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Comment by orliesaurus | Hacker News Reader

The narrative in this article is heavy, but basically if I understand this right..cooking food indoors pollutes the air, and because you are in your kitchen indoors, you're polluting your own living space's air?

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The kitchen exhaust fans in American homes are very weak (at least, every one I've lived in, and visited...). When cooking, you can smell what people are cooking, so it's not really doing its job of pulling the air out. I upgraded begrudgingly to a Chines brand called Fotile. It's expensive and I fought tooth and nail with my wife because my natural instincts was not to trust Chinese brands I never heard of. Admittedly, it's one of my best purchases. We can be frying stuff on the stove and standing 5 feet away, you won't smell it.

And like the link below says...it's the biggest appliance company I've never heard of. I have the one pictured on the left.

https://www.treehugger.com/kitchen-design/chinese-manufactur...

God I fucking hate the nonsense "range vents" on the bottoms of microwaves that is typical of many American homes (mine included). They do literally nothing. It's infuriating that in my new-construction, rather nice, home I get this pretend bullshit in my otherwise lovely kitchen.

I'm tempted to get a proper range hood just because this infuriates me so much, but the cost of redoing the whole cabinet above the stove is steep.

Lol I was in the same boat. House is new construction, GE appliances... I took down the microwave and replaced it with the Fotile hood. The microwave (its huge...) sits on my counter.

Needed to do minor custom wood work to mount and make it look nice, but it's doable. My dad was a carpenter so it was easy to get done.

Thanks, I wondered about that. Just moved to a new place that has one. Noticed that air pollution levels as measured by my laseregg still stay fairly high if I'm frying and have the fume hood on. It indeed seems to do little, which is unfortunate.

That's my take home. I hate being in a room that has no ventilation. I even get pains in my chest quite quickly. So have learned to always throw open windows if possible. All year round I have the kitchen window open when cooking. We don't bother heating the kitchen or bathroom (south UK rarely below 0). And I like to replenish stale air periodically by creating a deliberate draft for a few minutes throughout the house. If not it soon stinks. I am totally repulsed at the smell of burnt toast and lingering cooking smells, so wonder if that's a natural gagging response.

"The narrative in this article is heavy"... to put it mildly. It's terrible writing.

Maybe I'm just not part of the target audience

Yeah I'm still waiting for a TL;DR, but doubt anyone made it all the way through yet, it's so long, verbose and yet empty.

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