On 11/2/2023 at 3:45 AM, Deephaven said:The driving force to switch is two fold. A somewhat simple meal will turn my 70f kitchen into an 80-85f in the summer and the grease propagation from the heat is seriously insane. I have a ventahood and it is basically useless. Perhaps a large 1600cfm vent would deal better but even then the amount of residue you'd have to clean out of the vent is awful.
Ventahoods are fundamentally useless; the technology doesn't work. I'd suggest looking up threads on Houz (formerly Garden Web). There are couple of engineers who post there who have cracked the code on hoods, and explain pretty well how and why most consumer hoods fail. The answers have more to do with creating a large boxed-in space above the range ("capture area") than with cfm. But also, standard restaurant-style baffles do the job for removing grease as long there's adequate air speed going over them. The centrifugal ventahood method is a mess.
Edited to add: I've been planning a kitchen renovation for a year now; the hardest part (besides coming up with the money) has been figuring out how to get decent ventilation. The consumer options are mostly terrible. And it's hard to find a commercial installer who will talk to a homeowner. The best solutions I've seen are by people who hired an HVAC engineer and had a custom installation, but I'm hoping not to spend my life savings on a vent.
