6 ms·

I think one needs to be a bit selective here. About 8 years ago I bought the cheapest catering/professional microwave/combioven I could get my hands on. I did

I think one needs to be a bit selective here. About 8 years ago I bought the cheapest catering/professional microwave/combioven I could get my hands on. I did this because I got tired of consumer units with overcomplicated UIs designed (apparently) by unregenerate misanthropes, rotating dishes that are a pain in the ass to clean, overzealous bleeps that go off every 30 - 60 seconds after a cycle is finished, peeling enamel, corrosion issues, and that are too small on the inside. Consumer grade microwave ovens all, as far as I can tell, universally suck in one way or another that my commercial grade microwave doesn't. The thing is bomb proof. The only thing that's gone wrong in 8 years is the internal bulb. Everything else is rock solid. This is, however, a rather different proposition to buying a food mixer that was manufactured in 1948. I can get spares for my microwave or, at this point, buy a new one and recycle the old without feeling I haven't got my money's worth. I'm going to struggle with the 1948 mixer and, like you, I don't want that. Others have highlighted that commercial grade dishwashers and fans are also probably bad ideas. I've run into similar issues with UPSs: none of these things seem designed to run in an environment where fan noise is going to cause a serious problem (nobody seems to sell a completely silent UPS - it's really daft). Likewise, if you buy a rackmount server instead of a desktop computer you may be surprised to find that the fan noise is extraordinary. Honestly, the main thing is to do your research before making a purchase so that you buy something that's really going to suit your requirements, whether that's a consumer grade or "professional grade" piece of equipment.

