Welcome to kitchen exhaust fans. Today we’ll discuss some pointers and tips on finding the best kitchen exhaust fans for your needs as well as where you might look to buy kitchen exhaust fans at the best price. Buying and installing kitchen exhaust fans are usually done during home new construction or when you are looking to remodel your kitchen. It is not usually performed as a separate and standalone project though there isn’t really any reason why you couldn’t. If you have moderate carpentry and construction skills, installing a new kitchen exhaust fan shouldn’t be all that tough for you.
So let’s first give an overview of what you need to be aware of when looking at kitchen exhaust systems. The first thing you’ll need to ascertain is whether you’re going for a whole kitchen hood exhaust fan or just replacing the one that is in your kitchen hood already. It is usually recommended to replace the whole kitchen hood and exhaust fan at the same time. If your house is several years old and you have the standard kitchen exhaust fan, it might be doing a decent job of pulling smokey and stinky air from your stove top but it is likely not venting it as affectively as it should be. Very often it is only venting out into the ductwork or worse yet into the attic.
If you have a stove top fire and use one of these older kitchen exhaust fans to clear the smoke as you try to put out the fire there is a small chance that the fire could end up in the attic. So to be safe, put out the fire first and then turn on the kitchen exhaust fan.
Thankfully nowadays there are commercial kitchen exhaust fans that are making inroads into the consumer home kitchen market. You’ve likely seen these types with the big hoods sitting proudly over standalone stove tops on their own dedicated island. You’ll pay more for a commercial type kitchen exhaust fan but it’ll work better at ridding your home and kitchen of smoke and smells. Though sometimes to be installed properly, you might need additional ductwork to vent these kitchen exhaust fans outside.
You’ll also need to size your kitchen exhaust fans for the appropriate range or stove that you have in your kitchen. Most ranges are rated in BTUs which are British Thermal Units of energy they use. You don’t need to know exactly how that is calculated, but you should know that the exhaust fan rating of your kitchen fan is in CFM or cubic feet per minute and is how much air that particular fan (not just kitchen exhaust fans) can circulate per minute.
A good rule of thumb is to divide your range’s BTU by 100 to come up with the CFM of the kitchen exhaust fan that you need. So for example if your stove uses 50,000 BTU then dividing that by 100 gives you 500 and so you’ll need a 500 CFM kitchen exhaust fan to have the appropriate extraction capabilities to work with your range.
Some of the better kitchen exhaust fans manufacturers include Broan, Kobe Range Hoods and RangeCraft. If you go to one of the many home improvement stores you’ll be able to find out more about each one, or you can click on the links I provided to those companies. You’ll notice that you can really customize kitchen exhaust fans to your own particular needs. So get going and soon you’ll find you’re back home on the range 