The only saftey issue with regards to hoods is removing burning gas by-product. I have never heard of someone dying from gas range by-prodcut but it can't be healthy.

The high power burners are for sauteing,woking,and searing meat.If you simply don't do any of this the value of high power burners becomes faster boiling times for water.

I have a small galley kitchen and I putting a full size SS hood. I like the look of copper and different dark artisan finishes but felt it would make my kitchen look like a cave.The SS hood reflects light and does not make it look like a cave IMO.

But at least you should consider a less expensive less powerful hood. I don't think I would recommend no hood at all.

There really isn't a safety issue. The by-products of gas combustion are CO2 and water unless the range is malfunctioning in which case you might get some carbon monoxide but that's what CO detectors are for. You can certainly go without a hood but you'll possibly end up with a hot kitchen coated in grease.

Modern homes are designed to be energy efficient. By insulating the walls, and eliminating air leakage around doors and windows, heating and cooling costs can be reduced. But making the skin too tight has some downsides - mainly the accumulation of indoor air contaminants which can contribute to health problems because of mold development and/or entrained particulates. Cooking is a prime source of indoor pollutants, such as grease particles, smoke, and steam. So even the most energy efficient structures must be designed with regular air exchanges to keep the air clean and breathable.

Older leaky homes probably have enough air coming and going to provide enough fresh air, unless your cooking style generates more gunk than can be naturally exhausted, in which case your kitchen will end up with concentrations of greasy dirt. My old kitchen had no venting, and the contents of the cupboards above my underpowered wussy cooktop were regularly slimy, and my smoke alarm objected every time I used my broiler.

So, you might call the benefits of venting aesthetic, or you may consider it a matter of health and hygiene.

I have cabinets above my cooktop. I found out that there is code that gives the minimum distance between the cooktop and the cabinet. This is for fire safety. If my kitchen had more cabinet space, I would opt for a vent. There are a lot of very attractive ones on line and some of them are effective enough to do a good job for a modest cost. If you can afford a range like a Bluestar I can't understand why the cost would concern you.

Wow - thanks for your assumptions about my cleanliness and how much money I have.

I'm glad you all like your hoods.

As far as I can see you asked for advice and didn't like the advice you received. I didn't detect any snarkiness in the answers except for the last one from nerdyshopper. Folks are generally pretty helpful and friendly here.

Billy

Even if you are just boiling vegetables or pasta, the steam generated will carry minute oil particles from that all around your home. (Yes, even if you don't use butter or oil, vegetables still contain minute amounts of oils that are released when cooking.) Oil attracts dirt.

Those are immutable physical facts that cannot be denied.

Unless you are someone who constantly is scrubbing their walls and laundering their curtains and upholstery, that grease and dirt remains in your home. When oils go rancid, they impart a less than pleasant odor. This is why your grandmother cracked a window open while cooking cabbage, even if it was sub zero outside. She wanted to keep as much smell out of the house as possible.

You can certainly opt out of having a hood, but you should get up on a ladder and inspect the sticky mung that coats your ceiling now before you make that decision set in stone. Then think that a Bluestar is probably 3x the range you've ever used in your home, so magnify that 3x. (Plus the heat factor.)

In some locations, having a hood over your range is part of the building code. You need to ask about that when you get your gas permit to increase the size of the line for your range.

I'm renovating a 1941-built house that has never had any kitchen ventilation, and one of the main ... I won't say surprises, exactly, but certainly mental adjustments has been figuring out that serious ventilation is not cheap, and that effective hoods are visually obtrusive. I'll end up spending slightly more on ventilation than I will on the Culinarian rangetop. There's a steady trickle of I-can't-believe-I-need-a-hood posts on this forum.

The points in the initial post about kinds of cooking make sense. I might suggest that if you don't need the kind of heat the Bluestar burners can generate, you might not need a Bluestar: less expensive alternatives may give you all you need. At least, to turn the question around, people who do opt for Bluestars are usually doing so because they want to do kinds of cooking that *also* absolutely necessitate serious ventilation.

There's another factor as well. Ask an asthmatic. Besides all of the cooking effluent, there are chemicals released in gas cooking that get in the air. Just because your range is correctly installed and burning cleanly doesn't mean that there is actually zero unburned gas or zero by product. Asthmatics are sensitive to this even when there's good ventilation. Without any ventilation, these less than health-promoting chemicals remain.

The size of the hood canopy isn't what's important (though 3" longer than the cooktop on each side makes it more efficient), but the amount of draw it has is. There are some low profile hoods that do a great job. Mine is only 12" tall, and since it vents right out the wall behind, it has a full set of cabinets over it, which provide great storage for my least used pots. I think there are hoods that are only 6" high that can do as good a job. You would need to sacrifice some cabinet space for the duct, if you have to run it up through the attic and roof, but only about 10" square. Even in a small kitchen, that's not much of a loss compared to the gain in function.

If you have a building department with kitchen codes, you probably can't install a Bluestar (even without the 22K burner) without a decent hood, and if you have a good hood, you might need a make-up air system. This is reality. It can't be wished away.

Safety isn't much of a factor (except for putting something non-flammable over the range). I think you'll like having one--if nothing else, the lights right over the cooking surface are pretty handy.

If the overwhelming looks of a hood are what's bothering you, I've had good luck with the slide-out hoods. They're effective and unobtrusive.

One thing that no one seems to have commented on... the OP says he/she has "an old fashioned exhaust fan that vents outside." So it looks like ZoeCat17 already does have and is used to a form of ventilation...if ZoeCat17 is talking about the kind of exhaust fan I think he/she is (like a bathroom exhaust, through the wall?) the biggest differences a "real" hood would make are (1) more effective/quicker because of the capture area containing smoke/grease before it spreads, which may be minor given his/her comments on cooking style, and (2) the addition of a filter. The filter is where a safety improvement may actually lie...if you use a fan without a filter, then grease *can* build up on the blades of the fan itself and the internal mechanism, and/or on surfaces outside near the outlet, and these *can* be a fire hazard. Both of these issues can be addressed through cleaning, of course, assuming the fan mechanism is accessible, but it is far easier to clean a removable baffle.

I would also note that as someone else who has lived a loooong time without a vent hood, the 2 things I really look forward to more efficient venting of are steam and heat - neither is a safety thing, and an open window helps with both, but when I work in a kitchen with "real" ventilation I am astounded at how much more comfortable it can be. This especially comes into play if you regularly make stock or big pots of soup/stew, or anything else that simmers on the stove for hours....depending on your cooking style, YMMV.

My mom still has the original exhaust fan that goes through a wall. It is a LOT more powerful than a bathroom fan (and noisier). She doesn't use it since she has a hood now. The hood tackles the problem at the source.

Kobe makes a hood that is only 2" high. Hard to call that 'big'.

I'd like a slide-out hood made of glass. Since glass is transparent, I would install it as low as possible. Then, it would be at a height somewhere above bent elbows and below chin. Not at forehead height. Also, a slide out can be bumped without anyone getting hurt. It just slides in when bumped. I've written in other threads about the height of sneezeguards, transparent plates that don't interfere with arm movements or hand-eye coordination.