The stainless steel hood at our lake house is a PIA to keep clean. The least little bit of dust or grease shows up.

Wood would be easier to maintain the appearance, but it will still be just as dirty as stainless steel. It really depends on the look you want. Wood is more traditional, stainless is more modern. If the stove is located between other cabinets you can just have a shorter cabinet above the stove and put an exhaust system inside of it. But if your stove is a major feature of your kitchen you'd be better off to have a nice hood, whether stainless or wood. Or there are even other colors in enameled metal hoods.

@atlbeardie I was worried about that.

What vent hood are serious cooks purchasing? I have no idea which to purchase.

@C Cahill: You are now at stage 0. Stage 1 is when you have read a large number of "hood" and "MUA" threads here and their referenced material, and have a good idea of what requirements apply to kitchen ventilation. While I emphasize performance requirements, aesthetic and cost requirements must also be considered. Also, the architecture you are integrating these components into will strongly affect the details.

Stage 2 is when you have used the provided estimation methods to determine the requirements for your hood system and MUA system (if any). Stage 3 is where you look for hoods, blowers, silencers, MUA heaters, etc., as required or applicable, that meet your requirements. Stage 4 is when you figure out your installation of these systems, e.g., ducting paths. Stage 5 is when you buy them. Installation and test is left as an exercise for the serious cook student.

Suggestion, to start: search for hood and MUA threads where @opaone or myself have put in our oar. We are happy to help, once you know what it is you don't know and can't figure out.

Thank you! I have started reading but do they all last about the same? Can you compare apples to apples? Every company is telling you they are the best. It is like searching for a mattress.

Heh! Yes, mattress is a very good example. This is why ca. 2007 I started reading up on kitchen ventilation so I could ignore the magic that was being asserted and determine for myself what was needed.

In a hood, most of the effectiveness is embedded in the sheetmetal shapes and the blower motor and fan. I rarely hear of fan failures (I can only recall one on this forum). Broan absorbed NuTone that used to provide a lifetime guarantee. Wolf uses Broan.

If the hood exterior is non-magnetic stainless steel, it shouldn't ever rust or develop surface staining. What tends to fail in lower quality hoods are fan and light switches. These hoods may have thinner sheet metal, but that is not a point of failure. It might have a relationship with rattles.

Mean time to failure with electronics will typically decrease with increased parts count. So some risk of shorter lifetime may be present where fancy motor control circuits are in use.

It is fine to go shopping and look at hoods from the point of view of ease of use or lighting or construction quality, or aesthetics of design, but nothing should be purchased until you have gone through the process of understanding what you need a hood system to do and what its parameters have to be to achieve it.

Since modern higher performance residential hoods for pro-style cooking equipment derive their requirements from commercial cooking ventilation, you may wish to start by downloading and reading the first dozen or so pages of the Greenheck Guide: https://www.tagengineering.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/KVSApplDesign_catalog.pdf

Lots of great information. I know how many CFM's I need for my Wolf 36" range. I am having to vent through the wall and down and outside. I hope to get an inline blower to help push the air outside. This should make the vent noise less in the kitchen. The problem is the "cabinet" I was thinking I wanted is too small at the top for the vent that the appliance store had. So my next thought was I'll research this and find something that will work. Then the mattress feeling started. So I'm thinking if I find something that has enough CFMs; I can use an inline blower and fits. I'm good to go. Thanks again for your help and I'll keep you posted.

I like the idea of repeating the wood somewhere that’s higher than the lower cabinets

@CC I've addressed this a lot, but a naked hood doesn't have a CFM. The inline blower CFM, when installed in the ducting connected to the hood and depending on the MUA system, has a CFM determined by its fan curve. You want that CFM to match the ventilation requirement of the cooking process. This assumes that your far less than ideal ducting path can be countered by a suitable blower. It will be necessary to estimate the various pressure losses and find an inline blower from such as Fantech that can provide the CFM at the pressure loss estimated.