Add me to the list of frustrated OTR microwave owners. I had to laugh/wince when I read the above comment by a fellow GE owner that theirs "doesnt even have enough bottom suction to hold a piece of paper up against the bottom intake vents," because that's exactly the experiment I've done. Mine is set to vent to the outside too (in a condo) rather than recirculate, which is ultimately just a giant waste of the cabinet above my microwave. Mine's a GE Profile PVM9195SFSS with a 400 CFM blower and a "Boost" mode. Boiling a pot of water results in nearly all of the steam going straight up, with some of it condensing on the front of the microwave and the rest going toward the ceiling. A friend of mine with a GE had her front control panel go out, and the technician said that's a common problem due to...yep, you guessed it. Condensation. For a truly miserable experience, anything seasoned with a little oil on a skillet spreads noxious fumes throughout my condo. The whole place stays hazy for half an hour or more. One trick I've learned that helps just a little bit is to open the microwave door when venting. More steam gets sucked INTO the microwave and then up and out than ever gets sucked up from the underside. I have an extended warranty, and I've thought about calling a repair technician, but based on what you all have said, that sounds like a waste. When I had a small dishwasher issue, the technician ended up doing more damage the first time than he fixed, so I'm wary.

I personally have never used the self clean feature. I'm too worried about the heat from that messing up the electronics (that's what people thought several years ago when I got mine; not sure if opinions have changed). I generally use some kind of pan to catch drips, so only rarely have things drip onto the oven floor, and for things like roasted chicken that may spatter grease all over, it seems to just bake off over the next times I'm using my oven. So, I can't tell you how the self clean works, but I can tell you that I haven't really ever felt the need for it, either.

Wow! Some basics are needed here. First, no air goes up the hood, through the duct, and to the outside that didn't get into the house. Seal the house and the hood flows no air. Second, the hood will try to move air and if it can't the house pressure will fall to the zero CFM value at the left edge of the hood blower's fan curve, perhaps a few tenths of an inch of water column. This pressure, and likely the pressures corresponding to a good portion of the fan curve (less the losses from hood filter to outside), can cause back-drafting of combustion appliances. Back-drafting is a carbon monoxide hazard. Some combustion appliances can back-draft at a mere 0.03 inches of water column. Fireplaces are just a bit higher than that number, depending on draft achieved. Third, while low CFM levels may be supplied by the house leakage as make-up air, this is not usually good for the interiors of house walls, and can pull dust into the interior. Fourth, there are many ways to supply make-up air (MUA) and generally some heating of the air is needed (possibly required by code) in northern climes. Fifth, the comments about wall vs. island hoods are valid, but the result is somewhat confusing. Without a back wall, the island hood needs to be larger front-to-back (deeper) to accommodate the rising expanding cooking plumes it is to capture from the rear burners. This larger area still requires the needed flow velocity (90 ft/min suggested), so island hoods will in general require more CFM than the same performance hood mounted to a wall. (Feet per minute equals CFM per square foot of hood entry aperture area.) If drafts are accounted for, including those caused by moving people, the island hood may need to be wider as well as deeper. In some cases, cold MUA can be brought into a room having an oversized heater (think Modine type) and preheated that way. In others, an electric or hydronic heat exchanger may be needed somewhere in the MUA ducting. Low CFM requirements might be addressed by an existing hot air furnace, but usually these are sized for normal house heat loss. In all cases, even in houses with separate MUA for combustion appliances, the MUA configuration should be imagined as having ducting commensurate with that needed for the hood system. Last, all of the above is related to having a hood that removes most of the cooking effluent, leaving the walls clean and the air relatively odor free. As far as I know, there is no Code requirement to keep one's house clean and thus the options of no hood, or of a barely filtered recirculating hood, or a barely useful low CFM exhausting hood are available choices.

Yes, we don't regularly need to run it at full speed. It has a continuous speed control and most of the time we run it either on low (for less challenging foods) or at 80% (for stir frying). But there are times when we need to go to full power. For the most part, this hood is pretty good and I am quite happy with the trade-offs that we made. But as with most residential designs, capture volume is small compared to commercial hoods, and I honestly doubt that it gets the full 1200 CFM. We have an old leaky house and several windows on that floor that are open year round. So, no active MUA, but plenty of air from all over the place. Nonetheless, having a (nominally) more powerful blower gives me a little more slack to make up for some of the known trade-offs. This hood replaced an old VentAHood and the difference is like night and day. No more cooking smells, ever. The downside is that I now need to clean the hood more frequently. I am always amazed just how much oil/grease it captures in such a short amount of time. Fortunately, cleaning is pretty easy with baffled hoods. The cooking area is very well protected from most cross drafts, so I am happy with our choice of mounting the hood higher up, and then increasing the overall size. It makes for a very functional design. Not everybody will have this option, but it's nice that ModernAire always builds to order. So, customizations are easy to do.