Farberware 1000W Stainless Steel Countertop Microwave

Good size. Good power. Cooks food thru. Awesome color.

First of all, this Farberware microwave oven is Farberware only in name/branding, which Farberware licenses for the purpose to Englewood Marketing, which gets the ovens made mostly in China, and then markets, sells, and warrantees them. It’s not really up to Farberware traditional standards, but still probably among the best in a large, really crummy field of available microwaves.

This oven comes in 4 or 5 different “colors;” mine is “stainless steel,” and calling that the “color” is pretty accurate, as there’s a thin veneer of what probably is really stainless on/around the front face of the oven, and that’s it, that’s about all the stainless on or in this oven, ‘most everything else is plastic and cheap, painted steel. The very first bullet point of the product description falsely says, “Stainless Steel exterior and Stainless Steel interior,” but that’s just a big, bad lie. (It’s generally easy to tell, as a magnet isn’t attracted to stainless – and stainless is almost never painted or coated, ‘cause it’s fine without.) Nonetheless, from the front, it actually looks good, handsome. From the top and sides it looks like what it is, plastic and cheap painted steel. But still it’s probably about as good or better as any other at the price.

(There is another available color, “copper,” which is also handsome, but, ironically, reminds me very much of Revere Ware cooking pots, Farberware’s long-time traditional rival.)

This oven consumes 1500 watts electrical power, by actual measure, same as advertised. I haven’t yet bothered to measure/test the microwave radiative power delivered into the cooking chamber, to see if it matches the advertised 1000 watts. (The difference, the missing 500 watts, is lost in the process of converting from electrical power to microwave.)

This oven, so far for us, cooks well and evenly enough. There are a lot of reviewers here reporting various hard, early failures with this oven, but so far at least we’ve been lucky, ours works. Time will tell.

Reduced power levels, e.g. 50%, as/when requested by the user, are achieved, not by actually running at 50% power, but by cycling between full on and off at somewhere around 10 second intervals with a 50% (or whatever) duty cycle. (Do all microwave ovens work this way, is it too hard to really “dim” the microwave generator?) I suppose this is mostly okay, but if you want say 50% power for a short period like 10 seconds, perhaps to soften a small amount of butter, you’re quite out of luck.

The power cord is 3 feet long – rather short, too short for our situation, we’re forced to get and use an extension cord. Our previous microwave cord was 4-1/2 feet, which worked perfectly by itself.

The oven’s operational noise is a bit loud, certainly a bit louder than our previous microwave.

The oven’s audio beep signaling sound is produced on way too many occasions; and way too many beeps for less than no possible purpose – like it’s beeping to notify you at the end of a cooking cycle – which is pretty ridiculous in the first place, as the oven is noisy enough in operation that you’d have to be deaf not to hear it stop – and you’ve opened the door and it obviously knows that too but still continues to beep regardless; and it (the beeping, still) is too loud; and is especially sorely lacking a way to just turn the whole darn beeper off (i.e. *OFF*). A super nasty, irritating fault in my view, believing firmly that machines should be seen but not heard. Especially egregious since the makers of this oven invested so much in hardware and firmware for cheesy gimmicks like dedicated Pizza and dog-food buttons, but couldn’t be bothered to simply add a small bit of firmware to allow the owner/user of the oven to tell it to just be quiet, do not beep at me!

Occasionally this oven requires two or more presses of a button before it registers. This is probably just some flakiness in the (always cheap) membrane button switches, but might also be a bug in the firmware, I haven’t lived with this oven for long enough to know which yet.

The oven interior light is needlessly ridiculously dim; and the oven interior surface is needlessly dark, medium-dark grey (could as easily and better been lighter-colored); and visibility through its front-door window is very poor (heavily obscured by some kind of presumably protective masking, but also needlessly dark); so overall visibility of whatever’s inside is triply-needlessly extremely poor. My mate sarcastically called it “theatrical.” I call it nearly useless, almost impossible to see into. They could just as easily install a light bulb with 10 times the light output.

