While some people are content with using microwaves for occasional tasks such as reheating a cup of tea that’s gone cold or melting butter, others depend on them for everything from baking cakes to cooking complex dinners. Whatever your needs, the good news is there’ll be a microwave to suit you.
Standard microwaves, which are the cheapest, are great for the simple stuff like reheating and defrosting. They don’t take up much room and are the easiest to use.
But if you want something more whizzy, consider a microwave grill, which also has a heating element, or a combi which can heat, roast, crisp and brown just like a normal oven.
Remember more watts mean faster cooking and think about capacity too, bearing in mind that anything less than 20l can feel cramped for larger households.
Consider the latest tech, such as a drop-down door and flatbed design to fit awkward and bigger shaped dishes inside. You may also want features such as auto-reheat, auto-defrost and steam.
When testing microwaves, our criteria included all this tech, as well as size, capacity, cooking time, ease of use and cleaning, aesthetics, usefulness, efficiency of features and value for money.
You can trust our independent reviews. We may earn commission from some of the retailers, but we never allow this to influence selections, which are formed from real-world testing and expert advice. This revenue helps us to fund journalism across The Independent.
Microwaves
Besides being a bit on the noisy side, we found it hard to fault the Beko MOC20200C, which performs extremely well at pretty much everything and whose star feature is the four-step programming – a boon for the time-poor. For a microwave-grill combi, the Sage quick touch crisp microwave did us proud – it’s intuitive and as comprehensive as they come, although as we said it’s certainly not cheap.
IndyBest product reviews are unbiased, independent advice you can trust. On some occasions, we earn revenue if you click the links and buy the products, but we never allow this to bias our coverage. The reviews are compiled through a mix of expert opinion and real-world testing.
