REQUIEM FOR A MICROWAVE OVEN?

[ea56]

Midea-Schimdea, it works great and thats all that concerns me. I liked the controls on my old Sharp and they are the same on my Midea Magic Chef. It always does just what it had oughta do and thats the bottom line for me with any appliance.

Eddie

 

[petek]

I was surprised to find out that my Carrier Mini Split is also made by Midea. They probably make numerous other known and little known brands as well. Anyways its been good so far the last couple of years.

 

[normadesmond]

@chetlaham- Thanks!!

@panasonicvac- It's over 20 years ago & all I can recall is maybe the base was a reddish/maroon color. Beige too. Might the bags been F & G? I always delighted in that. Really though, it's been s o long ago.

 

[panasonicvac]

Sounded like it was one of the Jet-Flo models.

 

[mattl]

I have a Jet Flo Panny upright.  Was my dd for years, did/does a great job.  It's the variable speed model, it's now a part of my vintage collection.

 

[whitewhiskers]

Sharp Carousel R-930AK

Purchased at Circuit City in 1999. At the time I had visions of baking crispy pizzas, beautiful biscuits, and even cakes baked with a combination of convection and microwave with less time. It never happened as the convection feature sucks. In reality the convection took longer than a regular oven to achieve the same degree of doneness.

A few years into service the door interlocks failed. I replaced two melted interlocks and the thin gauge wires which also melted with thicker wire. Also re-aligned the door as it too was never right out of the box. The vacuum fluorescent display is getting dimmer and may fail soon. I have the service manual which shows the oven is extremely complicated. There was a time a few years ago when dozens of these ovens appeared on eBay and Amazon as refurb units. It was a popular model that made lots of promises but never lived up to the hype and failed early in service.

It works great as a microwave oven to reheat leftovers and cooking frozen dishes. The sensor feature works great to cook potatoes. It has two Popcorn settings, and most important, the popcorn bag needs to be elevated somehow so it's higher than the lip of the metal tray. Sharp didn't want to use a glass tray for fear of shattering. The next model up uses a ceramic tray that is non-conductive and won't break in convection mode. The build quality is excellent using thick triple-wall metal. It's built like a tank, unlike many of the microwave ovens sold today which are made as cheap as possible.

There's a newer model SMC1585 which may correct some of the design flaws of the earlier model. But it too seems to have lots of returns from unhappy buyers. These units are then put back up for sale as refurb.

 

[panasonicvac]

My grandparent's next door neighbors has the white R-930AW version that's since been put into storage. Always thought they were interesting. But in all of honesty, I don't personally care about convections. In fact we have a Toshiba countertop that replaced one of our Amanas I was talking about earlier, the convection feature is just trash. It's even worse than our LG stove which also has a convection. I don't know why we didn't return it and brought our old Amana back from storage because it also doesn't microwave that good either. If I were to ever have one of those Sharp convection microwaves, I wouldn't use the convection feature at all. But why pay for something extra if you're never going to use it? I think it's better off to just get a over-the-range R-1514TY model instead for about the same price because I would definitely use the fans and the lights. That's what I'd buy from Sharp today because it's closer to the R-508HS we used to have from our last cabin I was also talking about earlier.

 

[whitewhiskers]

another Roz Chast Microwave Oven Cautionary Cartoon