Range Hoods: The Vent-A-Hood Difference

It’s usually the first competitors in the market that nab the generic name – xerox, kleenex, jacuzzi, tupperware – but whether or not you call your range hood a Vent-A-Hood, these pioneers in range hood technology still bring something unique to the table. The secret’s in the fan. Vent A Hood range hoods all come standard with their patented “magic lung” centrifugal blowers. They’re cleaner, quieter, and impressively effective – but what’s the difference?

First and foremost, Vent A Hood range hoods are designed a little differently from your average range hood. All range hoods are designed to cover your cooktop, but most of them are covered all across the bottom with a layer of wire mesh filters. While, on the surface, this might seem logical – after all, you’re trying to filter out the bad air, right? – all it really does is gum up your vent with grease and allow gross cooking air to go elsewhere in your kitchen. Vent A Hood range hoods like this Decorative Wall Hood, on the other hand, are totally open on the bottom, which allows the hot air to rise naturally and catches and funnels it up and out through your ventilation.

The second difference in the fan itself. While most range hoods use conventional fans to force cooking air upwards and out through your ventilation, Vent A Hood range hoods like this Steel Range Hood use centrifugal fans that work a little bit differently. Instead of just blowing air upwards, each fan pulls air in from the sides (after it’s been caught in the hood) and spins it around. Think a centrifuge – those things that spin vials of blood on your favorite crime or medical show. What this does is forces the grease and other contaminants in the air outward onto a little drip tray before sending the much-cleaner air out through your ventilation, preventing the horrific and hard-to-clean buildup of old gross grease on the inside of your hood.

The corollary is that Vent A Hood range hoods are incredibly easy to clean. While most range hoods have those awful greasy vents that are almost impossible to get clean, a Vent A Hood range hood like this Wall Mounted Range Hood simply spits all that grease out into a removable metal tray that’s smaller than a cookie sheet. Just pop the tray out, empty the pan, wipe clean, and put it back in. No soaking, no scrubbing, and no unsightly, still-slightly-greasy filters to put back or replace.

These specialized fans are good for something else, too: they’re quiet. If you’ve ever turned on a range hood, then turned it down or off because it was too noisy – or worse, not turned it on at all because of the sound, you know what a nuisance most range hoods can be. That’s because most range hoods only have a single standard fan. To wick away more smoke and cooking air, you have to turn up the fan, and every time you turn up the fan, it adds power and gets louder.  But Vent A Hood range hoods like this 66 Inch Range Hood come with more than one fan – in fact, larger models have as many as four. Why? Because by increasing the number of fans, you can get the same suction power of a standard fan on full blast, without ever increasing the noise above the lowest setting.

In fact, in lab tests, Vent A Hood range hoods like this Under Cabinet Range Hood are the only range hoods out there that don’t compete with human speech, even on their highest setting. That means that while most range hoods are difficult to talk over, can make it hard to hear, and produce noise at a level that’s actually irritating to human hearing, Vent A Hood range hoods don’t. In fact, the study shows that the 67 decibel sound level of a Vent A Hood is actually pleasing to the ear – and no matter how many of them you have on at once, it’ll never sound like more than one quiet hum.

Of course, sound isn’t the only factor (though getting yourself to turn the range hood on in the first place is a pretty big one!). Vent A Hood range hoods like are ideally suited for a wide range of home applications, from the casual cook to those with professional culinary grade appliances. Those with multiple fans, like this Wall Mount Hood, are even better for high-end cooking appliances, because you can get better targeted ventilation, pulling up more air over the parts of the stove you’re cooking on, and leave the parts you aren’t using turned off.

The flexibility of having multiple fans has an interesting secondary advantage as well, and addresses a problem with your existing range hood that you might not even have considered. If you have a very large  range hood over a very large kitchen range, but are only using one or two burners, traditional range hoods still pull air up from across the entire cooking surface. That means they’re also pulling out the heating or air conditioning in your home and spitting it right outside, wasting it and running up your electric bill. Vent A Hood range hoods like this Professional Island Hood collect only the air rising up from your stove, draw it away only from the burners you’re using, and filter out the grease before venting the steam, leaving your kitchen clean, cool, and smelling fresh.

From top to bottom, in big ways and small, Vent A Hood range hoods come out ahead of the competition. If you’re unhappy with your current one, or if you’re looking to remodel your kitchen, there’s really no better change you can make to improve the air quality and usability of your kitchen. What type of range hood are you looking for? What do you hate about your current one?