alcove hood vent height

last year

Hi, this is my inspiration photo for my new kitchen. I’d like an alcove around the range, but I am unsure what type of hood/vent I need. My appliance rep said I would need a flush mount hood vent…but every flush mount hood I see online is way up on the ceiling, visual, and is pricey. She said I could use a regular hood vent if the alcove is 36” above the range, but what if I want it a bit higher (like 48”) but not all the way to the ceiling? Advice?

Comments (3)

palimpsest
last year
What you need to look for is a range hood Insert of adequate width, depth, and CFM that can be mounted at 48" off the cooktop. This does put it in the general range of those mounted in the ceiling because they can be mounted at 7 feet above the floor/4 above the cooking surface. It should function better in an enclosed alcove like you propose than it would on an open flat ceiling. I would also make sure you have adequate set-down space on either side of the cooking surface an not have the side walls too close to the cooktop.
palimpsest
last year
Most conventional inserts even with high CFM are going to be designed to be mounted around 30-36" above the cooktop, not 48"
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What do the installation instructions say? Usually, the height is around 30" off the cooking surface. Sometimes, with weaker or smaller hoods, 24" is the recommended height. (What model do you have? You should be able to find the installation instructions on the Vent-A-Hood site.) BTW..."head banging" isn't generally an issue. We range in height from 5'10" to 6'5" (and growing) and none of us have had issues with "head banging". We have a Vent-A-Hood that's mounted 30" above the cooking surface. It's 24" deep (front-to-back) so it covers all but an inch or so of the counter in front of the cooktop plus it's 6" wider than our cooktop (36" cooktop & 42" hood). Our installation works well...very, very little escapes it.
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Bee, We have a Culinarian cooktop with a 54x27 wooden hood with an insert from ModernAire. Our counters are 37-1/4 inches high, in part because we're tall but also because this pushes the cooktop an inch closer to the bottom of the hood, given a fixed hood height. This allows us to push the hood higher without making it too far from the cooking surface. Here are our finished measurements: 69-3/4 inches from floor to bottom of hood 32-1/2 inches from countertop to bottom of hood 31-3/4 inches from top of Culinarian stainless to bottom of hood (and the top of the iron grates are about 1 inch higher than the stainless, making the hood 30-3/4 above the top of the iron grates) We planned to mount the hood higher but dropped it down when we realized it is not a danger to our heads. One drawback of mounting the hood to high (in addition to poorer performance) is that you see the undersides more easily and some complain about the hood lights shining in their eyes or in the eyes of people sitting at the island. Plus the perceived noise is higher if there's a straight shot from your ears to the underside of the hood. We have never bumped into the hood and it would be almost impossible to do so because the rounded front of the Culinarian sticks out past the front edge of the countertop, making the cooks stand further out from the back wall. The wood hood itself is 54W x 27D, so the opening is less (perhaps I should have made the opening this dimension). The hood actually sticks out only 26-1/2 inches from the back wall. This is due to the backsplash installed after the cabinets, as usual. We have an Abbaka 1400CFM fan on the roof, and it sucks well, even with a couple of bends. We've had no problem with smoke from wok cooking. To fit the insert in the hood we had Modernaire ship the insert directly to out cabinetmaker so he could build the wood hood to match the insert. During the design phase we made mockups from foam board. I suggest you do the same if you want to play with the dimensions. Good luck with your project! Your countertops and the rest look great! Billy
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OK, so now that height has been resolved, next issue! So, most under-cabinet range hoods are made for 12" deep cabinets, but Ikea's cabinets are 15" deep. So Ikea sells these small filler pieces that mount behind the range hood, which we did buy, but when our contractor initially mounted it he didn't put the filler piece in. So the hood is all the way back. We're torn about whether we should have him move it forward and put in the filler piece: on the one hand, I kind of like that it's further back in space, which addresses my issue the hood being low and hitting our heads on it while cooking (and just generally gives the thing a smaller, more discreet footprint). On the other hand, because the hood is meant to be mounted to a 12" deep cabinet, it means that when mounted all the way back, the top of it starts to slope down before the end of the cabinet, instead of remaining flush and starting to slope down at the end of the cabinet, which I think looks a little awkward. What would you do? Move the hood forward so it fits as its supposed to (and install filler panel? Or take advantage of the opportunity to move it back in space? Pictures attached (how it looks now). FTR -- We will likely be installing cover panels on the sides of the cabinets, so the side of the range will actually be covered. Only the front might look a little weird because of the gap.
