One Lowell room would have had two microwaves if the second hadn't been stolen from storage over the summer.

"We still have a rice-cooker, a toaster oven an espresso machine and a coffee maker, though," says a sophomore occupant.

The student says he uses the microwave to heat food his mother sends overnight from home and makes rice to go along with it.

Another Lowell student has a bread maker, another a hot pot, another a space heater.

The Source

The source for many of the forbidden appliances is close at hand-Harvard's own Cooperative Society.

"You can get almost all this stuff at the Coop," says one of the first-year pizza-makers.

Louise J. Petrozelli, merchandise manager of the Coop, says students are frequent appliance buyers, rules or no rules.

"Most of the students probably have a humidifier or a heater," she says, and "most will buy hot pots and toasters."

Petrozelli says that many of the cooking appliances are sold to "second year students...when they move out of the dorms."

But as College students seldom move off campus, most of those cooking appliances end up as illegal extras in rooms without kitchens.

"It really depends on the level of the student," Petrozelli says.

But, she says, undergraduates are not the Coop's primary market for the more powerful machines.

"We have no control over what they buy or what they use, but it's not really the students who are buying the high-voltage electrical appliances," she says