A 48” gas range (of any brand) with a downdraft is a very bad idea. As is doing any style of grill with a downdraft.

prior to our kitchen remodel, I lived to with two downdrafts. Never again. When we remodeled, we did a 36” wolf on an outside wall with whatever super powerful hood the appliance dealer recommended. My 36” puts off a gold amount of heat, steam and cooking fat.

follow the above advice, it is solid and you won’t regret doing it the right way.

You’re setting yourself up for a massive and expensive failure. Downdraft shouldn’t ever have crossed your mind here. It’s not even technologically adequate. They are just horrible con jobs. Overhead venting only. Only. With the makeup air in place.

“we hate facing the wall when cooking - really want to be able to cook and look out to the living room/dining room, etc”

The next time you are cooking at your cooktop, please try to look up while doing it. See if you can look outward while you are cooking for even 30 seconds. The reality is that when you are cooking, you are looking down at your pots and pans, not out to anywhere. Unfortunately TV has made us think that looking up from an island while cooking is cool. There was an interview with one of the cooks from The America’s Test Kitchen TV show. She said it took her weeks of practice to be able to cook while looking up at the camera, and even then she still looks down a lot.

If you want to be social while cooking, use your island as a prep space, not for cooking. Prep time is way longer than cook time anyway. Island as prep space means people can hang out with you while you prep, have a glass of wine, talk, maybe even help chop something, and not get splattered by cooking grease or get smoke in their faces.

You will spend an enormous amount of money to exhaust a 48” cooktop on an island. A downdraft to do that goes against the laws of physics, because smoke and grease go up, not down. A charbroiler? OMG those need a powerful exhaust. A 48” cooktop with charbroiler needs a big overhead canopy- shaped hood which will block sight lines. Make your life easier and put the cooktop against the wall.

You mentioned not wanting to bump your head against the vent hood. And that's an entirely solvable problem. Raise the hood above head height and increase the depth (front to back) of the hood. We did that in our kitchen and love the experience; very functional and looks good. And yes, placing the range against the wall made perfect sense. It also gave us the option of having a pot filler. Seems little a minor thing, but everybody in the family loves the convenience. The kids always miss it when we have to use somebody else's kitchen.

Yikes! A downdraft, for reasons I have elaborated several times on this forum, is a poor choice for any significant cooking. It is beyond 'out of the question' for a charbroiler. Let me bring your attention to Figure 4 of the Greenheck Guide. https://www.tagengineering.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/KVSApplDesign_catalog.pdf

I usually recommend a 90 ft/min air velocity (90 CFM per square foot of overhead hood entry aperture). This seems to work well for activities up to searing and wok cooking. As you may see from the table above, the charbroiler needs even more. And this is with a commercial hood that has a lot of reservoir volume below the baffles, thereby averaging out some of the flow velocity requirement.

I strongly recommend either finding an elegant way to plumb a large Wolf hood to your ceiling, or to build some kind of dropped chase from the ceiling, or a way to move the cooktop elsewhere.

There are some serious design errors here, fueled by a large knowdge gap about the reality of kitchen functions. You should be working with a knowledgeable and higher end kitchen designer, who is familiar with the required mechanical logistics, as well as the standard workflow time motion studies that created parameters to produce efficiency in zone placement. Kitchen Design is a science that involves serious risks to life and limb. And also manages to produce a beautiful aesthetic.

A great range on the back wall can be an awesome focal point, and is the start to rectifying some of the issues here.

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How long do you even stand at your range top to cook? Most tasks that require a substantial amount of time standing at the range top require concentration on said task. You will not be looking out to the living room. Get the range top off the island and put it against a wall so you can have proper ventilation.

We used a downdraft for a couple of weeks with a range in a peninsula with seating behind at a raised bar.

