I I rigged my microwave oven to operate with the door open, what would happen to stuff in the oven and to someone standing nearby?
IIRC there’s three switches to bypass in order to make that happen (could be wrong). If I also recall correctly, the answer is ‘deep tissue burns’. You’ll microwave whatever is in front opening. While I’m sure the inverse square law come into play, so if you’re standing a few feet back it’s probably not nearly as dangerous as putting your arm ON the turn table, but still, put a raw tenderloin in there and watch what happens.
Obviously the item in the oven takes longer to cook, as the microwaves are not reflected by the door and the loss out the door hole reduces the effective power by a %. A large %. It would become nearly useless at cooking. Maybe wouldn’t raise the temperatures high enough.
The chocolate bar in your pocket will melt.
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK! :eek:
Why did rig your microwave to work with the door open? What’s the point?
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What would happen to the food and the person standing nearby in a rigged open-door operating microwave would be roughly equivalent to what would happen if you had a toaster oven running with the door open. Both appliances use about the same power (~1200 W), though the microwave oven probably puts out less of that in actual radiation than the toaster oven since it’s running a turn table, light, reflector fan, and so on; maybe 800 W on average.
When you open a toaster oven door you can feel the heat on you hands and face, but you need to be pretty close before it hurts. Leaving the door open will noticebly slow the cooking of your tuna melt, but will only burn you if you hold your face or hands very close to or in it for a long time.
The potential danger though is that you’ll be able to feel the IR radiation coming from the toaster oven as heat; you have heat receptors in your skin which is where most of that frequency of radiation will be absorbed (top 1 mm or so). Microwave radiation will penetrate deeper into your tissues where you won’t be able to feel it to nearly the same degree (though you would still perceive a percentage of it).
But keep in mind, it’s still mainly power vs distance and a microwave oven only puts out so much power and the radiation is only directed in a particular direction. Your medium sized stovetop element on high will put out about 1500W, but you barely feel any of that as you walk back and forth through the kitchen while cooking supper. You’ll notice the heat/radiation for a few seconds while you move your hand over the stovetop grabbing and moving pots/pans around, but it doesn’t damage your tissues. So take that same amount of energy and proportionally apply it through the top 17mm of your hand rather than just 1mm… still doesn’t hurt you, in fact it might even do less damage.