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Comment by kevin_thibedeau | Hacker News Reader

Pretty easily mitigated with a vent hood which all these tests don't have running.

All the vents in places I've rented have seemed hilariously ineffective even on the highest and super loud setting. Maybe good ones make a difference but how many people actually have good ones? And how many people actually use them every time the stove is on?

>All the vents in places I've rented have seemed hilariously ineffective even on the highest and super loud setting

A consumer organisation here studied "rangehoods" and (if memory serves) they found them all to close to useless.

consumer.org.nz - the reports are paywalled and I no longer subscribe, so mēh!

interesting... i wonder if it's because of the height constrained by aesthetic inputs.. i'm pretty sure if you stuck the vent like 50cm above the stove it surely can be a bit more than useless...

I think it's really just because there are no objective and enforced standards for it. I used to have a kitchen with a pretty high ceiling and a fume extractor mounted way up high, so high it was controlled by an IR remote, and it worked great while making little sound. Currently I have one of those integrated with a microwave oven that makes a lot of noise, blocks my view of half the range, and doesn't work at all. Plus even if it did work, it would vent right into my eyes, not to the outdoors.

My vent is about 5 feet above the stove. We had to build a little soffit to get it just within code regulations. It has a huge blower that is located in a small attic space about 20 feet away. 100% recommend! You can’t hear it at all and you can watch all the vapor and smoke from the stove waft right up and away into the unit.

The remote eats a pair of CR2450 cells every three months, so that could have been done better.

Which model vent is it?

That sounds like horrible usability; it's going to be in the way all the time, especially if you're a tad tall. I bet that's the far more important reason than aesthetics. I already don't like the regular ones because I need to be careful not to bump my head in to it.

Boil some water and watch where the steam goes. Because it's pulling air from around the pot along with it, including the hot waste gasses that heated the pot in the first place.

Even on the highest settings, I've never seen one that even makes a dent, or moves the column at all. They're snake oil and fashion, nothing more. And that's before talking about the ones that don't have any ductwork, and just blow it back out into the room.

Commercial-grade ones that move ridiculous quantities of air definitely work, and a tiny tiny handful of people have these in their homes. The rest have essentially nothing.

If you put a paper towel right under the fan you’ll see the paper towel get sucked into the fan.

Right under the fan. Yes, they are useless.

Hm, that's not my experience: I used all three options (no hood [student dorm], circulation hood [currently in our house], outside duct hood [parents; last flat]). There is a huge difference between each. Having no hood is obviously not nice, since water vapor and fat end up everywhere. The circulation hood at least reduces the amount of fat. Not sure if by 20 or 80%, but there is a significant difference between turning it on or not. Especially the amount of fatty haze when making hamburgers is reduced a lot. Now for water vapor it does not help so well. It's okay for one pot of water (boiled eggs or pasta with pesto), but when doing some heavy cooking still a lot of water ends up condensing on the windows. With an outside duct (about 2m of duct work) water vapor becomes a non-issue and the amount of fat haze is reduced much better than with the circulation unit.

Also this isn't biased by "I don't cook". Quite the contrary :)

I've heard the grease thing quite a few times, especially with hamburgers, but... tbh it hasn't ever happened to me. And my past two apartments haven't had a range hood at all (just a microwave with a fan we never use).

Is it saturated fats or something? Burgers are definitely a rarity for me, but I cook plenty. It's just generally lean meat and veg/oil/etc.

Regardless of where the steam goes -- if the hood is not vented, it'll just spill the air back out in to the kitchen. The cabinets above our non-vented kitchen hood are always covered in grease from the cooking. I doubt a simple filter will make that air much healthier to breathe in.

FWIW every single rental I've occupied had never had the screen on the hood cleaned/replaced. They get clogged with grease and stop working, it's an oft neglected maintenance item.

Every rental I've lived in has not had ventilation.

It has had a range hood with a fan... and zero ductwork. The fan pulls up from under the hood, and blows it straight into my face, out the top of the hood.

There are extractors that work without a vent, they filter and release on the same space. I am not saying that was your case, or even if it was, the filters were properly maintained, just saying that those hoods exists. Searching for Recirculating Range Hoods would give more info about those

While they have filters (which I've never known people to replace, but that's not necessarily the hood's fault) and I believe they do something with what passes through them... they unambiguously miss the vast majority of the fumes. Even if you cook with the back burners, a massive amount of heat and steam will flow right around every hood I've run across.

I find it utterly implausible that these filters have any substantial effect on NOx. There are specialized filters consisting of large beds of modified carbon that will remove NO2. Regular activated carbon AFAICT does not, and these recirculating stove filters do not have massive filters.

I would believe they remove particulates and odors, and that’s about it.

A study found that range hoods don’t actually provide a significant reduction in NO2, but air filters helped.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4909253/

> Pretty easily mitigated with a vent hood which all these tests don't have running.

Almost nobody in New York City (where the NYT is based and focuses its coverage) has a vent hood that vents outside the apartment.

Older buildings don't have a hood at all, and new buildings have hoods which circulate air within the apartment, which doesn't really address concerns about accumulation of environmental pollutants.

>Almost nobody in New York City (where the NYT is based and focuses its coverage) has a vent hood that vents outside the apartment.

Thanks. If this bit of context was clear from the get go it would have been a lot easier for those from EUR where we would expect vents outside the apartment to be the norm. ( Not speaking for all EUR, so there may be places this is not the norm )

As a matter of fact this is the first time I hear about vent circulating within the apartment, and to be honest this sounds quite scary.

They're supposed to be used with a charcoal filter as well as the usual metal filter. They're mostly to trap odors, doubt they do much for air quality.

Recirculating filters are commonplace in Germany, as well. Unfortunately.

Many people in the US don't even realize their stove vent is just a filter. They look almost identical to outward venting hoods. Which means the filter medium is never replaced after it fills up with oils either.

> If this bit of context was clear from the get go it would have been a lot easier for those from EUR where we would expect vents outside the apartment to be the norm. ( Not speaking for all EUR, so there may be places this is not the norm )

It is the norm in newer buildings, but there are plenty of older houses or flats blocks in the EU that don’t have a good ventilation system. It’s similarly expensive same in the UK and I cannot say about Norway and Switzerland, but I would think that it is not better in the other non-EU bits of Europe.

Sadly recirculating vents are the new norm because of energy conservation rules.

I've seen that noted on PSA posts on social media for immigrants - that you should make extra sure that vents lead to outside and not into cupboards when renting a room, because it's rather common where people don't do more than boiling water but hard to realize without prior knowledge.

Am ex-home inspector. Almost everyone has a recirculating vent IME

https://youtu.be/rSIqKGsF2ZA

This is the problem with most homes that have vent hoods. I’ve yet to be in a home that has a make up air fan.

I live in a rental right now that doesn’t even have a vent. I just open the door and a window and hope that’s sufficient. (But it really isn’t)

I could see vent hoods helping, but I don't assume they mitigate the risk. They may not capture the gas sufficiently, quickly enough, etc. Maybe vent hoods in homes are not generally effective.

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