So I come home, tired, dirty, sweaty, and just want something to eat. I pop two chicken legs with butter and season salt in a baking dish and throw it in the microwave. Halfway through cooking it, the microwave starts making a loud racket. I turn the thing off and bang on it a bit, because hitting stuff is how you fix things, right? I try restarting it and it still makes the noise. I don’t care, I want my chicken cooked so I keep running it anyway.
Then the smoke starts coming out the top.
I glance inside the vents on top and see orange, flickering light and quickly yank the power cord. Fortunately, the fire dies down immediately. I haul the smoking microwave outside to the dumpster. Because of my poor health, it takes me three tries to get it there, and I’m nearly hyperventilating at the end. But it’s in the dumpster and I’m free to go to Target and get me a new one.
I want my chicken cooked, dammit.
So now I’ve got me a new microwave, and the 20 year old behemoth I used to have is resting in the dumpster.
I had a microwave catch fire once, too! The flame was coming from the inside, ‘ceiling’ are of the microwave.
Here’s a hot tip: If you shoot the fire extinguisher into an enclosed space like a microwave oven, the fire extinguisher stuff will blow back into your face before your body can send the “don’t breath that stuff” signal. I coughed fire extinguisher stuff for a week.
about 12 ago, i had the same thing happen to a microwave that wasn’t anywhere near 20 years old. no more than two or three at the time.
it also started making these amazing and very loud noises one evening, followed by much smoke and flame shooting out of the sides near the top.
fortunately, a former boyfriend who happened to be an ex-cop was there at the time. he kept his head whilst i ran around screaming, being the world’s most cliched, totally useless female of the species. :rolleyes:
no thanks to me, he got the thing unplugged and safely out of harm’s way, thereby saving me, my kitchen, my condo, AND my neighbors on either side.
After getting a fancy new installed microwave during a kitchen renovation, we weren’t quite prepared for how much faster it would cook things. My son threw a bag of popcorn in there and hit the handy button marked “popcorn” of all things.
Whoever created that button and assigned it a 2:45 time was seriously demented. The bag finished popping and starting scorching way before the timer went off, smoke billowing out as soon as I opened the door. I grabbed the blackened smoking bag with a pair of tongs and hurled it to the backyard, and spent the next few weeks getting the burnt popcorn smell out of the microwave.
So, my oven didn’t catch fire, it just tried to catch something inside of it on fire instead. Heed cher3 carefully, she knows what she’s about here.
There was a microwave fire at work quite about a year ago. This was the aftermath.. Apparently somebody punched an extra zero, and put their coffee in for 10:00 instead of 1:00.
ETA: The window was broken by firefighters to get the smoke out of the building.
