We are all aware that the favorite place for family and friends to gather in your home will be your kitchen. This means that you will want to have the best way to eliminate cooking odors and you will want it to be attractive. The cooker hoods are actually multi purpose additions to your kitchen. They will remove all the bad odors, fumes, and steam that is caused when you are cooking and send it all outside the home. The cooker hoods can be found in an array of styles including those with lighting, fans and filters.
The proper size for your kitchen is a cooker hood that is at least as wide as the width of your stove top. The best cooker hoods will efficiently remove all the odors and smoke from your kitchen area.
Cooker hoods with really quality exhaust systems will suck up the fumes and take them quickly away through your duct work. Some cooker hoods do not use duct work but will hae a filter that takes the fumes and pushes the cleaned air back into the kitchen instead of through duct work.
Some homeowners do not want to invest in duct work or it will not work for their home so they can use the cooker hoods that circulate the air. The odors and fumes are drawn into the hood and the filter cleans the air and then sends it back to ventilate the area.
Cooker hoods using these filters will need to be cleaned and replaced on a maintenance schedule. Experts who do home renovations will usually not recommend the use of these cooker hoods unless there is no other choice because they feel that no filter can ever do the job that removing the fumes through duct work can provide. The systems that do use the duct work also have filters. The reason for these filters is to collect any grease from the air the cooking produces and keep it from collecting inside the vents. Collected grease could cause a fire over time.
The design of the exhaust fans makes a difference in how well it operates. There is the axial fan which is much like a ceiling fan in shape and is very economical. The other type is called the centrifugal and is shaped like a barrel. This is more expensive but it is operates much faster and is a lot quieter than the other types. The high end cooker hoods will come with a built in timer that will turn the fan off at the proper time automatically.
Usually the cooker hoods will come with some kind of lighting whether it is an incandescent or halogen type bulb. The lights usually have a high intensity setting and a dim setting so it can be used at night for a subtle light in the room.
A lot of kitchens today have counter space problems so some homeowners choose to use the over head microwave to free up counter space. This is a microwave that is installed over the stove top area and it has a small vent in the bottom to help with odors. Unfortunately, even though this will free a little counter space it will never sufficiently remove the fumes and odors from the kitchen. Only a quality cooker hood can handle the fumes, steam, odors and grease produced from everyday cooking.
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Annie is an expert furniture and interior design writer.