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Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

(2016), FWIW.

The article doesn't mention issues with putting metal - dishes, silverware, twist ties, whatever - in the microwave. IF you know what you're doing, that's pretty harmless. (If not - sparks, fire, and other excitement often results.)

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Optical disks produce fun, brief light shows in the microwave. Don't run them for more than a couple of seconds, though.

I understand the physics of microwaves but haven't taken the time to understand when metal is dangerous — I tend to just always avoid it.

Do you know of any resources that explain what scenarios belong in the "harmless" category?

My (limited) understanding is that the shape is a large factor. Something about sharp edges or points concentrating the electric field induced by the microwaves, leading to a high voltage buildup. So forks are a bad idea, while spoons will likely not result in any sparks.

I once put food covered with alumnium foil (that had ton of creases) to heat up. That was fun show

My aunt did that with baked potatoes in ~1990 and burned down the entire house.

ElectroBOOM demonstrates this:

https://youtu.be/OyTmJX_TC84?feature=shared

jinx

you win!

Especially don’t forget to remove aluminum foils, sparks inside the microwave is a scary sight to witness.

Yeah, Mr. ElectroBOOM has a pretty informative video [1] trying a handful of different configurations of metal objects in a consumer microwave oven. Turns out it's hard to make "interesting" things happen with metal even if you intend to.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyTmJX_TC84&ab_channel=Elect...

Alton Brown used to have a recipe (I'm Just Here for the Food?) for homemade microwave popcorn where you can use a typical metal staple and it won't spark, something to do with the amount of metal, and also actual size of the microwave wavelengths used being bigger than a staple, iirc.

Good memory! He also says to use a turntable microwave, to keep the staples several inches apart, and away from the microwave's walls.

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