Dull thread alert - cooker hoods

[Nepotism]

I generally open a window but my builder seems to think I'm daft. I'm waiting for a lovely wooden shaker kitchen to arrive and need to add a unit for a hood. This is probably a really silly question, but what sort of hood do I need over a range cooker? Is it integrated or visor? Also, it's on an internal wall so that restricts my options. Can anyone help?

if you want an attractive kitchen ornament, get a recirculating hood. It serves no other purpose.

If you want the steam and cooking smells to be removed, get an extractor hood. It should be no less wide than your cooker.

If you decide to put the cooker against an internal wall, you need a duct from above the hood to the nearest external wall. The hood can be run on top of your wall cabinets, or even inside them. Rigid duct collects less grime than flexible hose. If you have no wall cabinets you can run rectangular duct in the angle between ceiling and wall. Rigid PVC duct can be painted to blend in.

Get a hood with several speeds. Then you can put it on the low speed at times without moaning about the noise, and leave it running until you have put the pans in the dishwasher and wiped the splashes off the hob. You can turn it up to high speed when frying onions.

Integrated hoods that fold away tend not to get used.

It should be fitted at a height where nobody will bang their head on it when leaning over the hob. This will typically be about 1metre above the worktop. The manufacturers instructions will give the minimum height, usually less than that.

The duct can be run on top of your wall cabinets

This is great info Pigletjohn - do you have any links please or do you just look in the description for 'extractor' when buying?

Also, will the extractor hood be powerful enough to remove steam/smells from something sitting beside the hob (like a George foreman or slow cooker) or is it best to have one above that area too? (It's an open plan kitchen/dining/living room and I don't want it all smelling! Paranoid!)

May I hijack? Ours needs to be on an internal wall. To get outside it'd have to travel through the room next door too. There is however a disused chimney in the corner. Could it go into there? It's not been capped

And who do you get to fit one? An electrician or builder or kitchen fitter or all three?

small builder can do it, or a kitchen fitter or electrician.

I am sure there are some top-quality kitchen fitters somewhere.

Many of the others are notorious for slipshod and non-compliant plumbing and electrical work.

You need a fused switch on the wall above the worktop, in the same row as all your many sockets and appliance switches, with a high flex outlet in the wall close to the position of the hood, but accessible. An electrician can do that. Hoods can also be fed from the lighting circuit. Some electricians may not like drilling big holes in walls, so ask if they will do the duct. You will have to redecorate and possibly replaster afterwards, electricians are generally no good at plastering and decoration.

It is so difficult to vent into a disused chimney (you need a steam-proof and grease-proof liner or duct, and it will probably drip) that you may as well rule it out.

When looking at catalogues, look at airflow in cubic metres/hour and at noise in db. I have forgotten the airflow figures which building regulations require of an extracting cooker hood. It is less than is required of a kitchen extractor fan, because it removed the steam and fumes at source.

see Q3

If you HAD to get a recirculating hood would you bother? We're having a whole house MVHR system fitted so will have some ventilation but the guys who fit it say we should get rid of the grease with a recirculating fan. As our hob will be in the island all the hoods are a. Expensive and b. Hang in the room and get in the way. We're thinking we might not bother with it at all...

My kitchen has more than enough useless ornaments.

I would still get an extractor in the kitchen, the suction will prevent cooking smells drifting through the house.

If no hood, I would have an extractor fan in the wall, or even the window. An island hood needs to be ducted, sometimes the duct can be run between the ceiling joists. Hoods should anyway be mounted at a height where you can't bang your head on them, so are not in the way.

if your ventilation system has positive pressure, an open vent in the kitchen will push the air out.

We've got an extractor in our recently fitted kitchen and I though it was just going to be pretty but pointless kitchen furniture but I love it! Not because of the extractor, I've got windows for that...It's the lights! I don't know how I ever managed to cook without them.

we didn't bother. we never use it when we have it so we aren't putting one in now.

Goodness me, I start a dull thread and get more traffic than the Friday night sex ones!

Thanks PigletJohn, life would be so much easier if you were my builder. The electrician has put all the wiring in but I suppose I don't have to have a hood if I don't want to. I have no wall cupboards so would have to go for the ducting option.

Stupid thing I never thought of - check how easy the filters are to change. We had to have a recirculating one as there is no external wall near our cooker (kitchen leads into conservatory dining room, can't exactly duct through glass!). I dutifully ordered replacement filters from Caple (after their website told me they no longer made them for the model of hood they still sell!) and could not get the blasted things on easily - and was suspicious that the kitchen fitter couldn't either as they were just propped in there, doing half a job. (Circular carbon filters in plastic frames that fit vertically either side of the internal part of hood). Frustrated, I emailed Caple who sent an engineer round. His verdict? He spent 20 mins doing exactly what I was trying, shutting his eyes and doing it by feel, ended up skinning his knuckles on both hands. Apparently they are always like that. Looking forward to doing that every year (not!). Hardly ever use it now.

with no cabinets, look at (fake) chimney hoods, which will conceal the duct as it rises to the ceiling, then look at rectangular rigid duct in the angle. Adjust your kitchen lighting so the duct is not floodlit, and paint it to blend in.

I have no particular view on whether a £900 hood is ten times as good as a £90 one. I am quite happy with Elica.

I have never used either of the 2 (quite expensive) cooker hoods that I've installed :-/

PigletJohn, can you recommend an extractor that's built into the ceiling? Our ceilings are fairly low, and the extractor needs to go over an island. The elica and falmec ones are approx £2k and I was wondering if there was anything cheaper.

don't know, sorry.

some on here

You might look at an inline ducted fan, with (say) four grilles set into the ceiling, or into a false ceiling. An HVAC engineer could put one together.

I ran my extractor duct under the floor of the rooms upstairs (so in the ceiling void) - has to run along the joists though - too big to feed through them and you have to get a fan with decent power if you need to extract a longish distance...do worry about grease accumulation in it though and it is a flexible one. It is DCs bedroom - carpeted but still a bit noisy for midnight snacks!
(Rented house I lived in we never really used hood but one day someone left a pan on and it burnt really badly...black smoke billowing bad -turned the fan on and the girl whose bedroom was directly above came racing downstairs thinking her floor was on fire - it vented straight into the ceiling void - no duct, no exit - purely decorative - but the electrics were connected !)