Panasonic Inverter Microwave NN-SD-997S ...........

Maybe the "blue flash" from the internal light, was the bulb failing, and it took out an internal fuse that feeds the lamp, fan and turntable supplies. Ordinary lightbulbs often fail with a spectacular lightning storm inside these days, and take the household lighting circuit trip with them. A bit naughty if the Pan doesn't have secondary protection fed from this supply, to ensure that the mag can't run with no cooling, or the food rotated in the waves though. I'm sure that someone on here will be familiar with the model, and know the answer ...

Arfa

Thx for the reply, i opened up the chassis and there is a fuse on a small circuit board at the upper rear right hand side of unit next to AC input. This fuse didn't appear to be blown. (measured 0.5 ohm) I don't see any obvious shorts or anything anywhere else around innards.....i've tried to inspect the input leads to what appear to be 'door latch micro switches' but they seem ok to me.

I was expecting the fuse to be open....this explains why magnetron and front panel are still live?

The local Panasonic repair center wants about $70 to look at it +extras if repair more than $70.

The unit this replaced ran for at least 15 years (Panasonic also, but a 'Genius'...perhaps 'Ingenius' would have been a better name, since it ran for 5 times as long at half the price, w/o so much as a burnt out bulb even and withstood being dropped, twice.)

I also had poor reliability from a Panasonic inverter-type microwave oven. It died (completely) after less than two years. Our previous microwave (a Kenmore, I think) had run for about 20 years.

I googled around a bit and concluded that none of the consumer-branded microwave ovens on the market today was likely to be significantly better than the Panasonic... reliability has gone badly downhill in recent years, due to the "race the bottom" price-wise, and the infatuation with fancy features.

I ended up buying a "medium-level food service" grade microwave (an Amana commercial model). So far, so good. You can even get these with the old-style rotary-knob timers, rather than pushbuttons and microprocessor logic.

Well, most likely the tungsten arc in the bulb popped the solid state relay that runs the light, fan, etc. These are probably set up to stay on after the cooking is done, or maybe just to keep running when the duty-cycle control of the magnetron is switched on and off. You can trace the power to the fan motor and see if there is an obvious electromechanical or solid state relay for this. It will be a LOT less expensive to get this through Digi-Key or Mouser than $70.

Jon

Not relevant to your actual problem, but we had a Panasonic Genius II from 1977-ish until 2007 when it died (prior to that a turntable belt had been replaced). Also replaced with a Panasonic inverter unit. Watching responses with interest.

....just to follow up for those that may benefit,like someone suggested, it was the relay that controls fan/light/rotarytable which burned out. The only rub was my waiting an extra day to pursue it and the woman carting the machine off to the repair center in the interim....oh well, it's only money....maybe it will last 10 years now???

The female time scale to get a piece of vital equipment going again is much shorter than the male's. In a similar situation, my thought to use a double boiler to reheat foods, and the oven to cook frozen meals, fell on deaf ears.

....isn't that the truth.....it's like the survival of h*mo-sapiens is now hopelessly intertwined with functioning magnetrons...i also dared to suggest maybe we could...i dunno... use the oven and those lovely stainless steel cookwares i sprung for a year ago. Instead i get a look like i just rattled off some bizarre Russian dialect. :)

Good evening.

Our latest business involves the wife working during the evening, so it's pretty much down to me to decide what to eat for an evening meal, and how to prepare it. I've virtually abandoned the microwave, and gone back to simple honest cooking in the oven and on the stovetop, using fresh ingredients. It's cheaper than frozen meals, and tastes sooooo much better. For instance, we had been using pretty much exclusively microwave rice packets. To be honest, they might as well have contained bleached and de-flavoured mouse turds. I have now gone back to boiling my own rice, bought for a fraction of the cost of the packet stuff - I am actually using a local store's 'budget' range. It takes but a few minutes to cook, and you can even smell it. I had forgotten how good rice smells when it is cooked, and how much intrinsic flavour it has, before you start adding any other ingredients to the mix. It also fries better than the packet stuff, and doesn't stick to the pan.

Apart from heating up a can of soup, I think that I can now pretty much live without using the thing at all, and am probably healthier for it.

Arfa

"Arfa Daily" wrote in news:SpiQq.6$ snipped-for-privacy@newsfe15.ams:

I've been trying to find a decent MW rice cooker with no success. I tried a Nordic Ware pot,but it requires soaking the rice for quite a while and still not cooking the rice right. what I really want is a MW pressure cooker,with a locking top and pop-off safety valve.