Why Do You Need Cooker Hoods?

The whole reason behind having a cooker hood is because when you have standard household fundamentals such as double glazing windows and wall insulation it denies the room access to new air coming through. Thus air extraction or recirculation is needed to remove odour and moisture from your kitchen and replenish the air.

The Choice, Extraction Or Recirculation

When deciding what cooker hood would be the best for your household you will need to deter from the two choices as mentioned above.

Extraction is always the favoured choice when it comes to cooker hoods however there are disadvantages to the extraction method. For example when you're installing your new cooker hood for extraction you will obviously need to make sure that your kitchen can support it. In other words if your kitchen is lacking space or capacity to install ducting then extraction would not be the choice for your kitchen setup. Not to mention the initial costs for the ducting and installation. However the benefits from extraction are more obvious as it vents all the unnecessary odours and steam to the outside through ducting. Ducting kits are not normally supplied with cooker hoods. In order to obtain ducting kits its best to go to the manufacturer of your cooker hood. Another thing to consider when buying a ducting kit is to try and see what size ducting your cooker hood will support because the wider it is, the better airflow it will give. Not only the width matters when coming to airflow but firm ducting also offer improved airflow. There is also no need to replace charcoal filters regularly as they do their job for a long term. Also having no charcoal filter in front of the motor means the airflow rate is much higher.

Recirculation on the other hand is much different as there is no ducting to the outside. In other words recirculation is more of an internal process using a filter containing active charcoal, which is used to remove odour and moistures from the air, then releasing the cleaned air back into the kitchen. The big benefit from recirculation is that it can be installed anywhere making it perfect if your lacking space or can't access the outside through ducting and it's also cheaper than extraction due to there's no ducting needed. Recalculating the air however has its disadvantage of not being able to completely clean the air, and so some of the odour and moisture will be put back into the kitchen. What can also make recirculation a pain is the cost of replacing the charcoal filters, as eventually the charcoal will eventually stop being able to clean the air. Using recirculation will also cap the airflow rate due to the charcoal filter is placed right next to the motor.

Extraction Rate Needed

If you would like to know the extraction rate needed for your kitchen you can work it out depending on the size of your kitchen. All you have to do is multiply the kitchens length, width and height to get the cubic measurement. Once that is done you then work out the extraction rate by saying if you wanted [x] amount of changes of air per hour, all you need to do is multiply [x] by [your room measurement in cubic metres] which will give you your extraction rate needed for your kitchen.