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Sharp R 230 800 Watts Microwave Oven Sharp R 230 800 Watts Microwave Oven I don’t know if I could lead a normal life without a Microwave, I use t...

1100 Watt GE Stainless Microwave Oven General Electric JES1142SJ Stainless Steel 1100 Watts Microwave Oven This is the second GE Stainless Microwave I have owned in less than a year....

I bought a Sharp R4-02JK (which looks exactly the same as the R402J, and I have no idea what differences exist between them) after being disappointed with my GE JES2251SJ.

I’ve been using the Sharp happily and daily for the last 2 years. I rarely use the stove, and I cook all my meals using the Sharp. That means an average of 2 cooking times a day, totaling probably 6 minutes. Yes, that’s how intensively a single guy who eats lunch at work will use a microwave. I eat healthy packaged meals from Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods.

Lessons I’ve learned and that I think are useful for everyone:

1. You don’t need a cooking sensor and they don’t work anyway. See my GE review above. For the last two years, I’ve been cooking 95% of my food by punching in cooking times indicated on the label. The food came out perfect. After a short while, you’ll learn cooking times anyway. A 300ml glass of tea takes 90 seconds; a plate of frozen veggies takes 4 minutes, and 5 if you add some pre-cooked frozen meat or vegetable meat substitute.

2. All microwaves heat large solid or viscous things unevenly, even those which are Consumer Reports top picks for heating evenness (see my GE review again). If you microwave a frozen turkey, the center will be cold or even frozen. BUT, that’s not as big of a problem. Don’t heat viscous tomato juice - heat tea or orange juice; don’t heat big chunks of meat, but small chunks.

3. All microwave ovens have a rotating turntable. Why this is listed as a “feature” beats me. It’s like listing “door” as a feature.

4. What you really want is a tall enough oven, not one of those low-profile GE Spacesavers that look like those long and short Basset Hound dogs. You’ll want to make tea in a tall glass, or just cook something on a large place. The Spacesavers are also stupid because they are rectangular, but the rotating turntable is circular, so the area between the square that encloses the turntable circle, and the rectangle, is unused. Or, you can put a rectangular cookie tray there and not have it turn, which is again stupid. A microwave is supposed to be convenient, and you don’t want to rotate the tray every minute for even heating. So the ideal oven shape has a large square base (33cm/13in) and is at least 20cm/8in tall. Believe me, I had to switch to a “compact” microwave and it was annoying.

5. You’ll find that you hardly use 10% of the feature of a microwave oven. There are basically two controls that allow you do to 90% of the cooking: the time, and the cooking power. And, you’ll need the cooking power only 10% of the time. But by varying with these parameters, you can heat, boil, defrost, melt or whatever.

Back on topic about the Sharp:

1. It has a light that’s supposed to help you operate in the dark. That light is practically useless because it doesn’t light up any buttons. Just bad design.

2. It’s black! That means it will look dirty soon, and often. If you ever had a black car, you’ll know what I mean.

3. The interior is not easy to clean. I got mine smoked at some point and the smoke stayed there after lots of Windex, Lysol and whatnot.

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