Cooker hoods are a vital piece of equipment to have in your kitchen. They remove all the steam, smoke, odours and grease created when cooking. Cooker hoods prevent damp forming in your kitchen and stop grease particles staining your cupboards.
Cooker Hoods
Cooker hoods can extract cooking fumes from your kitchen in two ways:
- Via Ducted/Vented/Perimeter Extraction – this is the most effective method of extraction as odours are pumped out of the kitchen. However this requires that the hood is connected to an outside wall via ducting.
- Via Re-circulation - if an outside wall cannot be reached an extractor can be set up for re-circulating. Air is drawn into the appliance through the filters to neutralise odours and remove grease particles. The cleaned air is then returned into the kitchen. A carbon filter or re-circulating kit is necessary for re-circulation.
They are available in a range of styles, including chimney cooker hoods , canopy cooker hoods , designed to be built-in to the underneath of a cabinet directly above the hob. There are visor/conventional cooker hoods, which stick directly out of a wall. Fully Integrated cooker hoods , are designed to be built into the cabinet above your hob and hidden behind a panel or door which must be open in order to use. And finally island cooker hoods such as the Baumatic PV372SS are designed to be suspended from your ceiling over a hob in the middle of your kitchen.
All cooker hoods have an extraction rate and the rate of extraction you require depends of the size of the room the cooker hood is in. The bigger the room the more air will be in the room, thus you need a higher rate of extraction. Your hood should be able to renew 10 to 12 times the volume of air in your kitchen (eg: for a kitchen of 15m2 and 2.5m ceiling height, the recommended extraction rate is +/- 450m3/h).
When deciding what size cooker hood to buy there are two important things to bear in mind. Firstly you need to make sure that the unit you choose fits your cooker top/hob. For example if you have a range cooker that is 90cm wide you will get the best results from a hood that is 90cm wide. Secondly, all cooker hoods should be placed so that the bottom of the unit is approximately 75cm above the hob.
Cooker hoods are designed to remove all the steam, smoke, odours and grease created when cooking, while preventing damp forming in your kitchen and stopping grease particles staining your cupboards.