How To Choose The Right Hood For You
Why the hood
An effective hood is essential to clean the air in your kitchen. Its main function is to improve the quality of air, by eliminating fumes, bad cooking odours and vapours that are unpleasant for people and can damage furnishings and decor.
When choosing your hood, you need to make sure that it provides:
- Suction performance suitable for your needs and environment in order to obtain adequate air flow with minimum power consumption
- Effective light source to facilitate food preparation
- Design that suits your taste and needs
- Good usability and low noise level
How to choose your hood
The hood should have the right suction power for the size of your kitchen and cooking habits. A simple calculation allows you to understand the most suitable power for your kitchen
- Multiply the height, width and length of your room to find your room volume
- Multiply the volume of the room in cubic metres by 10 to obtain the ideal power in m3/h
Duct out or Re-circulating
Duct out
The duct out hood exhausts air to the outside. This is the most frequently used type of hood becuase it ensures high performance (100% of the captured fumes etc are removed from the room), higher air flow and low noise level.
Re-circulating
The recirculating hood removes bad odours by means of a dedicated active filter and recirculates the air into the kitchen. Whilst no filer removes 100% of the odours, Elica high performance filters are industry leaders and can remove over 80%. A re-circulating hood is suitable for rooms where ducting cannot be installed.
How to install it
A cooker hood should only be installed by a suitably qualified technician
When installing your hood, bear in mind these simple basic rules:
- Follow all the steps shown in the instruction manual of the product
- If the hood is installed in duct out mode make sure that the correct ducting size is used and minimise the length and bends to ensure the best performance
- Comply with the minimum distance from the cooktop specified in the manual in order to avoid damaging working parts in the hood
Taking care of your hood
To ensure the long life and correct operation of your hood in duct out or re-circulating versions, the first step is to keep the filtering system in good condition
- The grease filter protects you hood by trapping particle of grease. The aluminium or stainless steel grease filter requires periodic cleaning by hand with neutral detergent or in the dishwasher at a low temperature following the instructions in the manual
- The charcoal/ceramic/revolution/long life filter installed in re-circulating hoods neutralises odour particles. All of these filters have different methods to keeping them clean so please refer to the instructions in the manual.