atoav 5y ago
Film equipment is just like that. People ask where the autofocus is on that 50k$ Arri-Zeiss combination and you point at your focus puller loafing around with a coffee in her hand. Just made for a different kind of gig than your usual consumer grade camera
- dusted 5y ago
  focus pullers are amazing and underappreciated
megablast 5y ago
> About 8 years ago I bought the cheapest catering/professional microwave/combioven I could get my hands on. I did this because I got tired of consumer units with overcomplicated UIs designed (apparently) by unregenerate misanthropes, rotating dishes that are a pain in the ass to clean, overzealous bleeps that go off every 30 - 60 seconds after a cycle is finished, peeling enamel, corrosion issues, and that are too small on the inside. See, this is weird. The cheapest microwaves you can get have two dials, one for temp, one for time. Why not buy one of those??
- culturestate 5y ago
  > The cheapest microwaves you can get have two dials, one for temp, one for time. Why not buy one of those?? I imagine two reasons: first, the market seems to have decided that simple microwaves must be small microwaves. If you want to heat anything larger than a bowl of soup you’re gonna forfeit the dials. Second, most of the time the dials also suck. Want to heat something for 2 minutes 30 seconds? Good luck with that on a cheap microwave that shows minutes in 5mm increments with 2.5mm of play in the dial.
  - akiselev 5y ago
    I didn't think of looking at commercial microwaves so I ended up getting the Breville Smooth Wave [1] with its power and time dials. It's ridiculous that the only consumer microwave I could find locally with dials instead of touch controls was also the most expensive one with the exception of the ultra-sleek high end cabinet mounted units. It's 1.2 cu ft which is on the bigger end and much quieter than the microwaves I'm used to with some sort of ventilation system that keeps going until you've retrieved the food. It's definitely more precise than the cheaper commercial microwaves I've seen without losing any of the "smart sensing" features, if you care for those. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Breville-BMO850BSS1BUC1-countertop-microwave-Stainless/dp/B085P3GCJT https://www.amazon.com/Breville-BMO850BSS1BUC1-countertop-mi...
    - culturestate 5y ago
      I was thinking about the cheap microwaves that use a mechanical countdown dial (like a kitchen timer) rather than just dials as a digital control surface.
greenice 5y ago
Commenting on the „overcomplicated UI“ designs: It takes quite some research to find single-purpose devices, that are tailored for a specific use case - and are not overburdened with often unused features. There‘s not enough metadata out there on ecommerce sites to filter for that. Take the microwave example: I‘m happy with the Samsung MWF300G microwave which does just one thing (heating stuff) really well in a very straightforward way: One haptic dial for duration. One for Watt. And a simple display for time. Just use the duration dial to set the time. That‘s it. You‘re done by turning your hand just once. It starts automatically. No start button needed. No program selection. No stop button - just dial it back to zero if needed.
- r00fus 5y ago
  I’ll do you one better a single dial microwave that even my 5yo could use I bought in 2017 [1] Commercial grade. No rotating dish but still warms everything nicely. Pain for defrost but honestly I just don’t defrost stuff much. [1] Sharp R-21LCFS Medium Duty Commercial Microwave (Dial Timer, 1000-Watts, 120-Volts) (Update of R-21LCF) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BDF5ZNS https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BDF5ZNS
- tobr 5y ago
  I believe that’s the one I got, too, after looking at basically all the options available. It’s still, I regret to tell you, a terrible product. First of all, the sound design is criminally bad. Whenever you touch the controls it lets off an obnoxious beep that is way too loud for a home environment. It should of course be completely silent, except a pleasant sound to let you know it is done, and of course, like other reasonably designed home electronics, it should allow you to adjust the volume or turn the sound off completely. (Imagine, for sake of argument, that your iPhone beeped whenever you touched it. It would be bizarre. Why would you want that in a microwave oven?) Second, the controls are flimsy and glitchy. If I try to increase the time slowly or by a small amount, the value tends to jump erratically up or down by some random amount. I need to firmly push the dial inwards while turning to avoid this. Third, except for the noise pollution of those beeps, it also brings in more light pollution in my home, through a blue blinking seven-segment display that insists on always showing the current time. This is a bad feature that is irrelevant to the purpose of the microwave, and I would prefer to turn it off. Finally, I hate the way it looks. Silver-coated plastic, reflective blacks and blue LEDs looks good in a cheap sci-fi flick, not in a home. What’s funny is that the inside actually looks pretty nice, a navy-blue metal with an organic white splatter pattern.
aaron5 5y ago
'designed (apparently) by unregenerate misanthropes' haha! I try to keep myself to one complaint or less per day, and ten cuss-words or less per day. The days I break my cuss-word quota are the days I use the microwave.
- mavhc 5y ago
  I made sure to buy one with 3 memories and a 10 key pad, it's been fine
porphyra 5y ago
Noise is really a big thing. Apparently commercial fridges are ridiculously loud too.
- airhead969 5y ago
  WHAT?! Hell, yeah, they are. They're rarely designed for aesthetics. "Do one thing, do it well, and lowest TCO."
Wistar 5y ago
After suffering through the APC and TrippLite crap, I bought a Falcon SSG1.5K UPS a few years ago for my animation workstation and network stuff. It has been fantastic. It does have a fan but it isn't noticeably loud. https://westwardsales.com/falcon-ssg1.5k-ups https://westwardsales.com/falcon-ssg1.5k-ups I bought it because the late writer Jerry Pournelle told me to. https://www.falconups.com/byte6417-final.pdf https://www.falconups.com/byte6417-final.pdf https://www.falconups.com/2008Chaos%20Manor%20Award.pdf https://www.falconups.com/2008Chaos%20Manor%20Award.pdf
- airhead969 5y ago
  This sounds like a testimonial ad for Herbalife. $50 consumer-grade products are almost always "crap," but you're making a sweeping generalization across dozens of product lines in 2 brands without offering any evidence or proof that you used appropriate products for the task. Fans on most UPSes only kick-in when their inverters run during an outage or a test for cooling. I happen to have an SMX1500RM2UNC with humidity and dual temperature logging. It's floor or rack mountable, uses commodity batteries in a repairable pack, expandable, remotely manageable, logs details, works like a champ with under-voltage and other edge-case transfer conditions. A writer is extremely unlikely to be an expert on backup power supplies anymore that I am an expert on coronary cannulas. Appeal to authority or an anecdotal testimonial is flimsy support, at best. Sorry for your loss, but you might be wandering into the weeds on this one.
  - mavhc 5y ago
    I have 3 smx3000rmhv2unc's and 2 of them give an error "battery bus soft start fault", according to the expert: "I suspect that the metering of the capacitor voltage is slightly wrong on this model of UPS. We've seen this error a few times and the units have performed fine both before and after. Its to do with checking the voltage rise on the cap on power on / battery supply. I think it meters out of tolerance and throws the fault when perhaps either the centerpoint is skewed or the tolerance is too fine."
    - airhead969 5y ago
bradknowles 5y ago
APC makes multiple lines of devices. The lower-end devices are not so great. But the SmartUPS line is solid. No fans or noise of any sort, unless the power is off and you’re draining the battery. And if you’re draining the battery, then you should pay attention to all that noise and be in the process of shutting everything down safely, so that you can survive whatever caused the power outage in the first place. The point of a UPS isn’t that you keep running for days regardless of the fact you’ve lost power, it’s that when the power does go out you don’t lose all your work, and you’ve got a few precious minutes to shut everything down safely. If you don’t use a piece of equipment the way it was designed to be used, then that is all on you, and not the equipment that you are failing to use correctly. Note that APC is owned by Schneider, a company that specializes in making the really big UPSes of the sort they go into data centers and are used to provide short term power for entire buildings. They know what they’re doing.

