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Can microwave emitters serve as a makeshift home defence weapon?
(sh.itjust.works)
This community is for people to ask questions they feel stupid for not knowing the answer or how to find the answer. "How do I not already know this?"
Think about it. Your house is probably wired for a maximum of 100A (maybe more if newer). A microwave oven uses 10A, typically. The maximum power you could put into an array of household microwaves would be the equivalent of ten microwaves.
Now if you considered all of this being converted to, say, an electric heater -- you could probably heat a fairly large space with this much energy -- probably even your house in a Minnesota winter if it was at all insulated. If you were to be able to direct this heat towards someone, it'd be like standing right in front of the furnace while it was on and blowing all of its heat at you. It'd heat you up real good, but you could always just leave that spot.
But with 100A, you could power a lot of LED lights, and very bright ones too. Like airport runway level bright. You're probably better off building something like that which you could shine at an intruder. Just don't blind yourself during testing ;)
Ah, but your house power would have no trouble charging a colossal bank of capacitors to provide a brief instantaneous kill shot. Also, I think the design would be improved if you added a wave-guided magnetron so that the energy was more directed, but I don't know much about that - I am more of a laser person myself.
But mah invisible ray of torment!
Really good point on power consumption.
That said, any space heater I've used that draws 10A can't heat water to boiling in 1 minute.
So I guess something about how a microwave delivers that energy matters in this equation? (I'm thinking distance from the emitter).