Farberware 2.2 cu ft

It heats food evenly, operates simply, and has enough power to handle common tasks like reheating leftovers, making popcorn, or warming frozen meals. The controls are straightforward and easy to understand, which is a big plus if you do not want to deal with anything overly complicated. The design is clean and modern, and the overall unit feels like a good value for the price. For anyone looking for a dependable microwave that covers the basics well, this one is a worthwhile purchase.

Very sturdy. Prefer the pull handle for opening. Like that it has a dark interior instead of white. Works great! Great microwave for the price.

I chose this particular microwave oven after doing a quick "top 10 best recommended" search. I have purchased a number of Faberware products and am quite happy with the quality and economical price points for them. This is a size and power upgrade for an aging GE 700 Watt countertop microwave oven. The included instruction manual is easy enough to follow and setup went fairly quickly. The unit build is quite sturdy and the easy touch Control buttons respond well. Functionality is excellent and relatively quiet. The internal glass platter has reasonably powerful steady rotation as well as the internal space being lit while in use. I can easily recommend this product to anyone looking for a mid sized countertop microwave while not breaking the bank to acquire a quality solution. One of the nicer aspects of this particular model is it comes in 7 different sizes, the larger ones with increased power ratings as well as multiple color schemes to choose from. Easy and economical choice to accommodate most any counter space.

First of all, this Farberware microwave oven is Farberware only in name/branding, which Farberware licenses for the purpose to Englewood Marketing, which gets the ovens made mostly in China, and then markets, sells, and warrantees them. It’s not really up to Farberware traditional standards, but still probably among the best in a large, really crummy field of available microwaves. This oven comes in 4 or 5 different “colors;” mine is “stainless steel,” and calling that the “color” is pretty accurate, as there’s a thin veneer of what probably is really stainless on/around the front face of the oven, and that’s it, that’s about all the stainless on or in this oven, ‘most everything else is plastic and cheap, painted steel. The very first bullet point of the product description falsely says, “Stainless Steel exterior and Stainless Steel interior,” but that’s just a big, bad lie. (It’s generally easy to tell, as a magnet isn’t attracted to stainless - and stainless is almost never painted or coated, ‘cause it’s fine without.) Nonetheless, from the front, it actually looks good, handsome. From the top and sides it looks like what it is, plastic and cheap painted steel. But still it’s probably about as good or better as any other at the price. (There is another available color, “copper,” which is also handsome, but, ironically, reminds me very much of Revere Ware cooking pots, Farberware’s long-time traditional rival.) This oven consumes 1500 watts electrical power, by actual measure, same as advertised. I haven’t yet bothered to measure/test the microwave radiative power delivered into the cooking chamber, to see if it matches the advertised 1000 watts. (The difference, the missing 500 watts, is lost in the process of converting from electrical power to microwave.) This oven, so far for us, cooks well and evenly enough. There are a lot of reviewers here reporting various hard, early failures with this oven, but so far at least we’ve been lucky, ours works. Time will tell. Reduced power levels, e.g. 50%, as/when requested by the user, are achieved, not by actually running at 50% power, but by cycling between full on and off at somewhere around 10 second intervals with a 50% (or whatever) duty cycle. (Do all microwave ovens work this way, is it too hard to really “dim” the microwave generator?) I suppose this is mostly okay, but if you want say 50% power for a short period like 10 seconds, perhaps to soften a small amount of butter, you’re quite out of luck. The power cord is 3 feet long - rather short, too short for our situation, we’re forced to get and use an extension cord. Our previous microwave cord was 4-1/2 feet, which worked perfectly by itself. The oven’s operational noise is a bit loud, certainly a bit louder than our previous microwave. The oven’s audio beep signaling sound is produced on way too many occasions; and way too many beeps for less than no possible purpose - like it’s beeping to notify you at the end of a cooking cycle - which is pretty ridiculous in the first place, as the oven is noisy enough in operation that you’d have to be deaf not to hear it stop - and you’ve opened the door and it obviously knows that too but still continues to beep regardless; and it (the beeping, still) is too loud; and is especially sorely lacking a way to just turn the whole darn beeper off (i.e. *OFF*). A super nasty, irritating fault in my view, believing firmly that machines should be seen but not heard. Especially egregious since the makers of this oven invested so much in hardware and firmware for cheesy gimmicks like dedicated Pizza and dog-food buttons, but couldn’t be bothered to simply add a small bit of firmware to allow the owner/user of the oven to tell it to just be quiet, do not beep at me! Occasionally this oven requires two or more presses of a button before it registers. This is probably just some flakiness in the (always cheap) membrane button switches, but might also be a bug in the firmware, I haven’t lived with this oven for long enough to know which yet. The oven interior light is needlessly ridiculously dim; and the oven interior surface is needlessly dark, medium-dark grey (could as easily and better been lighter-colored); and visibility through its front-door window is very poor (heavily obscured by some kind of presumably protective masking, but also needlessly dark); so overall visibility of whatever’s inside is triply-needlessly extremely poor. My mate sarcastically called it “theatrical.” I call it nearly useless, almost impossible to see into. They could just as easily install a light bulb with 10 times the light output. The Instruction Manual is written in rather broken english, presumably by a Chinese, sometimes understandable, but often not. Fortunately the oven is not so complicated that you can’t generally bumble around and figure it out. Customer service - by Englewood Marketing, in Green Bay, WI USA - is remarkably quick, nice, knowledgeable and helpful, at least for answering operational questions. Didn’t try ‘em on any more substantial matters. The real, actual weight of this oven, including the turntable, excluding all the packaging, is 29lbs, 14ozs., i.e. 2oz’s. under 30lbs. The Instruction Manual says the “Net Weight” is “Approx 31.0Lbs” - but I’m pretty certain that’s just not currently accurate, over by a pound. Given that they specified the ostensible weight down to the tenth of a pound, I’d guess that their scale is accurate but that they have lightened/cheapened the oven by “approx.” a pound since they earlier put it into production and weighed it. And this oven’s weight is perhaps a little bit light in the field of similarly priced ovens. This might be somewhat the cause of the weight of this particular oven being so rarely noted - and so all over the map, anywhere from 24 to 36lbs., when it is mentioned. The warranty on this oven is nominally for 1 year - but, like pretty much all current microwave warranties, effectively worthless by the time you get done navigating its terms and conditions. In almost any case of a problem, you’d be better off just biting the bullet and getting another oven. So why, out of the hundreds of microwave ovens available, did we get this one? Because it appears to me that they are all pretty crummy, badly flawed, a number of them even severe fire hazards; of those that will fit our strictly constrained space, this Farberware seemed and still seems to be the most-capable/least-awful, at pretty much any price. If I were rating on an absolute scale, considering this Farberware oven’s many faults, I would give it only 3 stars. But, considering the large field of its mediocre competitors, grading somewhat on a curve, I’ll give it 4 stars for now.

