Hello,

We moved into our house last year, and due to various logistical difficulties, we went with a recirculating hood. We have an electric stove right now. In my city, I understand that to be code compliant a gas stove requires a certain amount of ventilation per b.t.u. of input. This ventilation does not need to be a hood, though. You can install a ceiling or wall extractor fan of the correct output. Electric stoves do not require any ventilation.

Our recirculating hood is better than no hood at all. We have a Broan AP1 hood with the recirculating kit. It catches a lot of grease (I need to clean the mesh filters frequently) and seems to absorb some odor with it's charcoal filters. It is rather noisy (seems like the recirculating vent is the noisy part, rather than the hood itself) and does not help much with steam, etc.

I would definitely check to make sure that it is truly impossible to vent your hood before agreeing to do a recirculating hood, but if you end up with a recirc hood, you may want to install some kind of extractor fan/vent elsewhere in the kitchen, depending on how much cooking you do.

Good luck!
Josh

Push back on your GC about adding ducting. Ducting can usually be added to existing houses and it sounds like your house isn't fully built yet. Of course, he may try to charge you a lot for adding it at this point.

being ventless means you learn to avoid cooking certain ways and certain foods.

with a vent, you have way more comfort, way more food and cooking options, and you can sell more easily later.

My builder tried to tell me I didn't need a vented hood because he didn't want the trouble of putting one in. Whatever, dude, just install it. ;-) My BIL's builder actually told him that it was against code to have a VENTED hood--liar, liar, pants on fire. I don't know why builders don't like to install vented hoods, but that seems to be the consensus...

Judging by the nasty smells that sometimes linger in my sister's house, ventless just is not as good. LOL

ventless should be your last option (only if your building code does not allow venting).
otherwise, move your cooktop under the window and put an exhaust fan :)

For various reasons we've had a ventless hood for 20 years. Never again. First, the smoke alarms tend to go off with certain types of cooking. When my son was 2 he would push a chair under the smoke detector whenever I used the old crusty oven because more likely than not it went off. I couldn't make bacon without the smoke alarms in the background. an if anything actually burned...

In the next house and our "temporary" kitchen that lasted 10 years we had another ventless hood. With a brick wall near the stove each grove would collect cooking oils and then dirt. What a pain to clean. Oh, and whatever you cooked can be smelled for days. I now have a 1600 cfm vent and it's quieter than my ventless. Love it, love it.

If you don't really cook then it shouldn't be an issue - but if there's a chance cooking will be done in the future try to get a vented hood.