Microwave faults common to all brands
The questions people actually arrive with about a microwave — it has gone completely dead, it runs but the food stays cold, it is sparking, the door is damaged — have no code attached and the same answer on every make. They live here once rather than being rewritten under eight badges.
This is not Panasonic's H-code list, LG's seventeen-row table, or Sharp's E01–E04. Those belong on the brand hubs. It is also not a service manual. A microwave holds a high-voltage capacitor after the plug is out, and no page here is worth taking the cover off for. If your machine shows a code, start on the brand page — Bosch, Samsung, Miele, Whirlpool and Hotpoint each publish a different amount, and some publish none.
A dead microwave is often the monitor switch doing its job: it blows the fuse rather than run with the door interlock defeated. Fitting a new fuse on its own is the one thing the service manuals tell engineers not to do. Arcing, a bent door, or a damaged seal means take it out of service. The person to call is a qualified appliance engineer, not a gas fitter, and not someone offering to look inside.
Named-brand hubs in this category: LG, Panasonic, Whirlpool, Bosch, Samsung, Miele, Sharp and Hotpoint. Those pages carry the manufacturer’s own table; this one does not replace them.
How these displays appear
Most microwaves cannot show you a code. A machine with a knob and a dial has nowhere to put one, and among the models with displays the published sets are short: Bosch publish a single code, Samsung publish six, Panasonic list eleven H-codes and explain none of them. So a much larger share of microwave diagnosis is done from what the appliance is doing than from what it is displaying, which is what this page is for. If your appliance does show a code, go to your brand page first — these pages are for the symptoms that no code covers.
What a reset actually does
A microwave has a plug, which makes it the easy one in this part of the site: pull it out of the socket and the appliance is off. That is worth saying because the ovens, hobs and range cookers here are wired to a cooker circuit and cannot be isolated that way. Built-in microwaves are the exception and are often fed from a switched fused connection unit inside an adjacent cupboard rather than from a socket you can see. Pulling the plug clears a transient control fault on most models. What it does not do is make the inside safe, and that is the difference between this appliance and everything else on this site.
Most common shared microwaves faults
The microwave displays people look up most, whichever badge is on the appliance.
- Not heating but runningGet it checkedThe light is on, the turntable is going round and the food comes out cold. This is the classic microwave failure and none of it is an owner repair.
- Microwave completely deadGet it checkedNo display, no light, no fan. On a microwave this is very often a safety system working as designed, and fitting a new fuse is the wrong repair.
- Is my microwave leakingGet it checkedThere is a published UK limit and a real test for this, and the door seal is what usually fails it. What there is not, is a way to check it at home.
- Sparking inside the microwaveGet it checkedBright arcing and a scorched smell. Look at the small panel on the cavity wall before you run it again — a burnt waveguide cover is the usual answer.
Every shared microwave fault
9 published shared pages. Filtering happens in the page — every one is in the HTML.
Showing 9 of 9 codes
Microwaves these pages cover
These pages apply across types. The split is by how the appliance is built, not by badge.
Guides that help with microwaves faults
How to reset a microwave, and what the display means
Every make says unplug it, but the seconds differ. What each brand publishes, the displays that are not faults, and what to do with a code nobody publishes.Read the guideMicrowave faults: what you can fix, what you must not open
The plug fuse, the door, the waveguide cover and a mug of water are yours. Everything behind the casing is not, and unplugging it does not change that.Read the guide