The Instruction Manual is written in rather broken english, presumably by a Chinese, sometimes understandable, but often not. Fortunately the oven is not so complicated that you can’t generally bumble around and figure it out.

Customer service – by Englewood Marketing, in Green Bay, WI USA – is remarkably quick, nice, knowledgeable and helpful, at least for answering operational questions. Didn’t try ‘em on any more substantial matters.

The real, actual weight of this oven, including the turntable, excluding all the packaging, is 29lbs, 14ozs., i.e. 2oz’s. under 30lbs. The Instruction Manual says the “Net Weight” is “Approx 31.0Lbs” – but I’m pretty certain that’s just not currently accurate, over by a pound. Given that they specified the ostensible weight down to the tenth of a pound, I’d guess that their scale is accurate but that they have lightened/cheapened the oven by “approx.” a pound since they earlier put it into production and weighed it. And this oven’s weight is perhaps a little bit light in the field of similarly priced ovens. This might be somewhat the cause of the weight of this particular oven being so rarely noted – and so all over the map, anywhere from 24 to 36lbs., when it is mentioned.

The warranty on this oven is nominally for 1 year – but, like pretty much all current microwave warranties, effectively worthless by the time you get done navigating its terms and conditions. In almost any case of a problem, you’d be better off just biting the bullet and getting another oven.

So why, out of the hundreds of microwave ovens available, did we get this one? Because it appears to me that they are all pretty crummy, badly flawed, a number of them even severe fire hazards; of those that will fit our strictly constrained space, this Farberware seemed and still seems to be the most-capable/least-awful, at pretty much any price.

If I were rating on an absolute scale, considering this Farberware oven’s many faults, I would give it only 3 stars. But, considering the large field of its mediocre competitors, grading somewhat on a curve, I’ll give it 4 stars for now.

El color era que buscaba y su funcionamiento

So nice to have instructions because every microwave is different! Pix tells all.
Could not deal with my 750W any longer with paint peeling off inside which is unsafe.
This one is so easy to wipe out!
30 day returns on AMZ.
90/60 @ Trgt or Wlmrt.
AMZ won as had on sale with awesome reviews and I knew I would not be returning with this name brand! And Delivery free!
Oh… & so mesmerizing with this bright color.
The ONLY 1 thing that bothers me (yes, it’s a personal pref.)
The 5 high piercing beeps when done. Would prefer one ding & be done with it. Even if you open the door after one ding it STILL keeps going . Lol!

It’s rather odd, but the top criteria for my selecting a microwave oven to replace our old one that broke was how it would fit into the decor of the kitchen. I needed something that was black with stainless steel offset. It basically came down to a choice between Black and Decker and Farberware. The second criteria was power. I previously had a 900 watt microwave which I was used to but was looking for a compact unit that was just a little bit more powerful. As far as versatility is concerned, I liked the layout of the Farberware controls better., especially having the Time Cook and Power buttons right there on top. So I went with the Farberware,

The microwave was not that noisy. Yes you could hear it running. With all the comments on how noisy the microwave was, I was expecting it to be noisy. It was quieter than the last microwave I had.

If there was one criticism I would have, and it’s entirely a personal one, it’s the fact that it has 5 beeps when it finishes which is the same as my coffee maker when it finishes brewing so I can’t hear the difference between the two. Other than that, the five beeps are perfectly fine.

It does exactly the job I want it to do as a microwave oven. It cooks the food thoroughly and evenly, better than my previous microwave oven. So it’s exactly the appliance I was looking for and does exactly what I want it to do.

I use the microwave heavily on a daily basis so my hope is that it holds up for at least a few years or hopefully longer. Replacing a microwave oven is an inconvenient and painful event. Inconvenient because you lose the cooking appliance you are dependent upon on a daily basis for cooking and reheating a lot of your food. Painful because you have to transport a rather heavy piece to a facility where it can be processed.

No lo pude usar y lo tuve que cambiar porque hacía mucho ruido