I would consider my Prizer hood old school, no frills, and the quality is top notch.
Modern-Aire is another brand to look at that makes them more like they used to...

Here is a link that might be useful: Well made hood

Noise has a lot to do with your install and less to do with the specific hood. Most of it is air noise, not motor noise. And the fact is, there's a certain amount of air you've gotta move and a limited area that can capture it. Most hoods on high will be pretty darn noisy. I've never gotten the obsession about hood noise - how much time do you even leave your hood on high anyway?

That said, you can minimize noise by minimizing the amount of air you're removing! I see way too many oversized hoods. 400-600 CFM will be fine for most people. Sometimes more is good, sometimes less.

As for brands, I wouldn't worry too much. It's tough to screw up a hood. Stay away from the no-name Chinese ones, but other than that it's mainly a decision of style and price. ModernAire and Prizer are on a whole different level but are out of many people's budgets.

In terms of features most hoods are "no frills". Most of them will have a few speeds, a few light levels and that's it. The most you'll get is a timer, or heat lamps but those aren't really common features anyway. I wouldn't worry about the auto heat sensing, my hood (Broan) has it and I've never actually had it activate. That's probably because before I do any cooking that would activate it, I've already turned on the hood first. It isn't that sensitive. It's never turned on when I don't want it to. I think of it as more of a safety feature (albeit not a very necessary one), and even their bottom of the line hoods have it.

We're taking a very serious look at Vent-a-hood. Somewhat pricey - but uses whole different technology than others. Very simple - but highly recommended.

Here is a link that might be useful: Range hood discusssion thread

"... whole different technology" is a bit of a descriptive stretch. VAH use a centrifugal blower to sling grease out of the airstream onto the nearby fan housing walls, while conventional (quasi-commercial style) hoods use baffles to centrifugally sling grease from the airstream onto the baffles where is may drain to a central location or just remain on the baffles until they are washed (depends on baffle angle).

VAH is generally highly recommended by sales people. It is not a configuration recommended by commercial kitchen ventilation suppliers, or the other pseudo-pro residential hood manufacturers. It is up to the user of the kitchen to consider which approach is better for his or her conditions and cleaning capabilities, and what level of noise is tolerable when flow rates have to be high for good capture and containment.

For some, it is more cost-effective to buy something relatively untested by them and not deal further with the myriad complexities that can be issues in kitchen ventilation. Others may wish to study the topic sufficiently to have a better chance of obtaining characteristics important to them. This forum has many many threads on ventilation that may be instructive. There are also a lot of papers available on the web that provide useful background. Some of these are listed in my My Clippings.

kas.

I also posted looking for a decent hood today.

I am having trouble finding hoods with concave bottoms. Most of them have flat bottoms - with mine it looks like the rising smoke kind of bounces off. I was told that the bottom needs to be pyramidal for the air to flow upward properly. It seems silly to have to raise the CFM to compensate for poor shape - but maybe I'm missing something?

I'm looking at Kobe right now - the models with the quiet setting are supposed to be 1 Sone/300 CFM, which seems good for regular cooking. Obviously you'd have to crank it for searing, frying, etc.

This post was edited by feisty68 on Thu, Mar 6, 14 at 19:36

Came across this thread in my search for the best hood and wanted to ask Kas something.

Kas, you are correct, the sales people do recommend VAH. I went in leaning towards a Faber Pro Magnum with baffles and not the VAH. The sales person responded that I just removed the best hood out there. He tried to show me the force of the fan without mesh or baffles and how if there were baffles blocking the air flow, it just won't work as well.

I brought up the peeling paint issue and he suggested I upgrade to SS to cover the fan box. The box itself is not SS. He said that it is just an easy top rack DW clean up job.

Your thoughts?

We ended up with a Ventahood. It wasn't cheap but it was simple and was the quietest of the bunch we tested. It's installed and even quieter than in the store, which makes me happy. The lights are also awesome.

