. The range of actual temperatures in an oven is pretty small and I found this much more friendly than punching in the temperature, getting it wrong, cancelling, and punching it in again. It was a “finger tip” dial so it was quick to spin. Probably horrible for people with bad arthritis or other hand mobility issues, though.

I wouldn’t mind a microwave with a similar dial for time. Again, the actual range of times in typical use (for me) is not that high. The design described with a two tier system for adjusting time seems moronic though.

> The range of actual temperatures in an oven is pretty small

The range of temperatures you use is about 200 degrees?

Maybe 250. 300-550. I rarely go up to 550 and never below 300 that I can recall. With 5 degree increments, that’s only 50 clicks, fewer if the system is speed sensitive.

For temperature, I can see it working... though I don't see how it would actually be _better_ than tapping in the number.

For the microwave time, it was a horrible experience pretty much every time I interacted with the device. A keypad is simple, intuitive, and easy to use.

Keypads should be simple and easy to use, but they often are not. The buttons are inconsistently responsive and there’s always at least one other key you have to press, often two. And those other two are named whatever the designers decided and placed wherever the thought would be most confusing.

“Okay, I want to cook for 3 minutes.”

‘300’

”Ok, the numbers don’t work until I press something else. Hmmm”

‘Time Cook’ ‘400’

“Shit. I hit the 4. Where’s the cancel?

‘Cancel’ ‘Time Cook’ ‘300’

“Where’s the start?”

‘Start’

High quality dials with adaptive increments are amazing and much faster & easier to use than a touch pad.

My microwave oven uses a dial, and it works great. It uses increasing intervals between dial ticks (5 seconds for cooking times under 1 minute, 10 seconds for cooking times under 3 minutes or so, than 30 seconds, than 1 minute, than 5 minutes; I don't know the cut-of points by heart). The intervals are chosen in a way that they're precise where they need to be, and large where they don't need to be precise. It's really easy and fast to set the time you need.

It's a bit limited, in the sense that you can't set the time to e.g. 17:27. But who needs that?

When my old mechanical kitchen timer died on me, I bought a digital one with a dial, in the hope that it work the same way as the one on my microwave oven. Boy was I wrong. It kinda increases the interval when you spin it faster, but in a completely unpredictable and impractical way.

So I guess it's easy to make impractical dials, but it certainly is possible to make very well functioning dials as well.

If "the operating noise" is the cooling fan for the magnetron, it keeps going when the time is up to cool it down. Mine does the same, but actually says "COOL" on the screen when it does so.

The problem with this is that it prevents you from knowing when the microwave has finished.

The cooling fan isn't supposed to be an audible "microwave is on" alert. That's not its design function.

Perhaps the actual audible alert on yours should be louder.

My old microwave oven has a fan that is on only when the microwaves are on. If that was possible in 1985 it can be made the same way now.

No doubt it was some combination of lower power, physically larger or simply more prone to failure. Do you suppose the designers go to the trouble of a cool-down timer just for the hell of it?

I always use Reverse Hanlon's Razor, so I suppose they do it in bad faith. /s

Actually I guess they both shave off weight/cost and design for built-in model first (that are naturally more heat-constrained) and make standalone variant as an afterthought.

It's more reliable if you connect the cooling fan to a thermostat rather than the power switch. Otherwise the hottest time is actually after you turn it off (as heat from the inside leaks to the outside but is no longer being cooled by the fan.)

That must be frustrating, but was quite funny to read.

I would happily invest in kitchen appliances that have a silent mode for apartments and shared living spaces.

My microwave beeps at the end, and then beeps again 10 minutes later once the food has been removed. My old toaster beeped 5 times when the toast popped, which is unnecessary when the popping action is loud on it's own.

You might be able to remove the “buzzer” or speaker in the device.

If it's a regular piezo buzzer, just stick a small rare earth magnet to it. Instant silence, and doesn't damage anything!

This is brilliant - I bet there's not too many sizes of piezo buzzer so someone could make little kits to sell on amazon et al ...

Have you looked to see if your microwave has a volume control menu? After years of listening to my microwave blare across the house I saw a tweet that informed me that most microwaves have a menu setting somewhere to control the volume and sure enough, my Frigidaire microwave actually does. I had just never thought to look.

> The microwave can only be set in 15 second increments. But you can fine-tune it, in five-second increments, by spinning a dial

Mine is similar, also a combi. You spin the dial and it will go up in 10 second increments to a point, then in minutes, then in 5 minutes, then ten minutes, etc. Fine, I get it, it's like floating point. But it starts doing 5 minutes at the 10 minute mark! So you can't do 11-14 minutes. Which is actually about right for some things in an oven.

You also can't add more than 10 minutes to a short time without stopping the oven (this, I assume, is intended to be a safety thing to avoid being able to accidentally add hours of cooking without positive user intent).

And I do wish it would just stop the fan once it stops cooking, but I suppose the electronics next to the hot oven don't suddenly need less cooling just because the hot metal box doesn't have food in it.

I do like it though because it's much more efficient for small things than a big oven and I don't have space for a toaster oven and a microwave. And it has a much better UI for setting a delay start than the 6-button interface of the big oven.

> Mine is similar, also a combi.

> I do like it though because it's much more efficient for small things than a big oven and I don't have space for a toaster oven and a microwave.

You may have gotten the wrong idea. This isn't a combination where the same box functions as an oven and a microwave. This is a microwave that is for no reason physically attached to a separate oven - it takes up all the space of a big oven plus a normally sized microwave. The only thing they share is the display panel. And yet that didn't stop anyone from disabling microwave functionality while the oven is on.

There is absolutely no advantage to this compared to having an oven and a separate microwave, and many, many, many disadvantages. It continually boggles my mind that anyone ever designed, manufactured, or purchased this thing.

> The microwave makes a noise while it's operating. When it's finished, it will beep unobtrusively and then continue to make the operating noise. You can stop it from making the operating noise by opening the door.

Check out Chesterton's Fence.

Tell us why you think it’s relevant.

Sure. Sibling comments to my comment explain that the continued "operating noise" is a cooling mechanism that's required by the microwave oven.

So, it wouldn't be a good idea to just rip that part out of the design. Even if it may be annoying. Perhaps a better explanation is needed, like some models showing "cool" in the display. But it's per se not a design oversight.

Chesterton's Fence is about not changing things before understanding what led to the current state of affairs. I think the principle easily extends to complaining as well.

No, absolutely not. This is not a problem that other microwaves have. It seriously impairs the functioning of the microwave. Chesterton's Fence tells us that there is no cost to eliminating this ridiculously awful functionality, because other microwaves already don't do it. An explanation doesn't help in any way. The solution is to stop misbehaving.

Maybe those other microwaves have a different design that doesn't make it necessary. So, sure, you can re-design the microwave oven, but that may entail significantly more work than to just deactivate the fan.

I could criticize cars with combustion engines for having one and being so noisy/stinky/... Then I could go on claiming that they should just turn them off, cause there are cars without combustion engines which are less noisy/stinky/... I'd be missing that there is more to it than just turning off the engine. I'd need to replace it with something else, like an EV. Maybe that did not exist yet when that car was build. So, claiming that this old Ford from 1970 having a combustion engine is stupid because "this is not a problem that other cars have" is missing the point. I could go rip the engine out because I don't like that it's noisy/stinky/... But I'm in for a surprise here. The vehicle won't move anymore. Something I'd have understood had I followed the principle put forward by Chesterton's Fence.

> Chesterton's Fence tells us that there is no cost to eliminating this ridiculously awful functionality

No. It tells you to first understand what you are doing. Blindly claiming something misses that part.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com