I love how it looks and how small it is. We have very limited counter space, and this works perfectly in our small kitchen. It fits a medium size casserole dish. It cooks just as well as my old, larger one.

I’m very happy with this microwave. It heats food quickly and evenly. It’s easy to use and the size is perfect for my kitchen. Good quality for the price. I recommend it!

EDIT 12/25/2024: Rating reduced from 5 stars to 1. It would be zero if I could. The unit arrived in a day and there was zero damage to the box. The unit also had no visible damage to the cabinet or the power cord. But it was electrically dead right out of the box. I read the manual and followed the instructions which were few and simple. The display would not light up. The control panel was completely unresponsive. I plugged it into several outlets proven to be working with other appliances. Nothing. It's just dead. Back it goes. Already processed the return. It's disappointing. I'd expect at least minimal quality control like plugging the units in to see if they'll at least power up and the lights come on before they're shipped out to retailers. Apparently that didn't happen. ORIGINAL REVIEW: Just for clarity since their are multiple versions in this product listing, I bought the 1.3 cu ft, 1000W version with the stainless steel finish and the curved door handle. A microwave is pretty much like a coffee pot or a toaster oven to me. We use it 99% of the time to..... 1.) Heat up coffee or tea. 2.) Defrost frozen stuff. 3.) Reheat leftovers. 4.) Make popcorn. So the question becomes can it do the basics with an easy to use control interface and is it durable / reliable. The answer in this case is yes. This is a direct replacement for the exact same Farberware branded microwave I bought 7 years ago for the exact same price. The only difference is that the original one was black and this one has a stainless steel finish. The styling and control interface is identical except for a couple of feature additions in the new one. But as an offset, the old one had an output of 1100W and this one is rated at 1000W. No big deal. The physical size both inside and outside are identical. That's critical for me as this thing has to fit in a built in cubby / garage over the counter. And this is the largest unit that will fit I've ever found. As for the inside, it will fit a large dinner plate. Good enough. As for the control interface, there is a zero learning curve as it's almost identical to the one it's replacing. It has the basics covered..... 1.) Time cook. 2.) Time defrost. 3.) Weight defrost. 4.) Power level adjustment 5.) 5 presets for popcorn, pizza, dinner plate, potato, frozen veggies, and beverages. 6.) One touch cook time from 1-6 min. The old one was 1-3 min. 7.) 30 second one touch add by pressing the start button again. It's obvious that they put some thought into the interface to make it really easy to do what microwaves are used for 99% of the time. If you need to read the manual to use this, well... you need help. LOL, it's that easy. As for value, the original black one cost me the exact same $135 in March 2018. It's not dead. It still heats fine. But the timer / clock display flips out intermittently then comes back to life randomly before failing again. Just annoying. And the inside has seen enough wear that its not possible to get it really clean looking any longer. But hey, this thing gets used probably 10 times daily by 4 people on average. And at $135 the original lasted 7 years. That's about $19/year or $1.60/month. I'm OK with replacing it with a newer version at this point. I got good value out of it. Hopes this helps anyone trying to make a decision.

We've had this microwave for 4 months now. We are very satisfied with its performance. It is loud, as some people commented, but I don't feel it's louder than other microwaves. My partner thought we had paid a hundred dollars more, if that's not saying something :). Highly recommend.