I don't own nor have I ever owned a VAH hood. My specific knowledge of them in action is limited to reports here by people I consider competent to comment on them. For example, I refer to clinresga's [IIRC] posts about the VAH he had in one location and more conventional style hood of at least equal air flow he had in another location. Measurements using the same audiometer revealed the VAH to be noisier. However, those components are a few years old now, so VAH may have made changes.

My general perception of the merits of VAH vs. "conventional" hood designs is based on two aspects: First, understanding the capture, containment, and flow requirements that a hood has to meet, and second, the fact that commercial style hoods are the most efficient at meeting these requirements. The pro-style, baffled, pyramidal hoods that Wolf, Modern Aire, Broan, Independent, and others make are intended to closely mimic in performance commercial hoods while being sufficiently aesthetic to sell to residential customers.

I won't claim to be able to perform computational fluid dynamics in my head, but there are plenty of published examples of Schlieren photography of rising hot air from cooking surfaces for good and bad hood conditions to provide insight.

I personally prefer cleaning stainless steel baffles and stainless steel hood interiors then the cleaning process that I anticipate I would be dealing with from VAH based on what I've read here.

All of that said, baffle type hoods, mesh type hoods (when assiduously kept clean), and VAH squirrel-cage blower type hoods can perform adequately when properly sized for capture, with sufficient flow rate for the aperture, and blower sized for the restrictions through the air path from cooktop to outside and back to cooktop.

Disclosure: I own a Wolf (Independent) Pro-Island hood large enough to encompass a 36-inch Kenmore (Electrolux) induction cooktop and adjacent 3500W Cooktek induction wok hob, powered by an external 1500 cfm* Wolf (Broan) roof-mounted blower. There is a Fantech silencer in outgoing path.

kas

*This is the zero-static-pressure rated flow rate. In my configuration assuming imperfect MUA at the 0.03 inch w.c. level, the actual flow is estimated by me to be at least 900 cfm, yielding an adequate 90 cfm per square foot of hood aperture. Given the baffle design, the flow velocity through the baffle openings should be in the vicinity of 180 ft/min or 3 ft/s, the upper end of effluent velocity from anything I expect to be cooked. Duct velocity is in the desirable range for minimizing grease condensation under cold conditions.

I posted but don't know why my post was deleted. I did not have the budget for a "higher end" hood; my budget was closer to $2300. The brands I looked at were Broan, Imperial, and Zephyr. I settled on the Imperial due to the price to performance ratio. The hood is well made, made in Southern Calfornia. The design is basic and there are no bells and whistles to speak of, just 2 variable speed knobs, one which controls the blower and the other your lights.

I thought the price was a pretty good deal, given the quality, and the 1425 twin blower CFM.

Baffles do not "block" the airflow, but they do cause a pressure drop, like every other hood and duct surface between the stove and the outside. At rated flow rate, the only commercial hood value I have ever found for baffle loss was 0.1 inches w.c. This was probably at a flow rate per square foot (flow velocity) somewhat higher than we would normally use in a residential kitchen, because our pans are small relative to the large hot surfaces performing cooking in commercial environments (or otherwise being used to take Schlieren photography).

In the case of VAH, it is true that below the squirrel cage there is no obvious restriction (although transitions still cause a small loss). However, unless the losses through the entire path to the outside are accounted for, one may have just moved the primary restriction from the input side of the blower to the output side. (After all, the squirrel cage throws the grease against a wall. That process has to steal momentum from the air flow -- effectively a pressure loss.) In other words, free lunches won't be found in the hood.

Given a wide open house (near-perfect MUA), the only meaningful comparison is actual flow rate output where the ducting meets the outside. If VAH would publish their actual flow rate as a function of external (to the hood) pressure loss (essentially a fan curve that starts at some flow rate and pressure drop representative of the hood with embedded fan), we could better evaluate the performance when ducting and roof cap are added, and when MUA is less than perfect.

kas