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The goal of the cooktop ventilation is capture and containment. Capture refers to collecting the rising and expanding cooking plume effluent; containment refers to keeping it in the ventilation system until it is expelled outside. Capture requires that the hood entry aperture overlap the expanding effluent conical plume (which may be bent due to cross drafts). A 22-inch hood may not fully accomplish this at any height, depending on pan size and cooktop burner layout. While the subject is actually complex, one can roughly approximate the plume as an inverted cone with the pointy end down below the cooking surface, and the cone sides touching the pan base (or with gas, the flame diameter, if larger). The cone side angle may be treated as being 10 degrees to the vertical, although this also varies with what is cooking and pan base temperature. The portions of the cones that rise from all the pans that are being used on the cooktop at a given time that enter the hood aperture are captured. A small amount that would just miss the aperture may also be captured with high enough air flow. What isn't captured is distributed throughout the kitchen or house, and my be removed due to general air flow, before or after its grease and odor load is deposited on surfaces. Containment requires that the velocity of the air being pulled through the aperture be high enough that any place the rising plume strikes does not reflect the plume back downward such that it escapes from the hood. Schlieren imagery may be found on the Internet showing this effect for commercial hoods with insufficient vs. sufficient air flow rate (velocity times area). So, in general, raising a hood and expecting the same performance requires proportionate increases in hood width and depth, and increases in air flow rate proportional to the increased hood aperture area to keep the velocity up. Or looked at another way, one should start by determining what hood size is needed as a function of height (for capture), and what height person is safe from intersecting the hood when bending at that height. When the height that is safe for the expected cooks is found, the hood size can be used to find the needed air flow rate. From this the (higher) blower specified (zero static pressure) air flow rate can be estimated. Many topics on this forum address this subject. kas
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kaseki
last year
What you have with an alcove is a hood extension that for the back burners behaves more or less like a normal wall hood, but for the front burners plume capture depends on the air flow into the alcove to be sufficiently high velocity that it entrains the cooking plumes and deviates them from their normal expanding cone shape such that they are pulled into the upper part of the alcove. This is difficult when the cooking plumes are from energetic cooking with grease or oil, such as searing or wok cooking, where with gas burner hot combustion products included the plume velocity may be 4 ft/s.
- A deeper alcove helps, but then moving pans and such to side surfaces becomes awkward.
- An alcove with a protruding hood can work, but deviates from the "idea"
- Higher than normally sufficient hood flow rate helps, but adds noise and cost.
- Energetic cooking only on the back burners could be a solution, at some inconvenience.
- In general, every deviation from standard commercial practice for the benefit of residential application causes an efficiency or performance degradation.
Normally, a wall hood with base at 7 ft (4 ft from the cooktop) requires a cooktop overlap of about 6 inches each side and front to achieve capture under conditions of plume expansion and room air motion. The illustrated alcove might provide only half that, front-to-back. We need some dimensions of the overall plan to estimate air flow requirements. Standard inserts, such as one can find in the Wolf Design Guide, are marginal in the front to back dimension at 36 inches mounting height, so using them at 48 inches will not provide the desired coverage, although they will likely fit the alcove..

You might need a tailor-made insert to go into the top of the alcove, and some thought as to how that might be installed and removed should be pursued with your contractor or carpenter. Don't forget that hood systems in this size range will also require make-up air, another pain to integrate into the house, albeit easier when designing from scratch.

alcove hood vent height

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palimpsest

palimpsest

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