If I hack my microwave oven so that it runs with the door off, would this be dangerous? originally appeared on Quora, the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.

If I hack my microwave oven so that it runs with the door off, would this be dangerous?

Back when I was a young engineer (in a previous millennium) I talked to the old timers about their early experience. I had one engineer that started his engineering career installing radar and radio systems for the military. He talked about the various places he would work, like Alaska and North Dakota, that had this tendency to get pretty cold. He was lucky being the engineer, he got to stay in the radio shack while the techs were out doing the actual work.

When you are up on a tower trying to get the microwave dish to line up with another one 15 miles away, you need some serious precision using your tools. When the temperature is ten below zero (F, not C), your hands will get quite cold. The techs would sometimes warm up their hands in front of the microwave dish.

Yes, they were cooking their hands in a big open-air microwave oven. This “oven” was often only about 100 watts or even less - one 10th or one 15th of your standard oven. What happened to the techs? The two that this engineer kept in touch with had severe arthritis in the hands.

If you go up onto a tall building in a city, you will most likely see microwave antennae. It is much cheaper to beam your data across the sky in a city instead of trying to run a cable (in NY city, I was installing a system where we had to run some fiber optic cables across a street). It cost the customer over $40,000 to run the cable about 40 feet, and that was because it was a quiet street with little traffic. A busy street might cost a lot more.

Anyway, a lot of buildings have these microwaves. If you go up onto the building, you will see taped off and fenced off areas where you shouldn’t go if you don’t want to get toasted. You will also see several dead birds (mostly pigeons). While the microwave antenna is designed to seriously focus the beam, the power of those antennas is still a small fraction of your microwave oven.

So, what actually can happen without the door. First off, your door-less microwave is not a very good transmitter. It is designed to focus the beam in the center of the oven, not outside of it. So, the beam will be very wide. I read somewhere that the FCC says that microwave energy of 10 watts per meter squared is dangerous, and a time of 30 minutes such a beam could cause serious organ damage. What does that mean for our little experiment?

If we assume 66.7% efficiency coming out of the oven, then a 1500 watt oven will spew out 1000 watts into your room (it’s best to assume higher, but this makes the calculations easier). If we assume a 60 degree beam out of the door (30 degrees either side of the straight line out the door), then the 10 watt per square meter position would (roughly) be about 5 meters from the oven. However, the power density may not be smooth, and reflections off of the floor, walls, and ceiling in your room could focus more energy into the open area increasing that distance. Basically, unless you have a huge kitchen, your entire kitchen would fall into the “cook zone”.

Even if you and your pets avoided this cooking, you will get all sorts of other fun effects. Stuff in your cabinets might start to cook. Sparks may jump across metal objects as they act as inefficient receivers and get large potentials across their surfaces. You might fry electronics that are in the line of the beam (especially cheap, poorly protected and un-shielded ones). Moisture in the wood holding up your house will absorb the heat. While this would not be enough to start a fire, it might cause warping (doors in the beam might not close quite right if they have moisture in the wood). Your electric wires may act as an antenna and carry the high-frequency energy to connected devices. It probably won’t do any harm, but it depends on a number of factors.

Basically, you might not die from this, but you could get internal burns (which would be a serious pain since you can’t rub ointment on inner muscles). Any pets in the beam would suffer more because they have lower body mass and therefore the energy per kg will be higher. Also, you will disrupt radio receivers all over the place incurring the wrath of the FCC (or whatever local communications agency you have if you are not in the USA).

So, on the good-idea, bad-idea graph, this one would fall deep into the bad-idea region of the graph.

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