I used to think range hoods were just glorified fans until I moved into an apartment where the previous tenant had somehow managed to coat the ceiling in a thin layer of grease that caught the light at certain angles.
Kitchen ventilation isn’t just about keeping your smoke alarm from going off every time you sear a steak, though that’s certainly part of it. The air in your kitchen accumulates an astonishing amount of particulate matter—tiny droplets of aerosolized cooking oil, combustion byproducts if you have a gas stove, moisture from boiling water, and volatile organic compounds that off-gas from heated fats and proteins. Without proper ventilation, all of that settles on surfaces or, worse, lingers in the air you’re breathing. Studies have shown that indoor air quality during cooking can rival outdoor pollution levels in moderately trafficked urban areas, which is honestly kind of alarming when you think about how much time we spend in kitchens. The EPA has documented that gas stoves in particular release nitrogen dioxide at levels that would be illegal outdoors, and even electric cooking produces ultrafine particles that penetrate deep into lung tissue.
Here’s the thing: not all range hoods actually vent outside. Some are recirculating models that pull air through a filter and blow it back into your kitchen, which is better than nothing but not by much.
The fundamental divide in range hood options comes down to ducted versus ductless systems, and the performance gap is significant enough that it shapes everything else about your ventilation strategy. Ducted range hoods connect to ductwork that channels contaminated air outside your home, physically removing pollutants from your living space—this is the gold standard, the system that actually addresses the problem rather than managing it. Ductless or recirculating hoods pull air through charcoal filters that capture some grease and odors before returning the air to the kitchen, but they can’t remove moisture or combustion gases like carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide, which means they’re really just addressing symptoms. I guess they make sense in situations where installing ductwork is prohibitively expensive or structurally impossible, like in some older apartments or condos where you’d have to run ducts horizontally for dozens of feet, but calling them equivalent to ducted systems is misleading. The charcoal filters also need replacing every three to six months depending on use, which adds ongoing cost and creates a maintenance task that, let’s be honest, most people forget about.
Anyway, once you’ve settled on a ducted system, the next consideration is configuration.
Wall-mount or chimney-style hoods attach directly to the wall above your range and are probably what you picture when someone says “range hood”—they’re visible, they make a design statement, and they work well for ranges positioned against a wall. Island hoods suspend from the ceiling above a cooktop that’s built into a kitchen island, which presents additional challenges because the duct has to run up through the ceiling rather than out through a wall, and there’s no wall to help contain the cooking plumes, so these typically need to be wider and more powerful than wall-mount units covering the same cooking surface. Under-cabinet hoods tuck up beneath wall cabinets and offer a more subtle profile, though they generally sacrifice some capture efficiency because they’re shallower. Insert or liner hoods are basically the internal components that get built into custom cabinetry, popular in high-end kitchens where aesthetics demand that the ventilation disappear entirely. Downdraft systems are the weirdest option—they pull air downward through vents at or near the cooking surface and exhaust it through the floor or a nearby wall, defying the natural upward movement of hot cooking air, which makes them less effective but sometimes necessary for island cooktops where ceiling-mounted ventilation isn’t feasible or desirable.
Power gets measured in cubic feet per minute, or CFM, which indicates how much air the hood can move.
The Home Ventilating Institute recommends a minimum of 100 CFM per linear foot of range for wall-mounted hoods—so a 30-inch range would need at least 250 CFM—but that’s a baseline, not a target, and it assumes a relatively modest cooking style. If you cook with high heat frequently, have a commercial-style range that produces serious BTUs (gas ranges often output anywhere from 15,000 to 25,000 BTUs per burner, with some going higher), or do a lot of searing and wok cooking that generates substantial smoke, you’ll want significantly more airflow, possibly 400 to 600 CFM or even higher. Island hoods typically require 50% more CFM than wall-mounted models because they lack the wall to help contain and direct the cooking plumes. But here’s where it gets complicated: more CFM isn’t always better, because very high airflow rates create negative pressure in your home that can cause backdrafting of combustion appliances like furnaces and water heaters, potentially pulling carbon monoxide into living spaces, and they also pull out conditioned air that you’ve paid to heat or cool, which affects energy efficiency. Some building codes now require makeup air systems for hoods over 400 CFM—these are systems that introduce outside air to replace what the hood exhausts, maintaining neutral pressure, but they add cost and complexity. Also, higher CFM generally means more noise, measured in sones, and anything above 4 or 5 sones becomes intrusive enough that people stop using the hood at higher settings, which defeats the purpose.
The ductwork itself matters more than people realize, and this is where a lot of installations fail even with powerful hoods. Rigid metal ducts are far more efficient than flexible ducts, which create turbulence that reduces airflow—a flexible duct can reduce effective CFM by 25% or more compared to smooth rigid duct. Every 90-degree elbow in the duct path reduces efficiency, so the ideal installation has the shortest possible duct run with minimal bends, exiting through an exterior wall rather than up through the roof if possible. Duct diameter matters too; a 6-inch duct can’t handle the airflow from a high-CFM hood without creating excessive resistance that makes the motor work harder and reduces actual ventilation. And yet I’ve seen countless contractor installations where they squeezed in undersized flexible duct with multiple tight bends because it was easier than doing it right, leaving homeowners with expensive hoods that perform at maybe 60% of their rated capacity.
The honest truth is that most residential range hoods are underpowered and underutilized—people buy them because building codes require kitchen ventilation, then they never run them or only use the lowest setting because of noise, which barely moves enough air to matter. There’s this disconnect between the equipment and how it gets used, and I think it comes partly from the fact that you can’t see air quality degrading the way you can see visible smoke, so the feedback loop is weak. Maybe we’d take ventilation more seriously if our phones could measure PM2.5 levels in real time, which actually some newer devices can do. Until then, we’re mostly just dealing with the grease on the ceiling when it gets bad enough to notice.
