Comment by dataflow

9 hours ago

Only works adequately if your microwave is the rarer kind that actually lowers the power (inverter), instead of just switching between 100% and 0% repeatedly.

4 comments

dataflow

afiori 7 hours ago

This should depend on the frequency of the switching, if it is every few seconds it should behave sorta the same

vel0city 8 hours ago

I don't have the fancier inverter style. Setting a power level still works pretty well even though flawed. Drawing out the overall cooking time still manages to get things more evenly heated in the end when you give the food time to distribute the heat throughout the food.

Cooking food for 2 minutes at 50% power gives a noticeable difference in average temperature compared to cooking food for 1 minute at 100% power and waiting a minute.

And I don't always know what it decides to do as far as turning the magnetron on and off on its sensor modes, but it'll spend a while doing automated reheat and potatoes and what not and it'll be dang near perfect every time.

Don't get me wrong I'd love an inverter microwave, truly a better option. But its not like the duty cycle process has no impact.

chongli 8 hours ago
It's funny, because the inverter microwave is actually cheaper to build nowadays. It uses a small switching power supply to generate the needed voltage to run the magnetron at different power levels. The older style duty cycle microwaves use a huge transformer to generate the high voltage, which makes them way heavier and more expensive due to all that copper.
- vel0city 6 hours ago
  
  My microwave is over 20 years old and still working fine even with its computerized automatic modes. Modern versions of the product line are inverter based. Whenever this unit fails I'll probably replace it with the modern inverter version. I've used it at friends places, it's quite nice.
  It's a GE Profile model FWIW. It seems like a good product line from my experiences. The matching oven has also been a good performer overall.