Evaluating your microwave leaks

I'm telling you right now, this is not a recopes to cook your phone!

It's more about the fact that both Wifi (excluding 5.8ghz bands) and microwave oven uses 2.4ghz frequency to operate. This allows a quick trick to evaluate your microwave leaking!

By using any decent Wifi monitoring application that can report dB value. (in my case I used Wifi Analyzer for Android) you can measure the signal strenght with door open and door closed. Then make the substraction. This will give the attenuation factor of your microwave. Actually a perfect reading would be made by measuring "door closed" and no "microwave at all", but "door open" is a fairly good approximation...

Warning: Do not activate the microwave with the smartphone inside! (Actually it might be a good idea to disconnect it before doing the experimentation.)

In my case:

(-88dB) - (-42dB)= -46dB

So my microwave attenuate by 46dB the wave inside.

Assuming it's radiating 800w of power, we can calculate the leaking power with the following formula:

Linear_Gain = 10^(dB_Gain/10)

Linear_Gain = 10^(-46/10) = 2.5E-05

By Multiplying by the power of the microwave, we can get the leaked power. Here:

Leaked_Power = Power * Linear_Gain

Leaked_Power = 800 * 2.5E-05 = 0.02 Watt

0.02 Watt is pretty good! My microwave is not wasting it's power and it not toasting myself! Some can get values up to a few Watts...