I use a 30" wide (by 24" deep) hood over my 30" Capital range with no problems. If I had a grill on my range or did a lot of hot wok cooking, I'd have considered something wider/deeper but this has been fine for me.

Thanks---guess I should clarify the question. The past threads thoroughly convinced me that it's better to have a hood that's 6 inches wider....but how much better? I hadn't even considered not doing that until I started having trouble finding 42" hoods, and then in turn started finding threads where people successfully used smaller hoods, or where someone recommended deeper rather than wider, etc.

What are the "costs" of having a hood the same size as the range? We're trying to juggle the tradeoffs for storage and cabinets with potential tradeoffs for ventilation, but I'm having a hard time since I'm starting at zero, and can't quite envision how much of a difference different widths or depths might make for venting.

Hope that makes it clearer--thanks!

If you have cabinets flanking the hood it's less important - deeper is more important than wider.

As always, the issues are capture and containment. In the category of capture, one easy to remember _approximation_ is the six-inch wider rule. The real rule is that rising above each pan's cooking surface is effluent that expands as it rises. (Expansion is around 20 to 25 degrees half-angle.) If you want to capture all of it, you have to have a hood that is big enough to overlap these conical zones of expansion. Deeper is one helpful approach, and cabinet flanking is another, as weissman notes above.

Obviously, the location of the centers of these zones is the centers of the burners, and the size of the zones starts with the sizes of the pans used. There is also the question of which burners would be used for "smelly or greasy cooking, and which for more benign cooking. And there is the question of the occupant's tolerance for smells and grease condensation.

All of these aspects are factors, along with cost and aesthetics, in deciding whether to go for maximum capture, or reasonably sufficient capture, or inadequate or no capture (as I've seen in some magazine photos of poser kitchens with no hood at all).

kas

With surrounding cabinets and, I'd assume, a back wall a 36" hood over a 36" range should work fine. Be prepared to have a little more grease collect on the edge of the cabinets and back wall. Routine cleaning should prevent any nasty build up. How high you mount your hood also plays in to the size of hood. Typically hoods are mounted around 30" from the top of the range but there's a pretty wide variation. I've seen people go as low as 25" or so. That's too low IMHO especially with higher end (i.e. higher BTU/h) cooking surfaces. At about 28-32" mounting height, standard 36" with cabinets and back wall should be fine. If you go as high as 36" or more, then I'd look at a hood that extends out farther from the back wall. This will allow it to capture the fumes coming away from the wall better.

I have an island configuration which is the worst since there's nothing to contain the fumes and sight lines are a concern. When we had our hood installed, the installer showed us what the recommended 30" height would look like. At that height, the bottom edge of the hood would be right at the bridge of my nose which would block the sight line across the island and I think cause me to bump my head if I had to lean across to reach the back burners. I ended up having him move it up to between 34-36" position which worked a lot better. Fortunately, we did have the foresight to oversize our hood. In the end, you will have to make your own trade offs between performance, aesthetics, and cost.