I guess it would depend on how much you cook and what you cook? How often do you expect to run the hood on full blast while entertaining? I can you I have done that literally... never. I rarely use my 1000cfm hood above the low setting and while you can certainly hear that its on, its not obnoxiously loud. At medium the kids give me a side eye & turn up the volume on the tv or ipad a little if they happen to be watching something in the kitchen. On high, it IS pretty loud.

I did some stir fry last night and even with that medium setting is fine (embarrassingly I cooked myself a hamburger this morning for breakfast, I also used medium for that). And when I use the higher settings, its generally for a few minutes at a time and rarely/never for extended periods of time.

If a quieter hood suddenly magically appeared in my kitchen, I wouldn't complain but the complexity of doing anything other than an internal blower just wasn't worth it to me. No regrets.

great input. What hood/blower do you have?

I cook probably 4-5 nights a week, and I dont stir fry (yet) but saute/pan fry often.

It's 54" thermador and it came "free" with the rest of my appliances.

I'm going with a 36" wolf (6 burner, no built-in griddle nor grill) with a wolf 36" hood at my new place. I, too, saw the recommendations here about going at least 3" over on both sides. I chose not to because:

1. Added expense of going to a 42" hood.
2. Losing another half a foot on the upper cabinets. (Existing kitchen had a standard 30" range, so I've already lost half a foot on the uppers and lowers.)
3. Wolf recommends 36" as a minimum (i.e. 42" would be better but 36" will work).
4. Frying and stir frying, which I don't do much of, can be done in the center as well when using my Lodge cast iron griddle/grill.

Wolf offers internal, in-line and external blowers. I chose to go with internal because it's cheaper and easier to access the blowers should something go wrong.

re:Kaseki

When you say the hood aperture should be able to overhang the burners by 3"..do you mean the burner itself? or the range? Just curious....I am 6'6" and there is no way I am going to go with a hood deeper than 24" regardless of what best practice or fire code or anything dictates lol.

The main reason I was thinking an inline blower would be better than roof mounted is because we live in the northeast...so anything on the roof is subjected to a lot more than anything inside the attic...and its also a 2 story colonial with a fairly steep pitched roof so accessing the blower for maintenance in the attic would be considerably easier.

Just e-mailed fantech to see if they recommend compatibility with some hoods over others.

"When you say the hood aperture should be able to overhang the burners by 3"..do you mean the burner itself? or the range? Just curious....I am 6'6" and there is no way I am going to go with a hood deeper than 24" regardless of what best practice or fire code or anything dictates lol."

Specifically, I should have said the intake aperture overlap the largest (to be used on a front burner) pan edges by about 10 degrees relative to vertical at the hood mounting height. This is for full capture of the highest velocity components of the plume.

I think it is fair to note that I mainly address best practice (as I understand it based on physical phenomena) as a goal for design; any lesser configuration is a personal choice of the person who has to pay for the configuration and deal with the consequences of choice. It would be very expensive to set up a candidate range/hood/blower/MUA configuration and determine for a given person's cooking just what level of uncaptured cooking plume resulted from that configuration, much less evaluate for persons likely to be present the match between the plume escape fraction and their tolerance for odor and grease, and from that make a recommendation.

Does it matter if a hood, lets say its 42x24x18 has 3" of metal in the front of it for the lights and knobs, vs having 6 inches? Basically despite them both being 24" deep, your aperture goes from 21" to just 18" doesn't it? Just curious since with all the talk on these forums about hood dimensions and sizes and aperture etc...I havent come across much conversation about certain hoods being better than others due to the design (in the sense of the control/light bar taking up too much space and making the aperture smaller).

Also does anyone know a rough cost for a wood/cabinet to put a liner in? I wanted to go with a canopy system as I mentioned above but when I called fantech today to ask if they had any hoods that they worked particularly well with (I was thinking they would know some brands where their controls mate up especially easily) they suggested their own insert. I ddint know it existed until the call but all their stuff just seems pretty reasonably priced...only ~500 for the liner?

When I called Fantech last week to inquire about about hood compatibility, I was told that if the hood has a variable speed control knob, then it should be compatible with fantech's variable speed inline and exterior fans.

The hoods I've found so far that meet this design requirement are:

* Broan Elite E64000 series,

* BEST by Broan Classico & Classico Poco,

* BEST by Broan Centro & Centro Poco.

There could be more Fantech compatible hoods, so please feel free to add to this list!

I believe wolf should work as well.

Broan Elite has some crappy reviews...though they talk about it being loud so who knows if thats due to the internal blowers (which you would not be using with a fantech inline blower) or due to poor hood design.

Incidentally a rep from Yale told me the iq internal blowers by broan were the quietest on the market...notably more quiet than other brands.

I find the classico and centro to be kinda weird looking...though I just saw a photo of the centro in an installed photo and it looked ok.

Conversely, love the look of the wolf.

Your hood decision depends a lot on what kinds of cooking you do, how often, what your tolerance is for lingering odors, what your tolerance is for noise, and of course... budget.

More: https://www.gardenweb.com/discussions/5161173/hood-faq

If you cook infrequently and when you do it's maybe cooking some rice or frying some eggs then just about any hood will likely do.

On the other end of the spectrum... We pan fry 2-4 times per week and entertain (with dinner) frequently. I really dislike the odors of meals past, don't want our house to smell like that, don't want guests to smell lingering odors and I really dislike loud consumer hoods. So,unable to find a consumer hood with sufficient containment area to work well, we're installing a commercial hood with an inline silencer & blower.

BTW, a 12" thermostatic griddle is actually quite useful. We've had one for about 2 decades and been quite happy. FWIW, our new range will be a 48" with 4 burners and a 24" thermostatic griddle.

I bought a Victory Range Hood and the reviews on here are pretty solid.