Comment by dale_glass | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dale_glass | Hacker News Reader

There's lots of reasons why something like a working microwave might get thrown out. Eg:

* I have a small kitchen and just never use it

* I have a small kitchen and it lacks some feature (eg, grill) that would save me another device.

* Grandma can't made head or tails of these weird buttons. Seriously, my current mirowave damn near has hieroglyphs on it, and it's quite recent. Microwave UI is just appalling. Feel free to ask for a picture if curious.

* We remodeled the kitchen and it's no longer a good fit

* We had an extra one for some reason. Eg, child had to move back in with their parents, brought their stuff.

* It's too small

* I'm moving to another country and not taking it with me

As for why not sell it/list it somewhere? You can buy a microwave for $50, so it may just not be worth the effort. You have to do all this negotiating/chatting/texting and agreeing with people about who will be where when, and if you're not in a bad need of a few bucks it may just not be worthwhile.

> Seriously, my current mirowave damn near has hieroglyphs on it

I bought a Smeg oven. I wanted and oven and wanted one with very few features to avoid complexity. I foolishly bought one with two knobs, as it looked simple.

It has heaps of features which you access via twiddling one knob, both together, pushing down on one while twiddling the other, and a variety of other methods which I don’t understand. Setting the clock takes me 10 minutes.

I bought a small Toshiba EM925A5A-BS microwave, which was top ranked by The Wirecutter at the time.

Two years later, the light begins flickering. Now it just doesn't come on at all.

I google up how to replace the lightbulb. Turns out, you can't and this issue is common amongst owners of these microwaves. It's amazing they can't spend the extra dollar or two in components and make the bulb replaceable. I imagine a lot of these Toshiba microwaves are in dumps now.

I'd have a hard time trying to give this thing away with a defective light. I'll probably be stuck with it finally stops working altogether, and then it will end up in a landfill.

That's pretty infuriating. I have look for your model online, and apparently Toshiba decided it was reasonable to use a LED lamp instead, and they didn't make them good.

If you're used to disassembly appliances to repair them it isn't difficult to change it to a new one, or even change it to a common bulb + socket system. You shouldn't have too much danger doing that, after disconnecting it for a couple of hours, because the high voltage lines (red stranded wires) are far from that part.

Yeah, I've been thinking about just soldiering in a new LED, but haven't had time. Replacing it with a socket is a better idea, though. Same amount of effort the first time, far less when it comes time to replace the bulb again...

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