Do awesome kitchen exhaust systems exist?

[Kaido]

I'm thinking maybe some kind of custom construction enclosed kitchen/cooking room attached to the house with just the stove/cooktop and massive exhaust system just for that room. That way I can do my cooking there and not smoke or smell up the whole house. Probably expensive but I do love food. I have some friends who has outdoor kitchens and does quite a bit of cooking outdoor, tho it sucks during wintertime.

Yeah I do a lot of cooking outdoors on my grill, but some stuff I like to do indoors. I even do my Wok indoors on a gas camping-style stove.

FYI if anyone wants to get into Wok cooking, the best system I've ever found is the "Wok Star" kit from Eleanor Ho - complete kit with a camper stove & video training for about $215, worth every penny if you want to learn stir-fry & do really fast meals:

http://eleanorhoh.com/

 

[Eug]

You can get make up air systems for residential, but they're pretty much restricted to recent custom high end luxury homes, because of the cost and the hassle factor for installation, and because they're usually associated with 48" or 60" stoves.

BTW, our Viking stove goes to 15000 BTU per burner, but 18000 or even 22000 BTUs isn't that rare anymore. Actually, I like some of the mid-range stoves that have a single 18000 burner, and then a small 5000 BTU burner for simmering. Ours are all 15000 and while it does low heat pretty well for a 15000 BTU burner, it doesn't do it as well as 5000 would.

Since you mentioned wok cooking, it should be noted that restaurant wok burners are upwards of 100000 BTU (!). That means it's impossible to do it in a standard home kitchen. The hoods for those are hardcore, and are equipped with fire extinguisher systems.

According to that Eleanor Hoh page, those camping stoves range from about 7500 to 12000 BTU. We have one actually, but I use it for hot pot.

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P.S. Just to be clear you understand what we're doing here by opening the window:

My 600 cfm hood blows air out the back through the wall outside the house. It sucks air from the kitchen and blows it out. If I open the window, it becomes more efficient. It sucks air in through the window (instead of from elsewhere in the house), and blows it out.

However, I try not to do that if my wood fireplace is going. The good news is that my fireplace is not an open style.

With a 600 cfm fan, you can often get away with having no make up air. And with say a 250 cfm fan you don't need make up air. However, most 250 cfm fans aren't so useful. Try searing a roast and you'll probably have smoke everywhere, whereas with a deep hood (ours is 18") with 600 cfm and there isn't much smoke that stays behind. We have a back-vented 300ish cfm microwave/hood in the basement, with essentially no depth to it. It's useless IMO, except for really light cooking.

You can get up to about 1200 cfm for residential, and at those air flows, make up air becomes a lot more advisable. As a comparison, my oversized 100000 BTU furnace that heated my house only had a 1200 cfm fan. My current furnace is more properly sized at 70000 BTU, and I'm probably running it at 400 cfm in the winter.

 

[BoomerD]

Occasionally I cook stuff that will smoke the house out and end up using a pair of floor fans and opening the window. Fortunately my current rental place has a tiny kitchen and I can exhaust the fumes out pretty easily, but when I move into a home someday I'd like something that actually works well. And not just over the range, but over in-wall ovens as well. Or if the toaster burns something. Or whatever. I've never seen a residential system that doesn't work like crap. Does such a thing exist?

Dude...you're not supposed to use the apartment smoke detector as a kitchen timer! :whiste:

Yes, there are some fabulous kitchen exhaust systems...but they're NOT cheap.

 

[Kaido]

Dude...you're not supposed to use the apartment smoke detector as a kitchen timer! :whiste:

Yes, there are some fabulous kitchen exhaust systems...but they're NOT cheap.

Those pancakes in my other thread weren't black originally :$ :biggrin:

 

[Kaido]

You can get make up air systems for residential, but they're pretty much restricted to recent custom high end luxury homes, because of the cost and the hassle factor for installation, and because they're usually associated with 48" or 60" stoves.

BTW, our Viking stove goes to 15000 BTU per burner, but 18000 or even 22000 BTUs isn't that rare anymore. Actually, I like some of the mid-range stoves that have a single 18000 burner, and then a small 5000 BTU burner for simmering. Ours are all 15000 and while it does low heat pretty well for a 15000 BTU burner, it doesn't do it as well as 5000 would.

