Choosing The Right Range Hood

There are endless options when it comes to choosing a range hood. It's a necessary appliance that has a significant impact on the look of your kitchen, and if not properly installed or functioning, on your health. Make sure you have the necessary information before you buy. Choices can be overwhelming, ranging from small, inexpensive fans to huge turbo charged units.

You need to make the selection based upon what you really need, factoring in your budget, your décor and how your home is constructed. Basically you should choose a range hood that fits the space over your working area and one that has sufficient capacity to vent or recirculate the air in your kitchen. Seems simple enough, right? Maybe not. There are two basic types of hoods. Vent hoods or recirculating hoods. Vent hoods are generally built-in and are wired directly into your household wiring.

They basically consist of a fan and sometimes a light housed in a metal or glass shroud. The shroud is a deterrent to the spread of a stovetop fire in addition to helping to collect cooking fumes. Fans are either rotary or centrifugal and perform one of two basic actions. In an external or outside vented system the fan will draw fumes and odors through a grease filter in a duct system and send the fumes either up or down and out of the house.

 Recirculating systems will draw the fumes over an activated charcoal filter and then recirculate the air back into the room. This basically just moves moisture, odors and smoke around the kitchen. When you're purchasing a range hood, as with anything, the higher price doesn't always mean the better product. For one thing, you don't always need the top of the line appliance just for the sake of having the top of the line appliance.

 To give you more flexibility, look for a range hood that has variable speed controls for the fan. You'll also want to consider how much noise the fan is going to make. Some hoods include an automatic shutoff for the fan. That's a nice feature to have if you want the fan to operate a little longer than your cooking time, but not all the way through dinner. Safety features include a heat sensor that will automatically speed up the fan or set off an alarm when they sense increased or excess heat.

 A nice addition, while not a requirement, is a light that helps to illuminate your stove top. To maintain your hood you need to periodically clean the hood. The grease filter (the thin, silver screen) traps airborne oils and grease to keep them out of the blower. Remove the filter and soak it in a degreasing solution. Then wash it with warm, soapy water before running it through the dishwasher on the top rack. Before you clean the interior of your hood, make sure the unit is turned off. In fact, turn it off at the breaker.

Clean the interior of the hood with a standard household cleaner/degreaser. The outside can be cleaned with a degreaser or a non-abrasive cleanser. If your hood vents to the outside you need to regularly check to make sure the vent that leads out isn't getting clogged with grease build up. Don't try to clean this yourself, but contact a vent-cleaning contractor by looking under chimney sweep or HVAC duct cleaning.

 The bottom line is that you want a common sense range hood. You want one that exhausts the odors and smoke coming off your range top and preferably doesn't send the fumes back into your house. If properly selected, installed and maintained, a range hood will provide years of adequate ventilation to your kitchen.