atoav 5y ago

Film equipment is just like that. People ask where the autofocus is on that 50k$ Arri-Zeiss combination and you point at your focus puller loafing around with a coffee in her hand. Just made for a different kind of gig than your usual consumer grade camera

dusted 5y ago
focus pullers are amazing and underappreciated

megablast 5y ago

> About 8 years ago I bought the cheapest catering/professional microwave/combioven I could get my hands on. I did this because I got tired of consumer units with overcomplicated UIs designed (apparently) by unregenerate misanthropes, rotating dishes that are a pain in the ass to clean, overzealous bleeps that go off every 30 - 60 seconds after a cycle is finished, peeling enamel, corrosion issues, and that are too small on the inside. See, this is weird. The cheapest microwaves you can get have two dials, one for temp, one for time. Why not buy one of those??

culturestate 5y ago
> The cheapest microwaves you can get have two dials, one for temp, one for time. Why not buy one of those?? I imagine two reasons: first, the market seems to have decided that simple microwaves must be small microwaves. If you want to heat anything larger than a bowl of soup you’re gonna forfeit the dials. Second, most of the time the dials also suck. Want to heat something for 2 minutes 30 seconds? Good luck with that on a cheap microwave that shows minutes in 5mm increments with 2.5mm of play in the dial.
- akiselev 5y ago
  I didn't think of looking at commercial microwaves so I ended up getting the Breville Smooth Wave [1] with its power and time dials. It's ridiculous that the only consumer microwave I could find locally with dials instead of touch controls was also the most expensive one with the exception of the ultra-sleek high end cabinet mounted units. It's 1.2 cu ft which is on the bigger end and much quieter than the microwaves I'm used to with some sort of ventilation system that keeps going until you've retrieved the food. It's definitely more precise than the cheaper commercial microwaves I've seen without losing any of the "smart sensing" features, if you care for those. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Breville-BMO850BSS1BUC1-countertop-microwave-Stainless/dp/B085P3GCJT https://www.amazon.com/Breville-BMO850BSS1BUC1-countertop-mi...
  - culturestate 5y ago
    I was thinking about the cheap microwaves that use a mechanical countdown dial (like a kitchen timer) rather than just dials as a digital control surface.

greenice 5y ago

Commenting on the „overcomplicated UI“ designs: It takes quite some research to find single-purpose devices, that are tailored for a specific use case - and are not overburdened with often unused features. There‘s not enough metadata out there on ecommerce sites to filter for that. Take the microwave example: I‘m happy with the Samsung MWF300G microwave which does just one thing (heating stuff) really well in a very straightforward way: One haptic dial for duration. One for Watt. And a simple display for time. Just use the duration dial to set the time. That‘s it. You‘re done by turning your hand just once. It starts automatically. No start button needed. No program selection. No stop button - just dial it back to zero if needed.

