I'm not sure what you mean as a blower vs a hood. However you're best bet is to look at a broan or a best(broans higher end) at a rm60000 series hood or k260a.

you can also take a look at ventahood as they have excellent interior blowers and a good recommendation.

Will your range include a gas grill or is it located in an island? If not, 1200 CFM sounds excessive to me. Also, are you looking at an all-gas range or dual fuel? If it's the latter, and you won't have a grill, 1200 CFM is almost certainly overkill above a 36" range. Just my two cents.

Is your range 36" as well, because if it is a 36" hood is not sufficient. You'll need 42"....rule of thumb is your hood should be 6" larger than your cook top.

josie,
thats not a rule its a recommendation. I have put many many 36" hoods over 36" cooking products without a single problem. Installation height, duct run and properly sized blowers are all far more important to a hoods ability to vent properly than with it being 6" oversized.

1200 CFM is certainly larger than is nessecary for a 6 burner range but oversizing a blower is never a bad course of action if you want effective ventilation. I have never had a customer call me about a blower being too powerful. I have heard from many customers who said the blower is too small and doesn;t do the job effectively.

Joboxes, I stand corrected.....I would recommend a 42" hood.

The 36" range is 4 burners, with a grill, dual-fuel. A couple of hardware stores said I needed 1200 CFM.

I'm coming across hoods like this one that have the chimney extension above:
http://www.kitchensource.com/range-hoods/su-5436.htm

...versus models like these that are wide all the way up:
http://www.witbeckappliance.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=5718

Is this just an aestetic difference or do these work differently?

Thanks for all the feedback.

Prestige Pyramid Classic, chimney style hood double (tepee style)sided baffle filters, 1200 cfm

I'd disagree with joboxes. While capture area may not be more important than blower capacity and duct size (i.e. total airflow volume), it is certainly at least as important. No amount of hypersized blower capacity will make up for undersized capture area.

If the hood is too small, it will be incapable of capturing any cooking fumes that drift laterally away from the edges of the range. Kaseki has posted some simple formulas for estimating lateral effluent drift as a function of hood height in the absence of any lateral airflow in the kitchen, but suffice it to say that failure to extend the hood beyond the range edges inevitably leads to substandard evacuation.

In contrast, adequate capture area/volume can to some degree make up for inadequate blower capacity. If the hood is large enough, and deep enough, to hold effluent for several seconds, this gives even a smaller blower a chance to "catch up" and remove those fumes. All in all, give me a nicely sized, deep hood with a 600 cfm blower over a hood that is too small and too high and has too shallow a "well" coupled with a 1400 cfm blower.

As to adequate cfm sizing, there are many ways to do that. Simplest rule is the one that Wolf promulgates: 1 cfm for every 100 BTU of TOTAL range capacity (i.e. BTU's of ALL burners added together). Thus, an 80K BTU range would demand at least 800 cfm. Based on recommendations here, that's conservative, as many would use a larger blower than that for such a BTU output but at least it's a good startinng point.

Search on this forum for all kinds of information.

You have not mentioned any concern about noise level. If this is a concern, you should seriously consider getting a system with the blower (fan motor) installed remotely. That is definitely less noisy than a system in which the motor is located inside the hood.

If you search this forum, you will find extensive discussion about the different location options for blowers in these systems.

We just finished a remodel in august. Over our dacor 36" 5 burner gas cooktop, we put a best by broan pk2229, which I think maxes out at 1200cfm. The capture area above the cooktop is 36" but the hood is 29". I have seared some meats and made quite a bit of smoke at times and have yet to have a problem, in fact I have yet to use the highest (of 3) speed.
As for noise, I don't really have anything to compare it with, but its no noisier than I would expect it to be for the power it brings.

dtrumpet: that's interesting, because I think we have the same cooktop (ours is a PGM 365). We must cook differently--I have a 42'' Vent a Hood liner rated at 600 cfm over ours, and I can easily overwhelm ours. If I do one of my really smoky recipes, I get significant effluent flow drifting outside the hood. That's compounded because on the PGM, the largest burner is front left, rather than front center, so much of the smoke drifts to the left of the hood. It's enough that I'll hold a sheet pan vertically to the left of the burner to capture more smoke.

The issue is clearly not related to cfm capacity, as I can see the smoke drifting away from the hood. It's not a case where smoke is entering the hood but fails to be exhausted by the blower, which would indicate inadequate blower capacity. My problem is capture area, which of course would be even worse had I used a 36'' hood.

In contrast, if I do the same recipes at home, I get essentially 100% capture of fumes. That's mainly because the range is in an alcove, enclosed on three sides, so that the hood, already 64'' wide, is essentially expanded further by the ceiling of the alcove which is flush with the bottom of the hood, making it effectively close to a 96'' wide capture area. That, much more than the 1200 cfm blower capacity, is what totally captures smoke no matter how much I make. So again, I believe that capture area is critical to high performance ventilation.

We have some very recent experience and observations I can share. We just put in a 36" Wolf Rangetop and decided to go with a 42" hood per the comments noted above. We also put in a 1200 CFM variable speed external blower. Our solution was an Abbaka liner and a broan external motor.

In the end, it was a decision between modern aire and abbaka. It could have gone either way between those two companies. The prestige liner was in the running due to its large capture area BUT it had a few features we could not live with. One was the heigth of the unit. At the time we were selecting the liner, we were unsure if we were going to exhaust through the wall or the ceiling. It would not work going through the wall in our application. The other reason is look where the controls and lights are. They are at the top of the pyramid. Neither my wife or I wanted to have to put my arm up there every to adjust the lights, to turn on the fan or adjust the fan speed. Also, I would expect things to get greasy up there. I know you can get external controls and mount them on your wall but the grease on the lights etc was sufficient to make us look elsewhere.

In the end, we are very happy with the results. The unit is MUCH quieter (and efficient which one would expect of the larger CFM) than the vent a hood we have in another house. The external motor is located a couple of feet above the liner so we were unable to put in a silencer but what a difference still. On all speeds you can easily talk in the kitchen and not have to talk over the fan noise. You can hear easily etc. On low/medium, its a low hum. Here's some pictures

salmon: nice hood! We looked at many of the same options that you did, and are as happy with our Modern Aire and Fantech as you are with your Abbaka and Broan.

I'm also interested that you had the same experience as I did. Like you, once I installed our hood with remote blower I realized how darn loud the Vent a Hood we have at the lake house was. When I posted that observation earlier I got several responses questioning me, saying their VAH's were "incredibly quiet" etc. I still maintain that you only appreciate how loud the VAH is when you have something to compare it to. Your experience is added proof of the difference.

Spiderrico, the width of the chimney extension is strictly cosmetic - the fumes go through the ductwork that's inside the extension (& the walls/ceiling).