A new year, a new microwave

The Frigidaire over-the-range microwave, model number FGMV176NTF, has a critical design flaw. The big heavy door has two mechanical latches which hold the door shut and protect you from dangerous microwave radiation. One latch on the top, one on the bottom of the inside of the big, heavy door.

Because the microwave is over the range people tend to grab the door handle from the bottom, and pull a little bit downward when opening the door. This causes the latches to wear unevenly. This means that the hidden switches behind the latches may not be switched at the same time. This causes the microwave to sometimes trip the breaker, sometimes blow a fuse.

This microwave is 6 years old.

You can confirm my observations by going onto YouTube and searching for “frigidaire” and the model number. You’ll find dozens of helpful home improvement dad-bros showing you how to pull apart the microwave, to replace fuses, and even entire switch mechanisms.

Oh. There’s also, a secret third switch. When the bottom door latch gets worn enough, it not only switches unevenly, it also fails to switch the hidden switch. This means the microwave will trip the breaker every time you use it. The light and exhaust fan still work, but now the microwave only serves as a ver cumbersome lighted cabinet.

The Home Depot was having a sale. I bought a shiny new Whirlpool slim-line over-the-range microwave with a better looking door situation. Priced originally at $600, it was on sale for $400. Great, I guess. I suspect that prices don’t actually mean anything. I’d place a strong bet that with shipping, packing, assembly, and some small overage to cover design and development of the product, the actual cost to Home Depot is probably $200 or less for any microwave in the store. So whatever. $400 or $600. Home Depot got paid.

The new microwave was delivered on a Thursday and waited patiently for my wife to go out of town over the long MLK weekend so I could wreck the kitchen and hopefully get it back together again by Tuesday.

Over the range microwaves are heavier than their counter-top counterparts. They house a microwave, exhaust fan, vents, and lighting in the same clunky metal box. I think ours weighed about 50lbs. To get these things off the wall is typically a two man job as you can’t unscrew the giant bolts which hold the thing up without it crashing down on top of the oven below. Typically one person would hold it in place while another unbolts it and then together gently lower the thing to the floor.

I was solo on this mission so I created a sort of stand for the microwave out of the heavy packing cardboard for the new microwave. That sounds flimsy, but this cardboard was incredibly dense and strong. I cut it to size with a saw.

Once I got the microwave off the wall I surveyed the cabinets and the wall behind the hutch where the old microwave sat. The installers of this microwave couldn’t find a stud in our plaster and lathe walls, so they figured why not just use seven or eight wood screws in the lathe. That should work. Right? There was also a hole left in the drywall. The kitchen installers ran tile rightup to the bottom of the microwave. There was a row of poorly cut ⅓ size tiles glued into place on the wall with no grout. The kind of sloppiness you wouldn’t notice unless you stuck your head under the microwave and examined the walls.

I removed the tile with a chisel. I patched the hole in the wall, and skimmed plaster over the drywall where the tile had been. At this point I was very glad I turned down installation from Home Depot. I know what would have happened. A couple of guys would have yanked down the old microwave, and slapped up the new one, leaving all the tile, holes, and all the rest for the future.

Plaster drying on the walls, time to look at the cabinets. The microwave was nestled between two wall-mounted cabinets. The sides of those cabinets formed a square alcove for the microwave. The outer sides of the cabinets formed the inner walls of this alcove. And they were peeling.

I asked Chatty Gwhy my cabinets were peeling and Chatty G told me about ThermoFoil.

ThermoFoil is trash.

ThermoFoil is a thin sheet of vinyl or plastic heat-formed to the surface of MDF cabinets. The MDF here, is fine. Modern MDF is durable, strong, paintable, patchable, etc. ThermoFoil wraps something inexpensive, but effective, in plastic garbage.

There is no way to shield the cabinets above the stove. The cabinets around the microwave just sit and absorb heat from the oven and presumably from the microwave. Prolonged exposure to heat causes ThermoFoil to slowly break down. The glue fails, the surface becomes brittle and starts to peel and flake away. Heavy use or high-friction areas show the same kind of wear. The corners of cabinet doors and drawers will begin to show wear over time.

These cabinets are 6 years old.

I found that my wife’s very powerful salon-quality hair dryer did a surprisingly good job of removing some of the old ThermoFoil. That’s not an Approved Use Case for a hair dryer, so I bought a small cordless heat gun and together with a flat scraper I easily removed this vinyl trash. I wiped down the exposed surfaces with denatured alcohol to dissolve the remaining glue and then applied three coats of semi-gloss paint. Better than new.

The plaster dried, so I sprayed on more orange peel texture to match the existing wall. Along with the creators of ThermoFoil, the creators of spray-on orange-peel wall texture need to be tied to a pier and left there while the tide comes in. The silly spray-junk dried and I painted the back wall of my microwave hutch to match our sunny orange accent wall. I cleaned up the tile with new quarter-round bull nose edge tiles to match the rest of the kitchen and matched the grout color as best I could (how many medium grey grout colors can there be).

Most of this job was a fit of heavy work, like removing a microwave, followed by a spurt of light work, like patching a wall, and then a lot of waiting for things to dry. So drying time became dog-walking time. I took the poodle out for a jaunt and discussed with him the next phase of the project. He is a very good listener.

It was time to install the new microwave. I prepped everything, drilled new holes for new bolts. Attached the mounting hardware to the wall. I found the wall studs. Maybe I should be a contractor. My neighbor, the Handsome Actor™ helped me heave the microwave into place and held it there while I bolted it down. After cleaning, the kitchen looked better than new.

While I was going down this rabbit hole I remembered my grandparents microwave. When I was a kid, we didn’t have a microwave. My parents shunned them for reasons of cost and amorphous principles. But my grandparents had a microwave and I thought it was magical. It was probably new in the 70s and lasted at least 20 years, the chromed knobs and faux wood grain gleaming brightly well into the Clinton years.