[arghandugh]

We recently got rid of a four year old microwave where the magnetron turned on spontaneously and silently when the door was closed, runaway heating the box. Control panel, lights, turntable, fan, everything is idle.

Manufacturer didn't consider this an interesting defect and refused to swap out-of-warranty. The lack of give-a-shit in appliances is becoming apparent.

[Prickle]

A defect like that would make it illegal to sell in my country. One big splash on a major network and they will probably go scrambling.

Have you contacted anyone other than the manufacturer?

[arghandugh]

No. I bitched about it on an old social media platform called Twitter but it never got any traction.

[Rinzler89]

>The lack of give-a-shit in appliances is becoming apparent.

Because most budget name brand kitchen appliances are just rebadged Haier/Midea OEM designs. I know HN has a hate boner for Samsung and LG appliances but for me they seem to be the most trustworthy budget appliances since at least they have their own designs instead of rebadging Chinese OEM ones like the rest.

Sure, if you have money you can go with a reputable brand like Bosch & Siemens, and if you have even more money you can go with Miele, but for one, not everyone has money, and two, I've even noticed even Bosch appliances made in Germany still have some issues due to poor design.

[jaeckel]

> Sure, if you have money you can go with a reputable brand like Bosch & Siemens

Just FTR they're exactly the same -- "BSH Hausgeräte GmbH" -- with just a different label on it. ... And I didn't have a single good experience in the last years, IMO they're designed for planned obsolescence.

E.g. my premium Bosch Hand mixer broke after 2.5 years. Afterwards I bought a >35 years old used RG28e for half the price and it's still going stronger than the Bosch ever was, 5 years later.

> if you have even more money you can go with Miele

If you buy cheap (or uninformed) you most likely buy at least twice.

[MichaelZuo]

Bosch and Siemens aren’t as trustworthy anymore since they no longer offer ‘bumper-to-bumper’ extended warranties longer than 5 years on appliances.

It’s like buying a car, the moment an automaker starts adding long lists of exclusions to their extended warranties, you just know their quality is going down.

[skyyler]

Interesting that you had to resort to a product of communism to overcome these planned obsolete devices that capitalism is producing.

[Rinzler89]

Communism sucks at building cutting edge devices, but good at basic low-tech items that are easily user repairable and made to last.

[skyyler]

How does communism suck at building cutting edge devices? Didn't the soviets make it to space before the capitalists?

[aguaviva]

They did indeed. But the reason they were so good at things like their space program was, in the end, an indication of why their system failed.

Basically, they were really good at building big devices/projects requiring state-orchestration of capital, like their space program, and many military projects like the T-34 and MiG-19. And turning rivers around in their tracks to build gigantic hydroelectric dams and so on.

But apparently that model does work so well when applied to consumer devices. That, and plus the fact that their population was generally too poor to buy them, is what kept them falling ever behind. The Soviets and their client states did make valiant efforts, but they tended to cost huge amounts of state capital, and for that and other reasons they never panned out.

For example the GDR once thought it could reverse its fortunes by devoting its capital and brainpower into the development of ground-breaking microchip (the U61000) that it hoped would take the Western market by storm. A brilliant achievement it was, but the production economics were never viable (from WP):

  From 1977 the attempt to achieve a competitive edge in microchips against the research and development resources of the entire western world – in a state of just 16 million people – was perhaps always doomed to failure, but swallowed increasing amounts of internal resources and hard currency. GDR was some five to eight years behind the leading producers of USA and Japan. To produce one 64kb chip cost 40 marks, while in the West it cost 4.50 marks. To produce one 256kb chip cost 534 marks, while in the West it cost 5.00 to 7.00 marks.[2]

That, and plus the fact that even if they could built something (a car, say) that could compete with stuff built in the West, their population was generally too poor to buy it, is what kept them falling ever behind.

Thinking about this makes me nostalgic for the day when this was how competing empires once sought to attain supremacy over the other, and leave them in the dust.

[EricE]

I dunno about the fawning over Bosch. My Bosch induction cooktop performs far worse than the half price GE Profile cooktop I had at my previous house. The Bosch does not heat evenly at all - almost all energy is focused in the center of the pan. I'm hating it so much I'm about to rip it out and replace it either with another GE or an LG. My mom got an LG induction range and I took my largest pan over to her house, put in a few inches of water and turned it on high - it produced even heating/bubbles across the entire pan, something the Bosch just doesn't do. Feh. I wish I would have done that test before buying the overpriced and underperforming Bosch. Talk about coasting on your brand name.

[u8080]

Agree, I've once bought Bosch washing mashine and it was noisy bad washing mess. After year of usage I've replaced it with LG with direct drive for ~same price and it is just another level - larger 8kg drum iso 5kg in same dimensions, low noise drive and pump, good washing and rinsing with bonus IoT integration.

[Night_Thastus]

Which model did you get? IIRC their slide in units are actually made by Bosch, but the standalone ones with the physical dials are actually made by another company, and were generally considered worse.

[uslic001]

Our Bosch dishwasher breaks at least once a year and needs a new control board every time it happens. Bosch is junk.

[creeble]

FWIW, same experience here. Replaced it with a quiet KitchenAid that has run for over 15 years, only requiring new tray slides once (and hey were not expensive).

