I'm trying to acquire a new pro range hood. How do I reduce noise?

3 years ago

I have a great room w/kitchen that has a builder-installed 30" 250-CFM chimney style range hood that vents at at 12 ft high on the wall to the exterior. So, 1 90-degree bend to exit. It sits over a 36" Wolf Pro rangetop w/90k BTUs of output and we cook Asian food. The mission is to replace the range hood, minimize noise, and get "good" performance.

A recommended choice is the 24" deep, 36" wide Wolf Chimney solution with a Wolf 1200 CFM external blower that would be mounted on the exterior wall at 12 ft high (relative to the room, actually about 25 ft off-the-ground due to grade). 10" round ducts, possibly with a silencer (10" opening) just after the 90 degree bend. However, I have no method to assess how loud this solution will be. We're not particularly price sensitive (in the sense that we've set aside money to solve this problem and the proposed solution is under budget). We are having HVAC work done at the same time to provide makeup air through an ERV. Can anyone help us develop a process to minimize the noise of the final solution?

Featured Answer

catinthehat

3 years ago

last modified: 3 years ago

Your requirement for a 60 decibel hood got me curious about my own setup. I have a 48 inch hood with 10 duct, silencer, and remote 1450 cfm @ 0 static pressure blower. Blower is mounted to the side of the house 20 ft away and is inaudible, 99% of the noise generated by the hood baffles. My crude measurements with my NIOSH phone app from ear height:

Off (ambient noise): 34 dB

Low: 43 dB

Medium: 59 dB

High: 67 dB

90% of my cooking is done at low, every now and then I’ll have to push it to medium, and I can count on one hand the amount of times I’ve used high in the past year.

I have no idea how to correlate fan speed with cfm, could never find info on that. Maybe if I measured current through each leg, but everything is sealed in conduit now too much trouble. The only way to get quieter with my setup would be to reduce the air velocity through the baffles (get a humongous box commercial hood). I’m happy though.

On the side of my house where the blower is mounted (13 feet above on the side wall), it sounds like a jet engine on medium and high. There is enough air on high that it actually blows all the leaves out of my side entrance walkway haha. Nice little bonus feature.

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