My microwave is positively geriatric (maybe as old as 20years) and I am looking for a suitable replacement. I neither need nor want anything with bells and whistles. I prefer dials to touch pads. Something around 800 to 850 max watts preferably with lower power settings available (plus defrost, of course).
I have been looking online. The tiny pictures aren't encouraging. They mostly seem to have power settings of 1 to 4 bars - with no mention of actual wattage. The timers look like they have a minimum of 1 minute, going to a maximum of about 30 minutes. The maximum isn't a problem but the minimum time is. My current machine starts at 5 seconds with 5 second increments to about 4 minutes and then increments of 30 seconds. Ok, just 5 seconds isn't enough to warm up or cook anything but a lot of the time I use the microwave to warm up the milk on my cereal (15 to 20 secs) or perhaps pop in a pitta bread to warm before I "open" it (10 secs). Sometimes I just need to "take the chill of" a bit of cooked meat from the fridge before eating it.
My microwave is 850W. On the rare occasions I am heating up/cooking a ready meal I may have to adapt the heating time as the instructions might be for a 900W oven and this might mean a timing of, say 6m 30s. I do it for 6m then give it the extra 30 second blast.
Am I misinterpreting what I am seeing on the websites? Can anybody advise me?
