Since the cooking chamber of a microwave oven doesn’t get hot, there is no way to make a “self-cleaning” microwave oven. Instead, you have to clean it by hand with a sponge and perhaps a little soapy water. As long as you get the soap or any other cleaning agents out, you can clean the cooking chamber just as you’d clean the top of a stove.
According to a reader, most microwave oven capacitors have fuses in them so that when they fail, they usually become open (they lose all of their ability to store separated charge and behave as a simple open circuit). You’d need a capacitor checker to find this open circuit within the capacitor.
Not one that came from the microwave oven. Microwaves are all around us and are completely innocuous. Your body emits weak microwaves all the time, as part of its thermal radiation! Like light, microwaves don’t remain still in objects so you can’t eat one that was put in the food by the oven.
While I have only a little experience repairing microwave ovens, I can make reasonable guesses. The loud hum you hear is probably an indication that something is overloading the power transformer. That suggests that the diode, capacitor, or magnetron are bad. If you have checked the first two carefully, at full operating voltage, and found no problems, then I would suspect the magnetron. I have been told by a reader that magnetrons usually fail by shorting out, the result of electromigration of the filament material. The tube would then draw excessive currents from the high voltage transformer. That has probably happened in your case. Still, free advice like mine is only worth what you’ve paid for it. I’d suggest you consult a local repairperson, who has test equipment that can pinpoint the problem in seconds.
Microwave cooking leaves no permanent mark on the food. It causes virtually no chemical damage and absolutely no radioactivity. The only drawback with heating milk by microwave is that the heating may be uneven and may denature some protein molecules in regions of the milk that become excessively hot. Since most protein molecules are disassembled by your digestion anyway, this treatment probably has no effects worth worrying about. Even with infant formula, my only concern would be the hot spots. If you carefully shake the milk after heating, so that its temperature is uniform, it should be just fine. I suspect that companies warn you not to heat milk in a microwave because they are worried that you will either not shake the milk to distribute its temperature evenly or that you will overcook it until it boils and the bottle explodes.
Like all electromagnetic waves, microwaves are composed of electric and magnetic fields. Since an electric field exerts forces on charged particles, a microwave pushes electrons back and forth through any metals it encounters. It is this motion of electrons back and forth through the metal walls of the microwave oven that allow that metal to reflect the microwaves and keep them inside the oven. If you leave a spoon in you cup of coffee as you heat it in the microwave, electrons will move back and forth through the spoon. This motion of charge will cause no problems so long as (1) the spoon can tolerate this flow of charge without overheating and (2) the spoon doesn’t allow the charges at its ends to leap into the air as a spark. To keep the spoon from overheating, it must be a good conductor of electricity. Since most spoons are pretty thick, the modest currents flowing through them in the microwave will leave little energy inside them and they won’t overheat. But a thin twist-tie or small bit of aluminum foil may well overheat and begin to burn. To keep the spoon from sparking, it should have smooth ends. Electrons are more likely to leave the end of a metal surface at a sharp point, so avoiding points is important. Most spoons are smooth enough that no sparks will occur. But a fork, a sharp piece of foil, or a twist-tie may well begin to emit electrons into the air as those electrons pile up at one end of the wire while the microwave oven is on. Like a spoon, the walls of the oven are good conductors of electricity and they have no sharp points. While electrons move back and forth in these walls, they simply reflect the microwaves without becoming very hot and without emitting any sparks. You’ll note that the light bulb for the microwave is always outside the cooking chamber because it contains small bits of metal that would have trouble inside a microwave oven.
The black holey stuff on the window of a microwave oven is a metal shield that keeps the microwaves inside the cooking chamber. Because the holes in this metal sheeting are so much smaller than the wavelengths of the microwaves (about 12 cm), the microwaves respond to the sheeting as though it were solid metal and they reflect almost perfectly. By keeping the microwaves inside the oven, this sheeting speeds cooking and protects you from the microwaves.
It isn’t necessarily bad to put metal in a microwave oven, but it can cause cooking problems or other trouble. Microwaves cause currents to flow in metals. In a thick piece of metal, these currents won’t cause problems for the metal. However, in thin pieces of metal, the currents may heat the metal hot enough to cause a fire. Metallic decorations on fine porcelain tend to become hot enough to damage the porcelain. But even thick pieces of metal can cause problems because they tend to reflect the microwaves. That may cause cooking problems for the food nearby. For example, a potato wrapped in aluminum foil won’t cook at all in a microwave oven because the foil will reflect the microwaves. The currents flowing in the metal can also produce sparks, particularly at sharp points, and these sparks can cause fires. In general, smooth and thick metallic objects such as spoons aren’t a problem, but sharp or thin metallic objects such as pins or metal twist-ties are.
This experiment is described in Fun with Grapes – A Case Study. While I haven’t tried it yet myself, I believe I know why it works. Grape juice is somewhat able to conduct electricity and the two halves of the grape are connected by a weak conducting path: the skin bridge. When the microwave oven is turned on, the microwaves not only heat the water in the grapes, they also push a few mobile electric charges back and forth through the skin bridge from one side of the grape to the other. This current releases energy as it passes through the narrow bridge and it heats the bridge extremely hot. The bridge soon catches fire and the electric current driven by the microwaves begins to pass through the flame. When current passes through a gas, it tends to ionize that gas (remove electrons from the gas atoms) so that the gas itself begins to conduct electricity. When current flows through atmospheric pressure air, it forms a brilliant arc. In this case, the arc that you see is powered by the microwaves as they push electric charges back and forth from one side of the grape to the other. An excellent set of movies showing this and other microwave oven experiments appears at http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~maarten/microwave/microwave.html.
Microwaves are like light—both are electromagnetic waves and both move extremely quickly. While it is possible to trap a light wave briefly between two mirrors, that wave will eventually be absorbed or released. The same is true of a microwave. It’s almost impossible to trap a microwave for more than 1 second, even in very exotic enclosures, so you needn’t worry about them becoming trapped in food. The food simply absorbs them and turns their energy into thermal energy.