So my sister's uWave stopped cooking. Display normal hums and all that. I have never been a microwave tech., actually never had one break. They usually catch on fire after a while.

But anyway I am hep to it, the capacitor goes bad alot, sometimes the magnetron. Sometimes triac, relay or something on the board comes loose off the solder. Normal ****.

So, I break out the old B&K 177 which has a 4 KV AC scale. The cap is rated 2,100 VAC.

I read the side with the rectifier and it is around a thousand volts. In fact less I think. I am thinking that is low. Put pur the probe on the transformer side and got an arc ! WTF ? And nothing happened. I chesked the meter, turned it to low AC and putting my finger on the probe made it read. Switched to ohms and that read as well.

So I do it again and I DID get a different result. I went to the magnetron side of the caps and got about the same reading, and then when I went to the transformer side my computer started making all kinds of noise. I do not mean 60 Hz noise, this was like a digital stream noise, probably square waves at more than one frequency.

Y'know the other day at work I got this unit the owner described as having multiple erratic and spontaneous operations. I decided to be a smartass and wrote it up as :

Complaint : Customer says multiple erratic/spontaneous operations.

Diagnosis : Unit needs exorcism.

Solution : Due to lack of holy water and Catholic Priest, changed main board.

I **** you not. But I could not blow it off because we are factory service.

Anyway, back to this uWave. On my tester, which tests at 400 mV/360 ohms impedance, the cap checks pretty good. Little bit of curve at the tips of the triangle wave but for a 0.98 uF that is to be expected with these test parameters.

So is this indicating I got a leaky magnetron ? If I can get a cap foro ten bucks I will fix it, but magnetrons are more expensive and this thing is well, it is a nice, decent performing uWave oven.
Not the best but I have seen alot worse. The heat is even and the control system is not hard to deal with. It is a Magic Chef, input power is stated as 1,500 watts, so it is what, 1,300 ? Nice, small height wise but a bit wider than the really small ones.

I just think when you got something good you should try to keep it going. There is no money involved in this one.