My daughter found a 15 year old white Viking all gas range with 4 burners. It is beautiful but needs some work: new burner covers (? round black piece which goes over burner), a new grate or two, and maybe some other things. She must have cabinets built before the range can be installed so must decide about the range before it is refurbished. The range is all gas. She also found a 36" Viking cooktop with 6 burners which is like the one I used to have and is in pristine condition. Her kitchen is small and the 30" allows room for a broom closet while the 36 " does not. Also, she found a beautiful 30" Vent-A-Hood which almost touches the ceiling, one foot short so she can have that one foot made. Which to choose? The 15 year old range, beautiful stainless steel back plate and the 30" white Vent -A-Hood or the 36" newer VIking cooktop with a standard stainless steel canopy (14"?)? The vintage range, backsplash and white vent a hood are beautiful and give more counter space in her 1930"s house than the 36" cooktop. Her house has two bedrooms and one bath and she lives alone. She has an auxillary oven. My thought is to go with the range. It suits the house and is all gas. I don'tthink it should not cost an exhorbinent amount to refurbish. The Vent_A-Hood is great looking and works. If the range is not satisfactory, she can eventually buy a new one but the hood is great and the 30" is better for her space. Thoughts? Thanks. Bobbie

It's pretty common for older homes not to have range hoods, but happily looks like it should be relatively easy to add, from your photo. You can cook without it till you get to it, though. (We've been cooking without one for three years, and previous owners cooked without it for 90-odd years before then!) We don't have our fridge yet so I can't comment on performance, but it does meet your height requirement---the Fisher & Paykel single door bottom freezer. I really like the interior and freezer designs, though again, we haven't used it yet. Needs 69" of height for venting and 33" of width (can't tell how much space you have there?), comes in stainless (and also white), and is pretty reasonably priced. We're buying ours locally, which also ended up being the cheapest option, for whatever that's worth. Good luck---and I love your stainless countertops!

By interior air path, I meant that there would be a way for a cat or a butterfly to get from the vicinity of the air intake of the combustion appliance to the kitchen. If a combustion appliance has an air inlet path from outside, and a reasonably sealed exhaust path to the outside, and lives in an area that is more or less sealed off from the kitchen, I would call that isolated. Isolated combustion appliances would not be expected to backdraft due to the kitchen ventilation. All other such devices can backdraft when subjected to lowered house interior pressures, which is what happens when a big blower is used to pull air from the kitchen without sufficient MUA. As hinted at above, keeping the pressure drop low in the MUA path can be challenging, as large flow rates across even large filters can have a significant pressure drop.* So, unless the MUA has its own blower, filtering has to be minimal -- somewhere between sparrow restriction and mosquito restriction. Blower MUA systems have their own complexity (potentially a lot of it), as unlike many commercial operations where ventilation rates are held constant and the MUA can be tuned to a fixed rate, the hood blower likely has several speeds, there may be bathroom exhaust fans that can be on or off, and fireplaces can move a lot of air, but tolerate only a slight pressure drop to maintain sufficient draft. This is why I suggest where feasible that combustion appliances have some combination of their own MUA and some isolation from the kitchen (via a basement door that stays closed, say, or better, a closed room within the basement). My oil furnace has its own intake duct to the outside using a kit manufactured for this purpose. I'm not familiar with modern gas dryers or hot water heaters to be able to comment on equipment of this sort that might be available for them. In other words, minimizing the need to keep the house pressure difference to the outside within 0.03 inches may be a lot easier than incorporating a sufficiently sophisticated MUA system. There are some simple ways of controlling MUA that may appeal in some cases, and I'll try to get to that subject in the near future. kas

We have a 48" gas cooktop with a 54" Prestige inline blower custom hood, with about a 61" x 31" sump - capture area. It's fabulous when we have multiple people cooking (Latke night, with 5-6 burners going, no lingering smell in the house... or simply cooking bacon on the weekend, again, no smell). Our cabinets are pulled forward on this run for a deeper counter top. Regarding sound, I do hear a faint remote clanging sound when this is running (vent area, opening and closing?). Ensure your hood is wider than your cooktop - don't do a 48 with a 48. Research make up air. Good luck!