It can do the job most people use a microwave for, and it will do it better. It will also do it several times more slowly, and there are three tasks it cannot do at all. Whether that trade works depends almost entirely on how much of a hurry you are in at 7pm.
The candidate is the $185 Wonder Oven: 12 litres, 1700 watts, six modes, a temperature floor of 200°F and a 60-minute timer, which is the whole shape of what would sit where your microwave does now.
A microwave excites water molecules throughout the food at once. That is why it is fast, and also why it produces soggy pizza, rubbery chicken and a lasagne that is molten at the edges and cold in the middle. It heats water, not surfaces.
A convection oven heats the air and moves it. Heat arrives from the outside in, so the surface dries and crisps while the inside warms. That is why reheated food comes out closer to how it started — and why it takes ten to fifteen minutes rather than ninety seconds.
Neither is better. They are different tools, and the honest question is which failure mode you would rather live with.
Anything that was crisp. Pizza, chips, fried chicken, pastry, roast potatoes. A microwave ruins all of these; a convection oven restores most of them.
Bread and baked goods. A microwave makes bread briefly warm and then leathery. The oven does not.
Anything you want browned. A microwave cannot brown at all. This is not a matter of degree.
Even heating. No cold centre, no scalding edge, no stopping halfway to stir.
Speed. This is the whole objection and it is a fair one. Reheating a plate takes ten minutes or so in a convection oven against about ninety seconds in a microwave, and the oven wants preheating. If your evenings run on the second, you will resent it.
Liquids. Heating a mug of tea, melting butter, warming milk. A microwave does these in seconds; an oven is the wrong tool entirely.
Steaming in a bag or bowl. Microwave rice, steam-in-bag vegetables, most ready meals designed for microwaves.
Defrosting. There is no defrost mode, and the 200°F floor on the standard and Large models means you cannot improvise one gently. The Pro's 80°F floor gets closer.
Most people asking this are not comparing cooking methods. They are trying to work out whether one appliance can go. So, in inches:
The standard Wonder Oven is 11.5 in. wide, 10.6 deep and 11.6 tall — comparable to a small microwave, and it is the only model in the range that is. The Large and Pro are 16.75 inches wide, which is wider than many countertop microwaves, so swapping one of those in is not a space saving.
Neither manufacturer publishes a required clearance, and a convection oven needs air around it in a way a microwave does not. Do not slot one into a microwave-sized alcove without checking the manual.
Yes, if you mostly reheat solid food, you cook at a relaxed pace, and you have been quietly annoyed at what the microwave does to leftovers for years. A lot of people in that position never miss it.
No, if there are children to feed at speed, if anyone in the house heats drinks in it, or if microwave rice and steam-in-bag vegetables are part of how the week works. Ten minutes is a long time when someone is hungry.
The compromise most people land on is keeping both and using the microwave for liquids and speed, the oven for anything that was ever crisp. That is not the answer you were looking for if the goal was reclaiming counter space, but it is what actually happens in most kitchens that buy one.
The only model that is a genuine one-for-one swap on counter space.
Check price at Our PlaceWider than many microwaves. This is an addition, not a replacement.
Check price at Our PlaceDimensions, temperature ranges and mode lists are Our Place's published figures, read 25 August 2026. The comparison of how microwaves and convection ovens heat food is general physics rather than a manufacturer claim, and the ten-minute figure is an ordinary expectation for convection reheating rather than a measurement.
Our Place does not claim the Wonder Oven replaces a microwave. 1919 Cookware earns a commission on purchases made through these links at no cost to you.
1919 Cookware is an independent guide to Our Place cookware, written to help you work out what to buy. We earn a commission when you buy through our links, at no extra cost to you, and it does not decide our verdicts — where a rival or a cheaper model is the better buy, we say so. Prices and specifications are read from each manufacturer's own published product data rather than from long-term kitchen testing, and the page below explains what that does and does not settle. We do not accept press samples and no brand reviews our pages before publication. Our Place prices and specifications last verified 16 October 2026; competitor prices 25 August 2026.
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