Vent hoods that are 54 inches long (recommended for your size cooktop) by at least 24 inches deep (27 is better), using baffle filtering, and made of cleanable 300 series stainless steel will not be available for a mere few hundred bucks. There will be more than that in the stainless steel. And this doesn't count the rather large blower you will need for this aperture area (viz., 1200 CFM) that would best be mounted on the roof and the Fantech silencer needed to quiet it down. Further, few housing locations (San Diego and Pago Pago may be exceptions) provide the year-round moderate temperatures that allow the house to leak the required make-up air at low pressure loss year round. So an MUA system or willingness to intermittently do without conditioned air (i.e., open windows) will also be required.

The lowest priced, effective hoods might be commercial types without the commercially required fire extinguishing. They may be built with lower cost 400 series stainless steel, and hence be cleanable but will not remain very shiny. You will still need MUA and a roof blower.

There are at least 9 years of ventilation topics on this forum that can be scanned for useful information. Or, both Greenheck and the Commercial Kitchen Ventilation Laboratory, inter alia, publish guides that will inform one of the issues in commercial ventilation that apply to residential situations when the owner decides to adopt pro-style cooking appliances.

Hours of looking at hood products is not the first thing to do. First, review the technical literature to determine what the requirements are, then look for ventilation systems that meet them.

You may find in this forum among comments by myself and others some basic requirements to start with when sizing your system. I am happy to deal with further questions relating to requirements, but not the brand of hood to buy.

kas

Perhaps I worded my question incorrectly. Much of my research for hours on end HAS been spent on the ventilation topics in this forum. I am aware and do agree with your recommendation of the technical requirements you stated: 54 inch, 1200 CFM. I will need MUA and want higher quality 300 series SS. I am willing to pay $,$$$ I was unaware of the silencer until I read about it on these forums and the guy in PNW ? sound tested his Modernaire and Vent a Hood between his lake house and home residence. If I had to buy today, I would choose Modernaire, but I am still not comfortably educated. Is the silencer available on all models or specific name brand? I prefer baffle filtering over mesh for sure, but what is the squirrel cage? and is it the "go to" mechanism of VAH? Seems some people prefer that over baffle. Why does VAH seem to get more variable ratings while Modernaire seems to get all positive ratings? What other brands out there have I not read about? I get the difference between a $500 vent and a $2,500 vent, but what is the difference between a $3,000 vent and a $6,000 vent? At what price point am I at diminishing or no returns for value of product? I am willing to spend $,$$$but I want to spend it for the right reason for me: product quality, and not status. I've read posts where people talk about their hoods like a status item.

OK, I see the disconnect, which ultimately derives from the negligible amount of useful information provided by hood manufacturers. Blower manufacturers are slightly better. So let me comment on your questions in some random order.

No hood to my knowledge comes with a silencer. Silencers that I'm aware of are made by Fantech to be inserted in place of a few feet of duct. My 10-inch duct, for example, has a 14-inch diameter silencer. See link. These are built internally somewhat like automotive mufflers.

http://fantech.net/LD10Silencer10Dia-Duct_enus-411286.aspx

Modernaire, Prestige, Abbaka, etc. are custom hood manufacturers. Sometimes they are useful for obtaining Pro-type look and function hoods that other manufacturers, such as Wolf, don't size. In other cases they may be less expensive. There may be some feature that one wants that requires a custom design.

In the cases of fabricators such as Moderaire, their hoods, as far as I know, tend to be residential Pro aesthetic counterparts of commercial hoods. That is, they use tilted baffle assemblies for filtering like commercial hoods, but the hoods are intended to be lower, have nicer stainless steel, and otherwise better fit residential kitchens.

There is another elephant in the room, however. That is Ventahood (VaH). Ventahood's historical "claim to fame" is their 'magic lung' squirrel cage blower used as both an air mover and centrifugal filter, thereby performing both the functions of an internal or external blower, and a baffle filter. Their claims about flow rate, however, are in my view somewhat specious as they don't account for all the pressure losses that need to be accounted for, particularly in the context of the drop in flow rates their fan design has as a function of pressure loss vs. more typical blowers, such as Broan or Abbaka make. (Note that Fantech makes in-line blowers that may be worth considering in some ventilation system architectures.)

In any case, an external blower and an inline silencer leaving only baffle hiss to listen to will be quieter than an sufficiently powerful to be effective squirrel cage blower next to the cook's ear.

So, if I recall correctly, the point clinresga was making about the noise comparison between houses wasn't specifically Modernaire vs. VaH, but conventional baffle hood with external blower vs. VaH Magic Lung. (I don't recall if the conventional configuration included a silencer.) There are other VaH designs, I believe, but I don't know how conventional or not they might be.

Joe Henderson on this forum seems to have access to many hood types and may be able to fill in gaps in my knowledge of specific hoods. I don't make recommendations for hoods I haven't used.

Trevor Lawson on this forum may be able to provide recommendations w.r.t. Modernaire.

Given a conventional design of a given size, then cost likely will be influenced by fit and finish, at least among the brands built by organizations that understand hood function. Some brands may be able to tack on a surcharge due to advertising or brand popularity. I have no idea what the cost difference is between a given Wolf hood, for example, and a counterpart Modernaire hood, for example. I have a Wolf hood, then manufactured by Independent, and the fit and finish is excellent.

I also have a Wolf (Broan) external 1500 CFM blower and an inline Fantech silencer, and at full power with low MUA pressure loss (open windows) the residual baffle noise is low enough to easily talk across the peninsula under the hood without raising one's voice.

In summary, size matters for capture; silencers are golden; adequate flow rate matters for containment; flow rate depends on a suitable fan curve for the round-trip pressure losses of the ventilation system, MUA system, and house leakage.

kas

I understand and agree with your summary...with 1 exception: what / how to determine "suitable fan curve"? - btw, thank you for your time and info. Learning about vents is like learning a foreign language.

The fan curve provides a graph of the fan flow rate as a function of pressure across the fan, which for a hood blower is the pressure drop from the cooktop to outside and back inside to the cooktop. If this can be estimated for the desired flow rate, than the fan curves of candidate blowers can be consulted to determine which are adequate.

An example of fan curves may be found on the second page of this Broan acrobat file. Some of these apply to some Wolf-supplied blowers also.

http://www.broan.com/common/productDigitalAssethandler.ashx?id=c7ed0024-c44b-445a-9ad1-f983bdce7101

Fantech has tables providing the fan curve data for their in-line blowers. Abbaka publishes fan curves also, I believe, for their roof units. Within the past two years, someone provided data or a link here to fan curve data for VaH power packs, but I don't have the link any longer.

Obviously, I have moved the issue from what is a fan curve to how the heck does one estimate all of the pressure losses, but that is a much more complex subject, not to mention an exercise in guessing due to lack of data, particularly baffle (or mesh) pressure loss with flow rate and whole house leakage flow rate versus pressure, or for the larger blowers, what kind of MUA will be installed.

You are now at the threshold of either doing a lot of research, having some expensive measurements, or accepting fudge factor informed guesses such as the factor of 1.5 I usually suggest as the ratio a/b of (a) a blower's rated zero static pressure flow rate to (b) the required specific air flow (90 CFM/sq. ft.) times hood aperture area (sq. ft.). (If mesh filters are used, another factor for how clogged they will be allowed to get before being cleaned should also be considered.)