[goda90]

The thing is, the superior way to reheat something would usually be a lower power level. But not the standard "turn on - turn off" cycle that most microwaves do. Actual lower intensity microwaves. You need an inverter for that. The food would heat more evenly, which is especially useful for things like butter that are prone to splattering.

[barbegal]

Pulse width modulation works just as well if the pulse width is short compared to the overall cooking time. And not having an inverter makes it more efficient. Unfortunately lots of cheap microwaves have a pulse width which is more than 10 seconds, presumably to help lifetime reliability, but means that for cooking times less than a couple of minutes it doesn't work well.

[thescriptkiddie]

I once used a very expensive wolf brand microwave that would always run the magnetron for at least 10 seconds regardless of the power level setting. So if you set it to do 10% power for 10 seconds it would actually do 100% power for 10 seconds. I'm kind of shocked that their QA didn't catch this, if nothing else it should refuse to run at reduced power settings for times under ~100 seconds.

[ZiiS]

Inverter microwaves are also more energy efficient than conventional ones (though more to go wrong).

[liminalsunset]

Interestingly enough, this particular question has been tested by Rtings [1] They found that during their tests, inverters which continuously varied the power did not necessarily lead to more even heating, but they do note that small quantities of food (like the butter you mentioned) that need to be heated for very short periods show some differences between inverter and non-inverter models.

Overall, they found that the improvement was much smaller than I'd originally anticipated.

[1] https://www.rtings.com/microwave/learn/research/microwave-in...

[apricot]

The commercial microwaves we have at work have both a large dial to set the time, and four large buttons under it for 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% power. No other controls. They are great.

[hammock]

If the power level buttons were an old school radio button that would be so cool

[seszett]

That's my microwave, I don't remember which brand right now but it was just one of the cheapest at Mediamarkt. It has one mechanical dial for time and one dial for power. It works fine.

I've never had a problem finding such models. My previous microwave is similar and was also one of the cheapest I could find then. It's about 10 years old now, and now sits at work because we didn't need two of them at home. It's next to an older one at work that is also similar and is probably around 15 years now.

[extraduder_ire]

I bought a microwave a couple of months ago, and found it impossible to determine which if any of the cheaper ones were inverter microwaves, or if they just used duty cycle power control. I assume that distinction is only made with higher-end microwaves.

In the end I went with the model that looked to have the simplest design and least things to break.

[hammock]

If it doesn’t say, it’s not inverter

[beAbU]

Pick it up, non inverter models will be really heavy on the control panel side.