Adventures in Mircowaves and why I'll avoid GE appliances when I can

Our microwave just stopped working yesterday. Greg opened the door, and then nothing. No light, no display, no error code. I got the vent cover off, to discover that the plastic holding it on was shattered, but this seemed to have nothing to do with my the microwave stopped working. we checked the fuses, we unplugged and replugged it, we checked that the outlet had power. I've crazy glued the plastic that shatter back together.

This is the shiny, expensive over the range microwave that came with the house. We think they paid about $500ish for it. It's about two months past it's 1 year warranty.

I thought I would phone GE's repair number, 1-800-GE-CARES, and ask if there was anything else easy I could check or a reset button or anything but they're phone tree had no way to talk to a person, that I could find, including trying just pressing 0, which sometimes work, and the trees were designed around whether or not you had a warranty. Sorry GE, you clearly don't care, or at least you don't care about me.

Luckily a friend is getting rid of his microwave and will be bring it over today. Sadly it is also a GE, but it's been running for 7 or so years and it sounds like it will fit and hopefully installation is as easy as it seems to be on youtube.

As a side note, this doesn't really upset me that much. It's such a first world problem. But I like to warn people about companies with bad customer service and items that are bad deals.

microwave part 2

So avacon happened to be getting rid of a over the range microwave, that happened to be the right size and he just happened to being going north today, so he kindly dropped it off.

The fan swap from external vent to internal was a snap.

Getting the old one down, was a brute. Those things are heavy. I had to go out and buy a drill bit and some toggle bolts and I was little worried by how many holes the wall and cabinet now has, but we got the new one in. It was almost as hard getting the new one in.

The "new" one (which is actually from 2005) has a dial control that we'll have to get used to. It's also an normal oven too, but I don't think we'll use that feature. But for less than the price of a repair guy, and a days of work and heavy lifting by both me and G, we have a microwave again.

Yay! and thank you avacon and spouse (I'm not sure I have her lj name)!

( before and after photos )

The interior bulb seems to have not survived the transportation and it's officially not user serviceable and would require taking the oven down from the wall again to get at it! Way to go GE. Yeesh. There are some people on the web who think it's possible to do with it mounted and by the user if I can just figure out the part number.