We love our Prestige hood! It is loud, though, but I think that's an installation issue.

Designing the hood system based on the many comments I and others have made here should not be too difficult, but designing the make-up air system (which you will need unless living in a typical Samoan residence) is more complicated due to house architectural issues, and the wide variety (including none) of possible combustion appliances that might be involved.

Best WPD39M42SB: Set the height at 6'4" and you will be fine with head hitting. Be sure to calculate how much flow rate your entry area needs, and the blower needed to supply it under the conditions of baffle pressure loss, duct pressure loss, and imperfect MUA replacement. Multiple redundant messages on this topic may be found in this forum.

Others: Depth is sufficient if a line from the cook's side edge of the largest pan to be used on a front burner to the inside edge of the hood above that point is less than 10 degrees from vertical. Else, it might be OK depending on side cabinets, CFM, tangential flow over the light bar, cooking style, etc.

Wolf: They have similar models, and should be part of your trade space.

Modernaire: They typically do custom, but the cost might not be out of scope.

Recommend using an external blower and an intermediate silencer to greatly reduce noise at the cook's ears.

MUA: You need a HVAC engineer (or bright contractor) who either understands the issues with MUA or who can extrapolate from the many MUA related threads here.

On containment volume: The value of containment volume is to allow a lower CFM to successfully deal with transient cooking plumes, and in general average the plume containment over the entire baffle space instead of that immediately above the plume source. Significant improvement (CFM reduction) requires the kind of volume that commercial hoods provide and that an 18-inch high canopy can't. So, more is better, but the improvement may be low where the volume is only a few cubic feet at best.

Modernaire is a great choice. It is what we have over our BlueStar.

I can third the recommendation for Modernaire. Very happy with our custom-designed hood. Looks great and takes care of all the cooking smells in our open-floorplan kitchen.

As @kaseki suggests, we mounted our hood above head height and then made sure that it has plenty of overhang. That's so much better than what you see in many residential kitchens these days. I like having a clear line of sight and easy access to all my pots. It also makes using the potfiller much easier.

In process of replacing a 36" Zephyr with a 42" Vent a Hood. The Vent a Hood is much more quiet than the Zephyr. Haven't cooked anything yet but the Vent a Hood is doing an amazing job of sucking drywall dust out of the air.

Then, the Vent a Hood is a lot more powerful--much higher CFM rating (and still about half as noisy as the Zephyr) and has a huge capture area and a lot more depth. 27" deep. The Zephyr had no capture area--one of swoop bottom hoods .Don't make my mistake!!

Also got a great deal on the VAH--$700. New/ out of the box. Dual blowers. Never installed. Facebook MktPlace find.

What I don't like about the VAH--the integrated LED lights are too yellow. Will replace with 5000k color temperature sometime down the road. I miss the timed shut off the Zephyr had but that is all that I miss about it. VAH is strictly manual control.

Our house came with a VentAHood (well, technically it came with a Viking; but that was just a rebadged VAH). It never worked as well as our ModernAire, but it certainly is an improvement over lower-end budget brands. My best guess is that VAH is a lot more susceptible to back pressure. Others have reported on this issue before in this forum. Make sure you have very large diameter ducts that don't run a long distance nor have any bends. Also, make sure you have a very good make-up-air system. Anecdotally, more traditional fan designs in combination with baffles instead of squirrel cages deal better with these type of challenges.

That's not to say that VAH can't be made to work. But it might take a little more planning, where other designs are a little more forgiving of design mistakes in other parts of the system.

I have an extremely short run straight up thru the roof. Used about 18" of 10" duct. Used a gooseneck roof cap. Not the prettiest roof cap but it is on the back side of the house and the taller cap just looked like it would be more efficient/ less restrictive. Ordered it from Roofing Direct.

The Modernaire models do look excellent, but are outside my budget.

Can anyone comment on the loudness of the Best / Broan hoods when they have a built-in double blower? My preference will be for external or inline, but I'm not sure if it will be possible.

Keep in mind everyone that the pressure loss in the MUA path adds to the pressure loss in the hood system path when determining the hood blower's performance from its fan curve. And a short MUA path can still have some pressure loss if filtered to keep out dust.

(In the listing below, the feet-per-minute columns are equivalent to CFM per square foot, and the pressure drops are in inches of water column as most (USA-sourced) fan curves are presented.)

(I don't recall the source of these data.)

So, if one had a 2 x 2 ft 3M Filtrite 1000 filter in an actual 800 CFM MUA path, the flow would be 200 ft/min and one would have to extrapolate the pressure loss from the flow data to some value around 0.2 inches, w.c. This is a similar loss to what one might get from a baffle filter on a hood at that flow rate. So if one's residence's lack of combustion appliances allows "passive" MUA (no blower), such pressure losses have to be accounted for in choosing the hood blower. Otherwise an MUA blower is needed or the combustion appliances need to be configured to have their own MUA taking them out of the equation.

@Paul R did you make a decision? im considering prestige as well but its a bit more than budget allows

@Georgeanne, Not yet! We're still working on buying the house. Will have to do quite a bit of damage control before dealing with kitchen and other fun stuffl

im about to enter the demo phase good luck!