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I just made popcorn in the microwave and I wonder how much energy my popcorn absorbed and how much energy was consumed by oven. It was 90g of corn and butter (kind of...) and it needed 800W for 3 minutes (800W * 3/60h = 40Wh).

I guess if the popcorn with some fat had absorbed all this energy it would have reached its flash point. So I'm assuming that the popcorn only absorbed some of the microwave energy.

  1. How efficient are microwave ovens? I mean the approximate percentage efficiency.

  2. Does the magnetron (or whole oven) draw significantly less energy when there is little (microwave-absorbing) food in the microwave?

I can't check it myself because my microwave oven is built into the furniture along with other appliances and I don't have access to the socket.

Here is similar question:

Efficiency of the microwave oven

but it does not answer my question about "approximate efficiency in percent".

Kamil
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    Check out this question and answer: https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/206206/is-a-microwaves-output-power-proportional-to-the-mass-of-its-contents?rq=1 – tomnexus Oct 06 '22 at 21:00
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    This isn't really an electrical design question – Voltage Spike Oct 06 '22 at 21:00
  • @tomnexus There are 2 interesting answers with experiment results. Efficiency is roughly ~50%. Thanks. – Kamil Oct 06 '22 at 21:08
  • I don't know about the magnetrons, but the transformers are designed with shunts which means they draw a great deal of reactive power if they are loaded lightly. A 1kw microwave oven transformer might draw 700 watts of reactive power when the secondary is open circuited. – Math Keeps Me Busy Oct 06 '22 at 21:12
  • Boil a known quantity of water. – Mattman944 Oct 06 '22 at 22:28
  • cooking popcorn _is_ making steam. determine the moisture content of popcorn and see how much energy is needed to make that much steam. – Jasen Слава Україні Oct 07 '22 at 03:33

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