Recirculating kitchen fans that actually work?

[CinderRosie]

I bought a house end of last year and have been wondering why the extractor fan in the kitchen was so rubbish, I assumed it was just because it is as old as the house (25 years ish). It has just become apparent it is one of those recirculating fans, as the hob is on the party wall with the house next door. My quick research suggests this type of fan is utterly useless which doesn't fill me with hope. We can't look at changing the type of fan until we rip out the whole kitchen which is a longer-term project, also our boiler is on the external wall where we would ideally duct to, so I'm not sure how we could even achieve a proper extractor fan. Does anyone have a recirculating kitchen fan that actually does anything?

Anyone?

I have the same problem, so giving this thread a bump!

Don't bother! We spent an eyewatering amount on a Bosch one and it's awful! Enormous waste of money, all it does is move the air around. My advice is to fit a proper ducted one, or just give it a miss altogether and open a window.

This is probably true, but still is not the advice I wanted to hear!

Mine is absolutely crap, only really useful for minimising steam from cooking, not smells etc.

The one we inherited when we moved house was as useful as a chocolate teapot.

But then, ours wasn't even recirculating. It was made with two knock-out covers so the installer could select one to remove depending on where the extracted air should go - recirculating or extracting outside. They had removed neither.

The lesson: check whether your recirculating fan actually recirculates. If the installer was as useless as ours, it may just use electricity to make a lot of noise!

This is not what I wanted to hear 🥲 now thinking it’d be best to get an air fryer which create minimal cooking smells and bung everything in that 😂