Under-Cabinet Range Hood

An Under-Cabinet Range Hood screws to the underside of the wall cabinet above your range, so the cabinet keeps its storage and the hood borrows its footprint. Housings run 5 to 8 inches tall and 17 to 22 inches deep, with the blower sitting inside the shell rather than out in the duct. Most sell as convertible units: a knockout on top ducts straight up through the cabinet, a rear knockout goes out through the wall behind, and with neither opened the same fan recirculates through a charcoal filter.

Compare it with a Wall-Mount Chimney Hood, which takes that cabinet away and repays you in canopy depth and blower size. A Slide-Out Hood is the shallow cousin, pulling a visor forward over the front burners as it starts. A Microwave Hood Combination fills the identical slot with a cooking cavity and a weaker fan. A Hood Insert does this same work, but only once a joiner has built a surround around it.

Choose this style when the cabinet run already exists and you want the cheapest fix, usually 200 to 700 dollars plus a short duct. It keeps up with an electric cooktop, weekday pan cooking, steaming and roasting. Look elsewhere if you cook on gas above roughly 45,000 BTU of total burner output, use a wok most weeks, or shallow fry often, because 250 to 400 CFM under a 20 inch canopy cannot hold that plume. Cabinet depth caps you as well: a 12 inch cabinet leaves your front burners outside the hood entirely.

Check which duct exit the model actually offers, since a top knockout is useless where the pipe has to leave through the wall behind. Ask for certified airflow rather than a bare number, filters that come out without tools, and a canopy of 20 inches or more. Three speeds is the floor. Read the sone figure at top speed, confirm the lamps are replaceable, and rap the shell with a knuckle, because thin steel drums once the blower spins.

Filters come out monthly through frying season and go into hot soapy water; aluminum mesh survives a dishwasher but darkens, while stainless baffles shrug it off. Reach past them twice a year and degrease the blower wheel. On a ducted install, confirm no charcoal filter was left sitting in the housing, a common handover mistake that quietly costs a third of the airflow. Once a year, run the fan and watch the outside cap to see its damper swing open.