A custom range hood for your brand-new kitchen is the focal point of your kitchen, so you want to make sure you love what you’re looking at and will cherish it for years to come.
Cooking produces heat, grease, smoke, and odors that can linger in your home. A good ventilation system pulls all that out, keeping your kitchen fresh and your air clean, while protecting cabinetry, walls, and ceilings from grease buildup.
Installation and Design Styles for a Custom Range Hood
Start by choosing the design style for a custom range hood for your brand new kitchen. You want to determine if you want a traditional hood, a transitional hood, or a contemporary modern hood.
Custom Range Hood For Your New Kitchen
Contemporary and Cabinet Matched
A matte lacquer cabinet designed to match the cabinets, with a polished stainless-steel chrome trim at the bottom, allows cabinetry suppliers to insert the actual guts of the hood into it. This would probably be more contemporary or transitional as far as design style.
Plastered Hoods
A plastered hood framed out by a contractor with plaster over the face provides a minimal look with simple design details. This style is framed out wood, drywalled, and plastered, with a hidden hood insert underneath. In kitchens with tall ceilings, this gives a grand feeling in a brand new kitchen.
Hidden and Style Matched Hoods
Putting in a hood liner hides the unit until you get underneath, where you have all your lighting and hood controls.
When dealing with a shallow upper cabinet, inserting a standard hood insert will not capture grease because it is way too shallow, causing steam to come out in front of the ventilation hood and get all over the cabinet front. Instead, special pull-out liners expand the canopy to make it deeper and much more functional to capture grease, and then you just push it shut and it disappears.
Metal and Traditional Custom Range Hoods
Finished metal custom range hoods offer unique curvatures with antique brass banding and rivets. These feature a duct cover, which is the section that covers the circular ducting. Duct covers determine the mounting height and scale of your custom range hood.
Other traditional styles include trapezoidal shapes with polished lip treatments along the bottom, antique brass finishes with seamless tops, or bulbous curves made with smoked copper bands and black stainless finishes. Straight rectangular box shapes in brushed brass offer a contemporary design style that is more minimal.
Ceiling and Downdraft Options
Flush ceiling-mounted hoods are designed to go a lot higher than traditional hoods so you can get the view of whatever you want out of your way. These include a remote that you can magnetically stick on any metal section of your kitchen to control the lights, hood, and timer.
Downdraft hoods pull smoke down through subfloors or cabinets using linear pieces that raise up and down or non-raising circular systems. However, downdrafts are not as efficient at capturing grease and filtering it out as a traditional overhead vent will be.
Over the Range Microwave Hoods
An over-the-range microwave is a microwave and hood all-in-one. In small spaces and limited spaces, it is practical to have it all in one, but it doesn’t really capture grease as well as a traditional hood and can be super loud.
Understanding Airflow, CFM, and Ceiling Heights
Ceiling height determines the scale and size of a custom range hood for your brand new kitchen.
Ceiling Height – 36 inches (Countertop) – 36 inches (Headroom) = Optimal Hood Height
Take your ceiling height, factor 36 inches for standard countertop height, and subtract 36 inches off the cooktop surface for headroom. These 72 inches subtracted from your ceiling height gives the optimal height for a custom range hood. Mounting heights between 31.5 to 36 inches off the countertop surface offer acceptable headroom for most people.
Ventilation power is rated in cubic feet per minute, or CFM, where the higher the CFM, the faster the air can move. Noise levels are measured in sones rather than decibels, where higher sones sound loud, like a jet engine.
Blower Options for Your Hood
Internal Blowers
Mounted directly inside the custom range hood, these are the most common style of blowers.
Inline Blowers
Installed along ducting in attic spaces, soffits, or cabinetry, inline blowers balance airflow efficiency and noise reduction.
External Blowers
Mounted on the exterior roof or sidewall of your home, an external or remote blower eliminates motor noise in your kitchen. Realistically, the bulk of the noise will come from the air rapidly moving through your filters.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a duct cover on a custom range hood?
This is the section that does what it says. It literally covers the circular ducting. Those are important because this is what’s going to determine the mounting height of your hood. This is what is going to determine the scale of your hood.
How do baffle filters capture grease?
The air to be sucked up has to come up, come down and back around the baffle to go out. When that air goes up and turns like that, the heavy grease cannot make that turn. It’s too heavy. So, it stays in the baffle filter, and your grease will collect right here in the baffle filter.
Why is duct diameter important for a range hood?
You cannot reduce from 10 in or 12 in down to 8 in. It’s against code and even beyond that, it just won’t work. The way that air flows is that a reduction in the diameter of the duct will act as basically a wall and your hood will not duct the air outside.
How do pull-out hidden hood liners work?
This pulls out when you want to use it. It expands the canopy, making it deeper and much more functional. It’ll capture all the grease and mess that you’re going to make. And then when you’re done, you just push it shut, and it disappears.
Conclusion
Getting the style right, matching ceiling height, checking duct diameter, selecting your filter type, and picking the right blower will complete the custom range hood setup for your brand new kitchen.