25 May
2001
25 May
'01
10:32 a.m.
At 07:59 PM 5/25/01 +0100, you wrote:
>
> My 17 year old "microprocessor controlled" microwave oven stopped making
> food hot the other night. Everything still appears and sounds about the
> same, just food stays cold, and when it first happened there was a bit of
> the smell of the gates of capacitor heaven being open. Should I take a
> swing at fixing it, or yield to the cheap new inverter technology?
The biggest cause of failures in microwave ovens is the magnets.
They're made of a cheap material that loses it's magnetic strength. When
that happens, the electrons no longer spiral in the magnatron. Instead thy
try to go directly from the cathode to the anode and that causes the
magnatron to draw to much current and that causes it to shut down. To
repair it, you have to replace the magnitron which usually isn't cost
effective even if you can get the replacement part.
Joe