• The downdraft was noisy and did a lousy job of venting.
• It diverted the flame of the back burners, making it impossible to use the back burners & downdraft at the same time. Since downdrafts only work (marginally) when pots/pans are right up next to them and lower than the top of the fan by several inches, the downdraft was useless..
• One of my children was splattered with grease while sitting at the peninsula when I was cooking and I had to ban them all from sitting there whenever I was cooking.
• We did not do any grilling, but I can't imagine it would be a good idea given the ineffectiveness of the downdraft when it was just trying to vent steam!
• All Dacor and other high end appliances, so not a cheap downdraft.

Please...do yourself a favor and rethink your design!

Regarding Kitchen work:

• 70% or more of the work done and time spent in the Kitchen is spent prepping...preparing food for cooking (cleaning, cutting/chopping, rubbing, mixing, etc.)
• 20% is spent cleaning up (clearing counters/table, wiping down counters/tables, loading DW (don't rinse!), sweeping, unloading DW)
• 10% is spent cooking...actually watching food cook (which means you are not socializing), adding ingredients, stirring. Yes, occasionally you will have a dish that requires more (e.g., making eggnog), but the overwhelming majority of cooking does not.

So, what work zone should be in the island (assuming it's your most desirable work location)? The Prep Zone. That's the zone you spend the majority of time in. In fact, the more cooking you do, the more time you spend prepping.

If you just MW food and don't really cook, that would be a different story, but obviously that's not you.

Regarding bumping your head...as suggested by others, get a larger & stronger overhead hood so you can mount it higher than standard. I suggest one that's 9" to 12" wider than the cooking surface and at least 27" deep (more would be better, if you can find one). Install it above the tallest person's head in your family. Not only will no one bump their head, but it will also remove it from your line of sight.

Is that your proposed Kitchen? It looks like you're going for the industrial look. So, get an industrial looking overhead hood.

Just an FYI that my family is tall (5'10" to 6'7") and no one bumps their head. You have a "sense" of what's there, so you naturally avoid it. Our hood is installed 30" off the cooking surface.

Seating...make sure you have the minimum necessary for a functional island.

Seating overhang for counter-height seating (36" off the finished floor):

• No cooktop...15" of clear leg/knee space (that's overhang space after accounting for cabinets & the decorative doors/end panels on the backs of the cabinets)
• Cooktop...15" overhang still applies, but the seating overhang's edge should be 24" from the back of the cooktop. Grease splatters far (much farther than 9", as I've personally discovered).

Seating linear space...24" per person linear space

"Like you, he hates facing the wall and bumping his head on the overhead vent while cooking.”

This is a common worry, but the reality is that the brain learns within a couple of times of standing in front of a hood where the hood is, and you don't bump your head.

It is not a good idea to "Install it above the tallest person's head in your family". That is because the higher you install the hood, the more chance the effluent has to escape the exhaust before it gets there. So you've paid for an expensive hood only to have it not work well because it is installed too high. The suggestions to make up for that by making the hood wider, deeper, and more powerful will end up costing a fortune, and end up with a behemoth hood, and all for no reason, because I swear to you, you won't bump your head on the hood after standing in front of it a couple of times.

The ideal hood height for effectively capturing cooking effluent is a distance from cooktop to bottom of hood between 30-36”.

Borrowed this pic from a post by JuneKnow in which she said this restaurant cook is 6’6” but does not bump his head due to muscle memory that occurs.

I find the problem isn't so much with bumping my head as with the hood being right in my sight line. Kitchen designers often work around this issue by shortening the depth of the hood. But then you have an inefficient hood that still partially gets in the way. Moving it up actually works amazingly well. No cooking smells from our kitchen, and no hood that gets into the way either. It stays nicely above my head height and sucks up the cooking vapors perfectly.

