Hacker News Reader

Comment by doubled112 | Hacker News Reader

I ran into this same setup with a microwave that failed in a few months after purchase and Walmart.

Tried to deal with the manufacturer, but they couldn’t help and sent me to the retailer.

Went to the store, popped it up on the counter, had a short conversation and got the expected “you have to deal with the manufacturer”.

Is there anything else I can help you with today?

Actually yes. Can you throw that out for me?

The confusion on the guy’s face was great.

Spent more than enough time on the $100 microwave. Their problem now.

View on HN

My experience with cheap modern microwave failures has been the door sensor failing, which for safety ofc prevents the magnetron from running. I had one fail in about 2 months, thankfully fixable with a $10 sensor and 15 minute of work. Same goes for a lot of appliances, repaired a dryer that had its door sensor fail (in fact, they all tend to use identical door sensors as far as I've seen, dryers and washing machines and microwaves).

My personal experience with a modern microwave (they mostly seem to be the same design internally, coming from the same chassis with the same electronics just a different button panel) was that the internal light bulb blowing generated a surge (it was a mains voltage bulb) that wasn't fused so the next nearest thing in the mains circuit was a trace on the motherboard that vaporized.

There is no way of easily changing this bulb (inside the main casing with no access panel for the bulb) so for want of a single in-line fuse, the entire microwave was rendered scrap[0] by the lifetime of a light bulb.

[0] - Except for the fact that I care not for electrical safety "DO NOT OPEN" warnings of doom due to being actually competent with handling high voltage equipment and being able to do a board level repair on the burned out trace without touching the very large capacitors associated with the very high voltage side controlling the magnetron...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com