Guest Blogger #448, Entry #1068, April 4, 2012
So, the aesthetic for your kitchen redesign is decided upon – you have chosen the kitchen carpentry, spent considerable time selecting the perfect range cooker to be the centerpiece, and the worktops and flooring complement your idea perfectly and bring the room together. One thing you may have overlooked or maybe not considered enough is the cooker hood…
Cooker hoods are sometimes the unsung heroes of the kitchen – designed to be mounted on the wall or ceiling above your range cooker or built in hob, they extract the grease and odors from the air and kitchen environment while cooking. This is then either extracted through an external wall to the outside environment, or alternatively filtered through carbon filters to remove the contaminants then re-circulated back into the room.
Generally consisting of a main canopy – or hood – section and a vertical chimney section, cooker hoods house a powerful motor that draws the air in. There are various styles of cooker hood available, as outlined below, and the right choice of hood can really enhance your kitchen in addition to performing a useful function!
Chimney & slab hoods
Cooker hoods vary enormously in style. Chimney style hoods are prolific, with their characteristic pyramid shaped canopy section – these hoods work equally well in a contemporary or traditional environment, and will complement a trusty old AGA or a sleek, modern Viking. Slab style cooker hoods have rectangular, horizontal canopies and tend to sit better in a more contemporary setting due to their clean utilitarian lines. Glass canopy hoods are also available and offer a similar modern aesthetic to slab hoods – some manufacturers, notably Falmec, produce hoods with tempered glass canopies that are patterned to add detail and focus to your kitchen.
Integrated hoods
Integrated cooker hoods are ideal if you are building your range cooker into a chimney breast, or beneath a row of cabinets. They are designed to fit into enclosed spaces and are finished on the underside only – the only visible surface. Integrated hoods can be used to extract or re-circulate as per any other style of hood, and due to their compact size often feature more powerful motors to enable them to offer the same capacity as their larger counterparts.
Island hoods
Island hoods are designed for kitchens in which the range cooker or hob is positioned away from the wall – they’re finished on all four sides as all are visible. Island hoods in general tend to be more contemporary in aesthetic, and although usually stainless are sometimes available in alternative finishes – the excellent Mirabilia collection from Falmec is a good example of this.
Cooker hood features
As mentioned earlier all hoods, whether chimney style, integrated or island utilize a motor to extract the odors from the room and either force them through ducting to the outside or process them through carbon filters and then push the clean air back into the room. This of course means that the power of the motor is key to the usefulness of the hood – hoods are measured by the volume of air, often in cubic meters, that the hood can process in an hour. This is equates to larger kitchens requiring a more powerful hood. A useful formula to gauge the power of hood required is to take the volume of the kitchen and multiply it by ten – this figure will then give you the number of cubic meters per hour your hood will need to process. One thing to bear in mind is that with power comes noise, and you’ll often find the noise level higher on more powerful hoods. It’s a trade off between efficiency and volume, so it is worth not buying a more powerful hood than you need – the extra power would be wasted and you’ll have to put up with a louder motor!
Cooker hoods are controlled by either push buttons, or, as you increase in budget, sliders or touch screens found on either the front edge or underneath the canopy. In addition to the primary function of extraction, hoods also offer illumination to the hob area below normally in the form of halogen lights.
Another useful feature to look out for on a hood is a delayed stop – this is ideal for when you wish to join guests at the dinner table after cooking. When set, the feature will turn the hood off after a set period of time, usually fifteen minutes.
So, to conclude …
There is such a large choice of cooker hoods available that it is worth spending some time considering what would enhance your kitchen design – so many people settle for an almost default choice of stainless steel chimney hood when there is so much else on offer. It is relatively easy to reach a perfect balance of form and function for your particular kitchen. It just takes a small amount of time and research!
Rangecookers.co.uk are the UK’s range cooker specialists offering a comprehensive collection of cookers and cooker hoods from premium manufacturers such as Rangemaster and Stoves, among others.
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