I waited awhile before commenting. I have a Wolf 48” 4 burners, griddle and charbroiler. I have cooked on it for almost 19 years. If you have never cooked on a charbroiler before you have no idea of the amount of smoke and grease they put out. My hood fan is 1200 CFM, and there are times it almost could not keep up. Saturday night get togethers with burgers or steaks or ribs for 8 to 10 people. Down drafts will NEVER handle it. Even neighbors with electric range tops say that a frying pan next to the down drafts don’t get hot enough. My husband is retired commercial HVAC. No way would he install a down draft system, they simply don’t have the CFM’s to do the job. He designed the exhaust fan with the motor and exhaust on the roof. Commercial style stove needs commercial style exhaust. Forget the Ken and Barbie down draft. The pic shows 2 burgers on the grill and the griddle with onions and peppers. Even with just 2 burgers there is Significant smoke.

Thanks for all the feedback and thoughts - was consistent with what I was expecting to hear, but great to get some more concrete examples to drive the points home.

It does feels like if we go with induction we can get away with the downdraft on the island, but if we want to embrace gas and go pro with the kitchen will need to play some switcheroo and move the gas range to the wall w/ a hood vent.

Will post an update with our plan once finalized!

Induction can still heat the pans as hot—or hotter— than gas. It still produces all of the food heat, odors, grease, steam, and smoke, that gas cooking produces. It just doesn’t have the bypass heat and combustion byproducts. It lessens, but does not remove, the need for overhead venting.

If you cook seriously enough to consider the 2 straight hours of cleaning on a charbroiler, then you cook too much to ever use a downdraft, period. With induction too. You’re a reducing the CFM a bit for induction. You’re not finagling the cooking products to move sideways into a too small aperture.

I cook on a 48” Wolf range with 4 burners and double griddle. Double ovens. The griddle is incredible for any type cooking from Naan to eggs. Can also be used as French top or a stay warm area. I opted out of 1/2 being a char grill because it would make The grill and the griddle too small for my preference. If I want to grill, I go outside.More fun and smoke is not a problem. The wolf range sits under a wolf hood and I intend to change the fan motor to remote. My experience with downdraft in other locations has been unsatisfactory mainly because it only pulls some of the smoke and odor out of the area but it mostly it pulls the heat from under my pans.
Whatever I gained in ventilation; I lost in heat.

I read that if you used a down draft that extended to the 18” height it would be above the flame and not effect the heat level of gas. can you tell me which down drafts you used?

I've mentioned this before, but hot cooking can generate meter per second rising and expanding cooking plumes. Generally, these will have larger sectional area than the pop-up slot area facing the plume. Yet, somehow, the slot velocity is expected to be high enough that the vector combination of vent air and plume effluent at the plume and over the entire plume area will be directed toward the slot. However, the slot acting as a mini hood has, like all hoods, to follow the behavior documented in the 2003 ASHRAE Handbook: HVAC Applications. There, Figure 6 page 30.4 shows that the air velocity has dropped to 10% of its slot opening value at 1.6 times the narrow dimension of the slot. Yet most of the plume is multiple slot dimensions away.

One imagines that the slot velocity would have to be 30 m/s of so to be fully effective. (Let's assume induction cooking so we don't have to deal with flame extinction.) A 3-inch by 48-inch slot (1 sq. ft. area) would have to move air at 6000 CFM to accomplish this. Given the pressure loss of the slot, I can imagine the large and noisy blower this would require.

In case this makes one wonder how regular hoods can work, please note that regular kitchen hoods do not pull effluent away from their direction of flow, but depend on the flow to bring the plumes to the hoods for capture.

Hi, I’m going through the exact same dilemma as you did right now. Can you provide us with an update? I’m hoping to hear that the Best Cattura downdraft is what you went with and that it 100% does the trick. Thank you!

Hi. we have a downdraft gas cooktop in our island currently( bought the house with it). it is a jennair 10+ years old. The burners all cook at the same BTU and the stove continues to blow out on low. We have cleaned the parts and soaked them multiple times. it needs to be replaced. we have a very large island and a very large kitchen. i would like to keepthe stovetop in the iskand but get 6 burners. After reading this i am nervous and would appreciare any suggestions.