Since you mentioned wok cooking, it should be noted that restaurant wok burners are upwards of 100000 BTU (!). That means it's impossible to do it in a standard home kitchen. The hoods for those are hardcore, and are equipped with fire extinguisher systems.

According to that Eleanor Hoh page, those camping stoves range from about 7500 to 12000 BTU. We have one actually, but I use it for hot pot.

---

P.S. Just to be clear you understand what we're doing here by opening the window:

My 600 cfm hood blows air out the back through the wall outside the house. It sucks air from the kitchen and blows it out. If I open the window, it becomes more efficient. It sucks air in through the window (instead of from elsewhere in the house), and blows it out.

However, I try not to do that if my wood fireplace is going. The good news is that my fireplace is not an open style.

With a 600 cfm fan, you can often get away with having no make up air. And with say a 250 cfm fan you don't need make up air. However, most 250 cfm fans aren't so useful. Try searing a roast and you'll probably have smoke everywhere, whereas with a deep hood (ours is 18") with 600 cfm and there isn't much smoke that stays behind. We have a back-vented 300ish cfm microwave/hood in the basement, with essentially no depth to it. It's useless IMO, except for really light cooking.

You can get up to about 1200 cfm for residential, and at those air flows, make up air becomes a lot more advisable. As a comparison, my oversized 100000 BTU furnace that heated my house only had a 1200 cfm fan. My current furnace is more properly sized at 70000 BTU, and I'm probably running it at 400 cfm in the winter.

And I'm perfectly happy with that 12000 BTU camp stove for Wok cooking - does the job perfectly! Which is also nice when the power goes out (happened twice last year - hurricane & then snowstorm, was out a couple weeks!). I also use a variety of appliances, including a large, flat electric griddle when I have a lot of family/friends over and do a ton of pancakes/eggs/bacon type of stuff. So there's various smoky stuff lying around on random counters instead of underneath vents.

So part one of the house design is looking at HRV/ERV systems since the walls are so air-tight, as well as just being a fresh-air ventilation system for handling CO2 buildup, and the other part is some sort of zoning system. My buddy has a very old house and just put in Mitsubishi Mr. Slims into every room this past summer. So basically zoned HVAC on a per-room basis, and everyone gets to choose their own room temp, fan control, etc. So if I went that route, or with a split-system, I would have a little more control over the room's air in the kitchen. However, I want the kitchen to be open and to be the central hub of the house - opening into both the dining room and the family room - so it gets a little more tricky since it's a not a nice, sealed room.

Maybe I'll stick a Dyson Air Blade on my Roomba and have that puppy roll around the kitchen while I'm cooking :biggrin:

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

Maybe I was confused. Is the one that sticks down out of the ceiling different than a ceiling fan? Since the smoke would rise above the ceiling pedestal version in your link.

The air is sucked into the vent it doesn't allow the smoke to rise past it. Unless the appliance you're trying to vent is too far away. In which case you move the vent or get another wall mounted vent over said grill. Stop thinking about the average home vent which makes noise and doesn't move enough air to blow out a candle, we're talking about moving the entire volume of air in your kitchen every minute.

 

[Eug]

Those Mr. Slims don't push much air.

Put in a 900 cfm vent in the kitchen and you'll be sucking in air from everywhere else in the house regardless, esp. in an open concept house. If you are building your dream house, consider a 48" stove with a 48" vent that's at least 18" tall, with a heated & cooled make-up air system.

BTW, this is my finished basement, with the new kitchen downstairs.

It has a microwave with a built-in fan, vented to the outside. It's 300 cfm, and it's basically useless. The fan part has very little height to it, and the microwave isn't very deep front to back either.

OTOH, our Vent-a-Hood is 600 cfm, 18" tall, and 24" front to back. Even on low flow mode which I'm guessing is around 300-400 cfm, it works pretty well. On full strength mode - 600 cfm - it works very well. On full strength mode with the window open, it's excellent.

