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Whether you’re a cooking aficionado or still learning the ropes, a range hood remains one of the most vital components in almost every kitchen. While you cook, the range hood is hard at work, removing smoke, odors, and various other harmful particles from the surrounding air.
These hoods use powerful fans to pull the air you breathe around your cooktop through filters or straight through a duct that expels it outside. Tiny food particles, moisture, heat, and smoke will all be removed or filtered out – preventing air and food contamination.
However, as useful as range hoods are, you still need to pick the right one for the specifics of your kitchen – so here are some factors to keep in mind while you’re browsing!
Visual Appeal
Remember – every kitchen has a layout that’s unique to its home chef’s individual habits. And the same is true for people’s aesthetic tastes. Choose your range hood so that it matches the design of your kitchen. After all, it’s bound to be an attention-drawing, easily noticeable design element.
Make sure that the material or finish color of the hood properly matches the rest of the elements in your kitchen – and the same goes for its size and shape, which should be in balance with the surrounding interior. Luckily, CopperSmith Black Range Hoods can be customized to the tiniest detail; you can choose everything from the body to the smaller stuff like plot rails, straps, and rivets.
Fan Speed
Depending on the hood you choose, you’ll have a different number of speed options at your disposal. And while plenty of range hoods have six speeds, most home cooks find that three options are more than sufficient.
Still, low, medium, and high-speed settings are a must-have – sometimes, you need to operate at a quieter setting or perform at a higher CFM (cubic foot per minute). This unit is the basic indicator of your fan speed.
To put things in perspective, 600 CFM is just fine for the majority of home kitchens. However, people who cook more frequently or make greasier meals will probably want something stronger, like 1200 CFM. It all depends on your cooking habits and preferences.
Type Of Range Hood
Different types of range hoods provide varying coverage areas – some are perfect for apartments and small kitchens, while others accommodate larger households and spacier kitchen areas. It all depends on your kitchen – and perhaps more importantly, your budget.
Here are some of the different range hood types you can choose from:
Wall-Mounted
These are the most iconic range hoods – the ones that are most similar to the shape of a fireplace chimney. Today, they’re mostly made out of metal, with a wide base that’s (at least) large enough to cover the cooktop’s width. Their width tapers off toward the top to facilitate airflow, resulting in a narrow column.
This classic look is a fine choice for many kitchens, particularly those with professional cooking ranges or an open floor plan. In most cases, a large stove top is guaranteed to be a focal point of the kitchen – the large wall-mounted vent hood provides decent visual balance.
Island Range Hoods
If your cooktop is on a kitchen island smack dab in the middle of your kitchen, the range hood will have to contend with trickier airflow demands. In that case, the range hood will have to cover a bigger surface area; there are no walls to channel the moisture and heat upwards.
With that in mind, such range hoods descend from the ceiling and extract the fumes, smoke, and contaminated air directly out of your home. Their shape isn’t that different from a wall-mounted hood – but it’s designed to be viewed from all angles.
Under-Cabinet Hoods
This is a more efficient, economical, and overall smaller choice – perfect for the kitchen of a busy modern family. The under-cabinet models are fitted, as the name suggests, under the cabinets – usually, their hood is the same size as your cooktop, which is important for catching all the heat and smoke.
If you’re in an apartment where venting the contaminated air outside would be tricky or in a smaller kitchen, the under-cabinet range hoods are an ideal option. However, they won’t send any air outside – they simply pull it through air filters, which we’ll talk about in more detail below.
Hood Inserts
Plenty of contractors and interior designers say that insert hoods are their favorites – partly because of the customizable kitchen layouts they allow and partly because they don’t steal the show from the rest of the room in terms of visual flair.
The hood inserts stay neatly tucked away in a custom-built hood that blends in perfectly with the rest of the kitchen – either made of metal, brick, or wood. As units, they’re usually less expensive than most other choices here. However, you’ve also got the cost of the custom hood.
Filter Types
If your range hood filters air rather than venting it outside, it probably uses one of the following common filter types:
- Aluminum mesh – a combination of fibers and fine aluminum grids that successfully trap particles contaminating the air. You can easily wash aluminum mesh filters if need be, sometimes even in the dishwasher (depending on the specific unit). They’re quite reusable.
- Residue cups – they collect grease and oil from your general cooking area, and they’re supposed to be hand-washed; hot water and soap will do just fine.
- Charcoal filters – these filters trap and remove any carbon-based imperfections from the air, which is useful in a kitchen. However, they need to be replaced bi-annually.