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Comment by stephencanon | Hacker News Reader

"I own a house without a microwave, ask me anything”?

Seriously, though: never saw the point. I do all my cooking from scratch, and heat up leftovers on the stove. Once every few months I find myself doing something where it would be more convenient to have a microwave, but it’s no more often than I find myself wishing I had a sous-vide cooker or a bread machine or electric kettle or any number of other kitchen gadgets. We have a smallish kitchen, and I’d rather have more counter space to work on when I’m cooking.

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Thanks for mentioning Sous Vide. I found it interesting that a precisely temp controlled waterbath product only costs a little more than the crude kettles mentioned in the article, and the internet is full of folks who put great effort into creating homemade $40 sous vide rigs.

Also despite what the article claims, water doesn't boil at one temperature, if you program a PID or whatever to keep on firing until the water hits 100C you'll be in for a bit of a surprise in Denver or some mountain towns which are much higher than Denver. I know Big Sky MT is about 9000 ft ASL, water boils at 190F or so.

I guess I'd ask how you got a house without a microwave. I've never lived without a microwave, but I have never purchased a microwave either.

An oven, a microwave, and a fridge are the three appliances I have been able to count on always being present when I move in somewhere. Typically the microwave is build into the cabinetry.

Apparently the previous owner didn’t feel the need to have one either. Note that we are discussing a house that was rebuilt from a barn in 1938 (no one really knows how old the barn was at the time). There are no kitchen cabinets into which a microwave might be built, just open shelves, which I find quite satisfactory.

When I redo the kitchen, I’ll add a range hood, but the next owner will also be buying a house without a microwave.

I think it's a regional thing. Every house I have owned came with the washer, dryer, fridge and stove. Even after I substantially upgraded the stoves in my first two houses, I left them there when I moved. Those houses were built in the 1950's and 1980's. Only my current house, built in the early 2000's came with a microwave.

OTOH, I'm told it's common in other parts of the country (I'm in the upper Midwest) to take major appliances when you move.

Speaking as someone with a commercial-grade sous-vide bath and variable-temperature PID-controlled pouring kettle sitting on his worktop, a microwave is also a useful gadget even for high-end cookery.

It's one of the best ways to cook many green vegetables, for example, and also makes remarkably good poached eggs:

http://www.bonappetit.com/test-kitchen/inside-our-kitchen/ar...

It’s not that I don’t think they’re useful; rather that the marginal utility (for us) of having one isn’t worth the kitchen space that it would cost us. Once every few months I wish we had one, but once every few months I wish I had lots of things. I try not to make a habit of rushing out to buy them.

Heating up a stove takes considerably more energy than using a microwave.

On my microwave, it takes about 96,000 joules (800W x 2') to heat up a plate with leftovers, while doing it on my oven it takes around 432,000J (1800W * 4').

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