 

[Atty]

Gizmodo posted on recently that rose up between or next to the stove top and sucked the air away. When it wasn't in use it would lower down and leave a flush table top behind. Too lazy to find.

 

[Eug]

Is it anything like this one?

http://www.smarthouse.com.au/Appliances/Kitchen/M6C7W9R7?page=1

If so, I suspect it would be terrible. $10000 just to have a gimmick... and much inferior air movement.

BTW, it seemed to me when I was looking at range hoods, the best looking range hoods had the worst designs in terms of air flow.

 

[yhelothar]

http://www.pacairusa.com/mainThisRHProduct.php?ProductID=RL-30B

I can vouch for this one. My cast iron grill is notorious for setting off the smoke alarm during my undergrad rooming days. The entire kitchen would smoke up even with the doors and windows open. Now that I have a pacair, the 963CFM with two fans and a slanted hood exhausts pretty much all of the fumes.

 

[Eug]

Heheh, that video with the Chinese sales guy on this page reminds me of those old dubbed Bruce Lee movies.

BTW, you'll notice that in the video they have this short height fans underneath a cabinet. Often times you can simply remove the cabinet and then put in a much taller wall-mount hood.

If everything else is equal, often a wall-mount tall hood will work better than an under-the-cabinet hood, at the same cfm.

 

[NetWareHead]

Gizmodo posted on recently that rose up between or next to the stove top and sucked the air away. When it wasn't in use it would lower down and leave a flush table top behind. Too lazy to find.

Sounds like downdraft ventilation. My parents insisted on building a kitchen with a range on a center island. They didn;t want a hood in the center of the kitchen and therefore a downdraft was the only choice. I wasn't too crazy about it, the house still smelled when cooking and it couldnt be used to eliminate much smoke. Furthermore, if you turned it up too high, the suction effect disturbed the flames from the gas burners. I won;t ever use one again if I can help it.

 

[Eug]

My sister had a retractable downdraft setup too, for their stove that was on a separate island in the centre of their kitchen. It looked cool, but it wasn't very effective. The weird part is that the house actually had the rough in for a over-the-range fan. There was a column that extended from the ceiling, and it could house a hood, but they just never bothered installing it.

 

[robphelan]

what are the options if your microwave sits over your stove/oven? it has a built in exhaust fan but if I have someone run the pipe up and through the roof, would it work well?

I may just have to find a new place for the microwave

 

[FallenHero]

Yup, and that's the point - sometimes I cook smokey stuff. My steak recipe is SUPER smokey and I like it about 100x better from the kitchen than on my grill outside. So I live with the smoke & fans.

There has to be a better way. Wall fans with ceiling vents or something.

You can always modify your grill or get accessory that allows you to smoke your steak the way you do in your kitchen, just outside. It would probably be much easier and cheaper then cutting holes in your house.

 

[PsiStar]

I have a 60" viking range hood over a viking wok gas + range mixed. As soon as I figure out what web site that I don't have to subscribe to upload the photo ... I will up load the photo. The blower is up in the hood & blows out thru a 12" duct. Variable speed but does make quite a draft at full speed.

 

[PaNsyBoy8]

This is the one I use

http://www.sanyangpai.com/RangeHoods_Detail.asp?Model_ID=4

 

[Kaido]

I have a 60" viking range hood over a viking wok gas + range mixed. As soon as I figure out what web site that I don't have to subscribe to upload the photo ... I will up load the photo. The blower is up in the hood & blows out thru a 12" duct. Variable speed but does make quite a draft at full speed.

http://imgur.com/

 

[PsiStar]

http://i.imgur.com/76UjO.jpg

 

[alkemyst]

There are tons of premium kitchen (as well as bathroom) ventalation products. Most of the big boxes would carry them because people seem to be happy with just a $10 fan.

 

[JTsyo]

I have a Zephyr that pulls 1100 cfm, keeps the kitchen clean from smell other than when the pressure cooker is used.

 

[vshah]

my parents have a whole house fan in their kitchen. open a couple windows anywhere in the house, turn this fan on (~3ft diameter), and you'll feel a breeze throughout the house. works great as a kitchen exhaust too.