Almost every modern kitchen will feature a cooker hood. These exceptionally handy and practical additions perform an essential service to your cooking area, ensuring a constant flow of air to ensure cleanliness, hygiene and breathable space.
Unlike key components like cookers or fridges, wall-mounted cooker hoods can sometimes be left right until the end of design – which can sometimes be too late to install the right hood for the job.
So, it pays to have a serious think about which wall mounted cooker hood is the best one for your home and kitchen – and in this guide, we’re going to look at the big things you need to be thinking about.
Type of hood
There are two main types of cooker hood – one is the extraction hood, and the other is the recirculation hood.
Extraction hoods are cooker hoods that remove the air from your kitchen completely. They do this by extracting the air through ducts which take it outside your home. Generally, this is the most effective way of cleaning the air from the room, but they can be a fair bit louder than recirculation hoods and often more difficult to install thanks to the extra ducting.
Recirculation hoods work by taking the air from the kitchen and filtering it through a series of filters. Once the air is filtered, it gets pushed back out into the room without the smells or the particles that can cause dirt buildup. They’re cheaper, easier to install and quieter, but they don’t remove the dirty air entirely – and often the filters can’t eradicate all of the unclean air.
Size
Naturally, one of the first things to consider is the size of your cooker hood and whether it will actually fit over your cooking space.
You’ll want it to be wider than where you’ll be doing your food preparation, so that the coverage can take in all the excess air and steam. But it’s not just about the width; your cooker also has to be tall enough to match the height of your cabinet so that it doesn’t stand out and distract from your interior style.
Noise
Fans cause noise, that probably comes as no surprise. But what can be a surprise is just how invasive that noise can be – especially if your kitchen doubles up as your eating space.
That’s why it’s always important to think about the noise levels of the fan you’re intending to install. Fortunately, most listings for cooker heads – including ours at Candy – come with the noise levels in decibels so you can get an idea of how loud the fan can get.
Just keep an eye out for the (dB) in the technical or performance specifications. You’ll most likely want to go for something below 65dB – anything louder than that will be much more noticeable.
Connectivity
The most state of the art cooker hoods will boast Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connectivity – which means you can remotely control almost all elements of your hood’s performance.
You can turn up the fan speed for example if the cooking smells are a bit too much, turn on the LED light for a little more illumination on those candlelit nights or just turn it off to bring down the noise levels.
And the best part is, you can do it all from your phone. That makes ideal for dinner parties where you might be on the other side of the room, socialising away, while keeping an eye on the hob.
Those are just some of the things you should keep an eye out for when choosing the right wall mounted cooker hood for you and your kitchen.
Ready to find out more? What not start with this excellent wall-mounted black hood with tempered glass – one of our customer favourites.
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