Any of you who have spent any time at all cooking and frying in the kitchen know the vital importance of kitchen stove hoods. They prevent grease, oil, and smoke stains on the kitchen walls, and suck out steam and other odors from your working space, making it much easier to work in the kitchen.
Kitchen stove hoods can be set in extraction or recirculation mode, and here we talk about kitchen extractor hoods. These open up outside your kitchen, in effect sucking all the grease and steam and removing it outside.
Now, there are three main types of extractor hoods: external range, internal range and combination hoods.
External range hoods suck the smells out of your kitchen and expel them outside via a duct. These are usually very cheap and efficient. If your stove is located near a window or a wall opening to the outside, installation is very easy and inexpensive. The problems in this kitchen hood come in if you live in a small apartment building or if you install the hood away from an external outlet. Then, the cost of installation and materials rises exponentially, and it might be better for you to install the second type of kitchen stove hood.
This is the internal hood and instead of ventilating the smelly air outside, it uses charcoal vents to clean the air and sends it back into the kitchen. These are by far the cheapest stove hoods; their initial cost is very low, and installation costs run low as well. Installation takes only a few hours, even for an amateur do-it-yourselfer. However, these internal hoods tend to get clogged often, and so you will have to change the filters frequently and this adds up to the maintenance cost. As you keep using these hoods, they may not extract all the odors and smoke away from your kitchen and leave some smells behind.
Combination hoods, as an alternative, combine the advantages and disadvantages of both these systems. They usually allow you more versatility and let you switch in between systems as you may need at the time. However, this adaptability comes at the additional capital cost as well as the maintenance cost of replacing the filters often.
Besides practicality, physical limits, budget and maintenance, you also need to consider the aesthetics of your kitchen before buying kitchen vent hoods. The demand for a much more pleasing look has resulted in stove hoods of many colors – from beige to black and white and stainless steel. These colors, if used appropriately, add to the feel of your kitchen.
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