[WorldMaker]

With Haier, specifically, I certainly it were a lot easier to tell what they build in Kentucky versus what they ship from China. For now you can still seem to count on the GE Profile series, if you are rich enough, but the mid-grade stuff is slippery, GE badge or not. (Some of the non-GE badges are coming from Kentucky, too, but like I said, I, at least, don't know how to figure it out without begging any friends that work at Haier to give me specific model numbers to look for in stores.)

[rdtsc]

I have a lower end Samsung that “started” after I opened the door. I hope it was just the fan and lights like the article mentioned. But it scared the heck out of me.

[foobarian]

My Samsung microwave works fine but the LED display doesn't glow any more. It's infuriating.

[lozenge]

The CPSC would be interested.

[neilv]

Maybe not. I recently did the lengthy CPSC form, to report a defective new name-brand microwave oven unit, which was manufactured with a 1/8" mis-seating of parts, where I measured with a professional meter to be leaking much more than anywhere else.

A week later, I heard back:

> [...] The product or particular concern that you describe does not fall within CPSC’s jurisdiction. You may wish to contact the agencies listed below, which we believe can best handle your concern.

> U.S. Food and Drug Administration Center for Devices and Radiological Health Document Control Center – WO66-G609 10903 New Hampshire Avenue Silver Spring, MD 20993-0002

> https://www.fda.gov/radiation-emitting-products/getting-radi... [...]

(BTW, I suspect the process apparently not forwarding a report between two agencies will result in some problems falling through the cracks. And it did, in this case, since I stopped holding the defective unit (I'd asked in my report that they let me know if they wanted to examine it), returned it to the store, and never looked into starting over the reporting process with a different agency.)

[xattt]

When regulatory bodies fail, it’s time to kick it into the court of public opinion, i.e. the media.

[ak217]

What was the model? I recently encountered something similar with a GE over-the-counter microwave. One day it stayed on after opening the door. I replaced the control module and the board in it looks exactly like the one in the OP photo (Midea with all of the same components), which leads me to think the fault is the same as the one described in the post.

[arghandugh]

Yep, the GE over-the-range model PNM9196SF3SS. GE is just a Haier badge since 2016. I'm not surprised by a Chinese company not giving a shit, but for a microwave magnetron to fire on its own feels like a sign of deep engineering rot.

The only fix was to unplug it then swap the logic board. Once it happened again with the new board we threw it out.

[xattt]

I had non-stop issues with GE OTR microwaves for 2 years. I started with a PVM2188SLJC that I ended up getting replaced three times by GE over a year for separate issues (buzzing turntable, cracked casing). I ended spamming the executive team and got an upgraded model with convect for free.

Fast forward two years later, and the fuse tripped inside the microwave after I forget a bottle sterilizer overnight, on Christmas Day.

I said fuck this, and went and got a Panasonic NN-SG158. The twist was that it looked like it was a different version of the first GE microwave we had from the same OEM, but a little reworked.

[ak217]

Mine was a PEM31DF2WW. The control panel layout looks slightly different but the segment display looks identical to yours.

The board that I replaced is a Midea MD1001LSE EMLAA5G-S3-K VER17. Not an exact match to the OP but in the same family.

[netdevnet]

> One day it stayed on after opening the door.

So you basically got exposed to microwave radiation. That's dangerous. Have you checked in with a doctor?

[rustcleaner]

It's a microwave, non-ionizing. They're pretty much easy-bake ovens which shine a monochromatic light at a color water is very black/absorptive at (a color far redder than infrared). They cook outside-in so he'd be baking his skin well before internal injury.

[HPsquared]

It would be like thermal burns but deeper. The heating is more diffuse and deeper than traditional cooking methods so I'd imagine if you did get a burn, it would go deeper into the tissue than you might expect.

[frabert]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hBRxwQXmCQ This guy recklessly tested various way of getting irradiated by a microwave to see what the effects are.

[chongli]

An extremely irresponsible video. He talked a lot about scary apocrypha to do with eyeballs exploding but never once mentioned the possibility of vision damage or blindness without the drama. I think he knew that microwaves are extremely dangerous to your eyes and avoided doing the most potentially damaging things without talking about it. To whit:

If you bypass the door interlocks and operate the magnetron with the door open and then stick your head into the cavity, you risk have your eyes pass through one of the microwave peaks in the standing wave pattern set up by the cavity. Extremely intense, localized heating within your eyeballs is never a good idea, and you risk burning your retinas or damaging your corneas or lenses.

The eyeball is large made of water and protrudes somewhat from the eye socket. Peering forward into the interior of the microcave cavity has the potential to expose your eye to the full brunt of the standing wave peak without much other body mass in the way to absorb the energy, creating the potential for that intense localized heating.

[BizarroLand]

Sounds like some of the limit switches went bad. They're cheap and easy to replace if it's an expensive microwave worth the $30 or so and the time to install them.

[quesera]

That sounds dangerous, and deserving of a name & shame.

Or a YouTube video with a pack of microwave popcorn that spontaneously pops and burns and smokes.

[HPsquared]

Sounds like relay contacts stuck closed.

[treve]

If your country has decent consumer rights there's probably another way to follow-up!