Just spent another weekend cooking at our lake house, where we have a 600 cfm VAH installed. It was the first hood I purchased, under circumstances similar to yours. The dealer we used for appliances just raved about them, told us how superior they were to all the others and "that's why they are the only hood we carry." What a load. Now that I'm totally spoiled by our Modern Aire hood with remote Fantech blower, cooking with the VAH is actually unpleasant. The incredibly loud din, as deafening at the lower settings as on High (it's NOT that VAH are quiet at high speeds, they are just equally noisy at low speeds, see the real scoop on noise), the markedly inferior performance, the ugly underside (compared to the beautiful baffle work in our MA), and the depressing realization that I will soon have to take down and hand wash the nasty "squirrel cages" all make the experience disappointing. I definitely am far on the negative end of the spectrum regarding VAH, but I also keep pointing out that I'm one of the few who have personal experience with the two hoods. If you search Vent a Hood, you'll get dozens of posts. One thing you'll see is that a lot of VAH defenders have only ever had a VAH. Many even say things like "of course, it's the only hood I've ever had, so I can't really compare..." Well, I can, and do on a regular basis. If you're mainly focused on the appearance of the hoods, rather than performance, that's OK, it's one approach, but it does lead to poor performance choices. If you search Vent a Hood and Zephyr on this forum, you'll get dozens of hits. I'd keep reading.

I ended up getting an Independent Incline on Ebay. Haven't installed it yet, so no pictures. But is was under 1K with a free blower - I chose 600, but could have gone for 1200 The bad thing is that I can't go with horizontal discharge after all - I have a very important post there. Will have to go vertically... The other thing is that the ebay folks at newenglandappliances where I bought it said that it has full warranty, but at Independent they said that they don't sell through the net so they doubted there'd be a warranty. They told me to call back with the serial number to check it out but I still haven't - i'm up to my ears in remodeling. But anyway, the hood was shipped directly from them (Independent), why wouldn't it have warranty?

I can't say anything about that particular model Kobe, however I recently installed a Kobe RA3836SQB-1 and the quality and workmanship is superior to anything I had seen to date.

We ended up with the Monsoon II. We looked at the cfm recommendations for our Wolf range (which has very high BTUs) and this model made sense for us. There are six speeds, and while the higher ones are quite noisy, the lower ones are not. The insert does a fantastic job making sure food smells go away and our smoke alarm doesn’t go off while cooking. The LED lighting and plug-in magnetic remote (you can see both features in some of the pictures below) are also terrific features. Highly recommend the Monsoon II but I admit I didn’t explore the Monsoon Connect and that might work just as well for your needs.