r00fus 5y ago
I’ll do you one better a single dial microwave that even my 5yo could use I bought in 2017 [1] Commercial grade. No rotating dish but still warms everything nicely. Pain for defrost but honestly I just don’t defrost stuff much. [1] Sharp R-21LCFS Medium Duty Commercial Microwave (Dial Timer, 1000-Watts, 120-Volts) (Update of R-21LCF) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BDF5ZNS https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BDF5ZNS
tobr 5y ago
I believe that’s the one I got, too, after looking at basically all the options available. It’s still, I regret to tell you, a terrible product. First of all, the sound design is criminally bad. Whenever you touch the controls it lets off an obnoxious beep that is way too loud for a home environment. It should of course be completely silent, except a pleasant sound to let you know it is done, and of course, like other reasonably designed home electronics, it should allow you to adjust the volume or turn the sound off completely. (Imagine, for sake of argument, that your iPhone beeped whenever you touched it. It would be bizarre. Why would you want that in a microwave oven?) Second, the controls are flimsy and glitchy. If I try to increase the time slowly or by a small amount, the value tends to jump erratically up or down by some random amount. I need to firmly push the dial inwards while turning to avoid this. Third, except for the noise pollution of those beeps, it also brings in more light pollution in my home, through a blue blinking seven-segment display that insists on always showing the current time. This is a bad feature that is irrelevant to the purpose of the microwave, and I would prefer to turn it off. Finally, I hate the way it looks. Silver-coated plastic, reflective blacks and blue LEDs looks good in a cheap sci-fi flick, not in a home. What’s funny is that the inside actually looks pretty nice, a navy-blue metal with an organic white splatter pattern.

aaron5 5y ago

'designed (apparently) by unregenerate misanthropes' haha! I try to keep myself to one complaint or less per day, and ten cuss-words or less per day. The days I break my cuss-word quota are the days I use the microwave.

mavhc 5y ago
I made sure to buy one with 3 memories and a 10 key pad, it's been fine

porphyra 5y ago

Noise is really a big thing. Apparently commercial fridges are ridiculously loud too.

airhead969 5y ago
WHAT?! Hell, yeah, they are. They're rarely designed for aesthetics. "Do one thing, do it well, and lowest TCO."

Wistar 5y ago

After suffering through the APC and TrippLite crap, I bought a Falcon SSG1.5K UPS a few years ago for my animation workstation and network stuff. It has been fantastic. It does have a fan but it isn't noticeably loud. https://westwardsales.com/falcon-ssg1.5k-ups https://westwardsales.com/falcon-ssg1.5k-ups I bought it because the late writer Jerry Pournelle told me to. https://www.falconups.com/byte6417-final.pdf https://www.falconups.com/byte6417-final.pdf https://www.falconups.com/2008Chaos%20Manor%20Award.pdf https://www.falconups.com/2008Chaos%20Manor%20Award.pdf

airhead969 5y ago
This sounds like a testimonial ad for Herbalife. $50 consumer-grade products are almost always "crap," but you're making a sweeping generalization across dozens of product lines in 2 brands without offering any evidence or proof that you used appropriate products for the task. Fans on most UPSes only kick-in when their inverters run during an outage or a test for cooling. I happen to have an SMX1500RM2UNC with humidity and dual temperature logging. It's floor or rack mountable, uses commodity batteries in a repairable pack, expandable, remotely manageable, logs details, works like a champ with under-voltage and other edge-case transfer conditions. A writer is extremely unlikely to be an expert on backup power supplies anymore that I am an expert on coronary cannulas. Appeal to authority or an anecdotal testimonial is flimsy support, at best. Sorry for your loss, but you might be wandering into the weeds on this one.
- mavhc 5y ago
  I have 3 smx3000rmhv2unc's and 2 of them give an error "battery bus soft start fault", according to the expert: "I suspect that the metering of the capacitor voltage is slightly wrong on this model of UPS. We've seen this error a few times and the units have performed fine both before and after. Its to do with checking the voltage rise on the cap on power on / battery supply. I think it meters out of tolerance and throws the fault when perhaps either the centerpoint is skewed or the tolerance is too fine."
  - airhead969 5y ago

bradknowles 5y ago

APC makes multiple lines of devices. The lower-end devices are not so great. But the SmartUPS line is solid. No fans or noise of any sort, unless the power is off and you’re draining the battery. And if you’re draining the battery, then you should pay attention to all that noise and be in the process of shutting everything down safely, so that you can survive whatever caused the power outage in the first place. The point of a UPS isn’t that you keep running for days regardless of the fact you’ve lost power, it’s that when the power does go out you don’t lose all your work, and you’ve got a few precious minutes to shut everything down safely. If you don’t use a piece of equipment the way it was designed to be used, then that is all on you, and not the equipment that you are failing to use correctly. Note that APC is owned by Schneider, a company that specializes in making the really big UPSes of the sort they go into data centers and are used to provide short term power for entire buildings. They know what they’re doing.