Microwave oven losing power?

DiddyDavies

I have a fairly old microwave oven (purchased about 4 years ago) that has been in storage for a fair while due to a house move and hasn't been used for about 1 year.
I've recently started using it and some of the items I'm using it to reheat seem to be taking longer then when I was using the appliance last year.
Is it possible for a microwave to lose power due to a fault? or is it normally the case that they either work or they don't?
It has a digital display and everything appears normal on this display and it seems to switch between power settings okay.

aerostar

As you say "some of the items take longer", it may well be that as the days get colder, your fridge and freezer gets more efficient, resulting in the item to be microwaved being colder, making the time to heat longer.  My microwave, in the summer took 6mins 50sec for an item, now it is 7mins 30. I have noticed that on earlier microwaves in the past.

unforeseen

It's because of the increase in the use of wifi. WiFi is in the same frequency band as microwaves
Due to this there are less microwaves for your oven to use so things take longer.

You can improve the cooking times by using the 5GHz band for your WiFi as that will free up more of the 2.4GHz microwaves for your oven to use. 

wongataa

unforeseen said:

It's because of the increase in the use of wifi. WiFi is in the same frequency band as microwaves
Due to this there are less microwaves for your oven to use so things take longer.

You can improve the cooking times by using the 5GHz band for your WiFi as that will free up more of the 2.4GHz microwaves for your oven to use. 

Utter utter rubbish.

Microwave ovens are shielded inside (to stop those microwaves leaving the oven and cooking the surrounding area) so any radiation of the same frequency as the oven uses won't be getting in and anyway the power levels of Wi-Fi are so low it wouldn't make any difference if they did.

The_Fat_Controller

A microwave not heating because of WiFi, best laugh I have had in a while 
Implying that there are not enough waves to go round as they are somehow shared is so funny.
I would only worry if it's making any odd noise or you can smell electrical burning.

ballyblack

unforeseen said:

It's because of the increase in the use of wifi. WiFi is in the same frequency band as microwaves
Due to this there are less microwaves for your oven to use so things take longer.

You can improve the cooking times by using the 5GHz band for your WiFi as that will free up more of the 2.4GHz microwaves for your oven to use. 

its NOT the 1st of April

Neil_Jones

unforeseen said:

It's because of the increase in the use of wifi. WiFi is in the same frequency band as microwaves
Due to this there are less microwaves for your oven to use so things take longer.

You can improve the cooking times by using the 5GHz band for your WiFi as that will free up more of the 2.4GHz microwaves for your oven to use. 

Realistically if your microwave is interfering with your Wifi it's probably time to buy a new microwave.

[Deleted User]

If you're microwaving a lot of wholegrain foods, you'll need to get high fibre broadband. 

forgotmyname

Neil_Jones said:

Realistically if your microwave is interfering with your Wifi it's probably time to buy a new microwave.

They do interfere with your 2.4GHz WIFI though, I noticed this many years ago.  Downloading would always drop to a crawl
just before dinner, initially thinking everyones just home and it's congestion but it clicked that whenever our microwave was
switched on the download speed dropped substantially.  Used to have bandwidth monitoring tools running back then so
the speed drop was obvious.

Cooking slower due to WIFI?   Surely thats backwards, there should be an excess of 2.4Ghz pixies with the WIFI and
microwave powered on.  Maybe you need to download something to speedup the cooking times?  

Just tried it but forgot the WIFI is 5Ghz.. Will try 2.4Ghz later to see if it still happens.

Neil_Jones

I think a lot depends on where your router is and the journey the signal takes.  If it only has to go across the same room in the opposite direction to the microwave/kitchen, it may not be as noticeable.  Whereas if you're unfortunate enough to live somewhere where the kitchen is in line of sight to the router...

Of course older microwaves are more susceptible to leakage, and newer ones are better at containing this.  However when the standard was introduced they did a bunch of research into it and the "microwave effect", but you may be able to play the effect down by changing some wireless settings to do with fragmentation, something to do fitting it in with the "off" periods during microwave operation apparently.

unforeseen

wongataa said:

unforeseen said:

It's because of the increase in the use of wifi. WiFi is in the same frequency band as microwaves
Due to this there are less microwaves for your oven to use so things take longer.

You can improve the cooking times by using the 5GHz band for your WiFi as that will free up more of the 2.4GHz microwaves for your oven to use. 

Utter utter rubbish.

Microwave ovens are shielded inside (to stop those microwaves leaving the oven and cooking the surrounding area) so any radiation of the same frequency as the oven uses won't be getting in and anyway the power levels of Wi-Fi are so low it wouldn't make any difference if they did.

Whoops, I forgot to put the tongue-in-cheek icon on my post. 
If you had read it properly then you would have realised it was a joke. 
It's a shame that you were the only one that didn't see it as a joke.