Ducted vs ductless range hood

[Tom M King]

When I was building new houses, I used the fans mounted on the outside wall. Duct ran straight from the custom made hood to the motor outside the wall. Inside the cabinets the duct ran through, the duct was boxed in against the back of the cabinet and finished like the rest of the cabinet interior. No buyer ever said anything about it one way or the other.

The ducts are really easy to clean out. You take the filter out of the hood, and you can see right to the fan. I had a local sheet metal guy that I went to High School with make the liner for the hoods for me to my measurements.

I was building everything about the houses, including the cabinets, so there was really no problem at all for me.

I can't find the exact fan I used, bought from a local supplier, but they were something like this, although backdraft damper was built into the fan unit. Variable speed, and they looked a little better than this one.

https://www.supplyhouse.com/Fantech-...ct-Fan-116-CFM

[Alan Rutherford]

So much good information here. I installed a fan several years ago that was ducted but the intake was in the countertop behind the range. The range was in an island and we did it that way rather than install a hood. The intake would rise up several inches when you turned it on. The fan itself was outside the house and IIRC it was 1000 CFM or more. Generous ductwork, smooth curves, total length maybe 20 feet.

Didn't work worth a darn. The first problem was those times when I suddenly realized I needed the fan because grease was smoking on a burner or something else had gone wrong, it took too long for the intake to rise up and the fan to come on. For more general use, being behind the range even that big fan wasn't enough to make fumes or smoke move horizontally to the intake unless pan and lid were strategically positioned in the right place.

Should have installed a hood and of course it would have been ducted.

[Terry Wawro]

I've gotten higher quality parts like fan, insert, damper and wall caps from hvacquick and then the ductwork and fasteners from big box store. Hvacquick emphasizes minimizing noise, but aside from getting a higher quality fan in the first place you don't have room for a lot of silencing in a small space.

https://www.hvacquick.com/products/r...itchen-Exhaust

Jim, Thank you very much for this website. I replace our old crappy range hood with a newer more powerful one a couple of months ago. It works great but it is very LOUD.
I being thinking about moving the fan into the attic above to cut down on the noise and could not find a solution on the web. This looks like the answer.