How to Choose a Ventilation Hood

When you’re shopping for ventilation hoods for your kitchen, you might think that they’re all created equal, but there are some important reasons why you should consider your choice carefully. Since a majority of airborne pollutants in any given household come directly from cooking in the kitchen, it’s crucial to capture and eliminate smoke, humidity, heat, and odors right at their source, before they have a chance to invade the rest of the household. Here are some things to look for:

Types of hoods

The best way to deal with the undesirable by-products of cooking are to exhaust them outside the house with a ducted vent hood. If for some reason you can’t install a ducted hood, find a non-ducted hood which can accommodate the layout of your kitchen, so that air can at least be filtered and recirculated.

The least expensive kind of vent hood is an under-cabinet model, which is non-ducted but effectively traps unwanted grease and odors in replaceable filters, before recirculating air back to the kitchen. A bit more expensive is a wall-mounted chimney hood, which is installed next to a kitchen wall, and resembles a chimney as it rises toward the ceiling in a pyramidal shape.

The ceiling-mounted chimney, a.k.a. ‘island hood’, is a more expensive type of vent hood which is suspended over your kitchen’s cooking island, and vents cooking odors outside the house. At the very top of the line of vent hoods are the custom-built models, designed to be completely compatible with the rest of your kitchen styling, including cabinetry, wall decoration, and even flooring.

Other considerations

Most importantly, your vent hood should be adequately sized to handle the volume of unwanted cooking by-products emanating from your stovetop, and should ideally cover the full length of the range itself. Special features on your hood will of course increase the price of the unit, and these can include extra blowers for fast removal of particulates, increased lighting, and possibly digital controls with variable-speed fans. Your selections should be guided by what you can afford, and what you feel is necessary to maintain good air quality in your kitchen.