With 26' of duct run its going to be really quite as in ....REALLY QUITE.... so no need to know of worry about the sones. Sones are only of any interest when you are dealing with internal blowers, even then a lot of the noise can come from the install.

I would suggest keeping the hood lower than 36" maybe between 32" - 34"

Well geez, what I've been told up to now is that even with the motor that far away the sound of the air rushing through the hood would still be really, really loud?
Arrrgh....

Do you have any suggestions as to make/models I should be looking at other than the Wolf?
Thanks for the reply,
Mads

When i say really quite what i mean by that is really quite compared to having an internal blower, i have yet to ever here of anyone who felt a remote blower over 15' was even close to noisy.

The fast majority of noise comes from 3 areas

1) The fan itself
2) Disturb area around the fan
3) Air moving through the baffles

Air moving though the baffles makes dramatically less noise than the first two.

Okay great so my research didn't lead me astray.
I believe that with the setup I'm looking at your 1&2 will be as minimized as possible.

So onto 3...
What I'm hoping to learn from the collected knowledge here is which hoods are better or worse for this setup.

Are there hoods that look good but perform horribly?
Is there a brand that I should be looking at over the Wolf?

Thanks,
Mads

OK, I"ll ramble on a bit on these topics.

I have a Wolf Pro Island hood (60-some inches wide, made by Independent) and a Wolf 1500 cfm nominal roof fan (actually made by Broan), with a Fantech silencer in between. The hiss through the baffles at maximum speed is modest, and certainly not inhibiting to conversation (unless one is whispering sweet nothings across the cooktop). The crackle and hiss of Wok cooking is louder.

The silencer (really a muffler) is the only addition you could make to reduce fan noise further.

To extend Trevor's remarks, the fan blades are not perfectly aerodynamic, and shed turbulence that causes noise. Also, there will be turbulence in the ducts that produces noise. There could also be motor rumble.

Few manufacturers provide the essential facts about their hoods, viz., noise versus flow rate, and pressure drop versus flow rate. Occasionally, one may run across a commercial hood with a pressure drop spec., but commercial kitchens are so noisy that baffle noise is the least of anyone's problems.

I'm not sure of Independent's status at present, but ModernAire is a potential hood source, as well as Abbaka and even local sheet metal fabricators providing hoods for commercial application. (You probably won't want one that meets the commercial requirements, but derivative designs might be suitable.) Broan is another candidate source.

The main goal is capture and containment, and this requires a cavity for collection and a flow rate sufficient to remove the effluent before it "reflects" back out of the hood. There are other sources of hoods, but some tend to emphasize aesthetics over function, so if function is more important, evaluate them from the point of view of capture and containment.

Unfortunately, the best we can do usually is guess at the fluid dynamics taking place in a candidate hood; the truth requires careful measurement, usually with Schlieren photography to see what is happening to the effluent as a function of cfm.

kas

Hi Kas,
Your 60" hood will be significantly quieter than my 36" at the same CFM sooo...

I looked into the custom hood option a bit and it looked significantly more expensive.

Another issue seems to be the required 27" depth...not every manufacturer makes one. I looked and I don't think Broan does? VAH doesn't......

Guess I'm beating a dead horse now.....
1. I think its almost criminal that high end hoods that can cost as much as a good used car don't have sone readings...
2. I'm still hoping that the collective wisdom here can at least point to which manf hoods are higher quality and which to avoid.

Will you have cabinets flanking both sides of the hood? If not, then I would upsize to 42" in order to have some overlap at the sides.

Yes I will have cabinets flanking both sides of the hood.

The hood size requirements result from the fact that the rising effluent expands as it rises. (Think 45-degree cone as an approximation.) So if you put your pans on the stove (in your minds eye) and grow cones from them upwards. The tip of the cone is below the cooking surface. The hood needs to overlap those cones.

The airflow, though, has to be enough to keep the air velocity high enough at the baffles to pull in the effluent and not let it reflect back downward (fluid dynamics wise, it will appear to curl downward). This flow is determined by the hood aperture, the effluent velocity (about 3 ft/s), and some fractional factor that accounts for how the hood is internally configured. (I would guess that for trapezoidal shaped hoods with sloped baffles, the factor might be around a half.)

Cabinets and back wall keep the cones on those sides constrained to stay under the hood, so the front to back depth is mainly set by where the pans are, how big they can be, and how high the hood is from the cooktop.

kas

Trevor @ Eurostoves has a video of a smoke-bomb placed in a WOK to demonstrate the capture of effluent into a Modern-Air hood ... impressive!!
Am instrested myself, don't know price yet.

Independent went out of business but was acquired. Call modernaire and get them to work out a quote. The powdered metal finishes are much cheaper than fancy copper, bronze etc.. I paired it with an external Abbaka blower and silencer. Making the hood bigger than the cooktop was the best GW advice ever.

BTW: two 45* turns is better than one 90* elbow.