Hi Bee,

I'll toss my hat in, even though I have a 48 inch CC rangetop. The rangetop has 6 burners and a grill. See the photo below - click on it for a larger photo.

Please tell me what brand you have.
-- I had a custom Modernaire hood insert made for a wood hood. I went custom because I wanted a flat (and not tall) front edge of the hood to reduce the apparent mass of a big hood. (Also it is a landing perch for Alfred E Neuman until everything is completed.)

The cfm's?
-- I have a 1400 CFM Abbaka blower mounted on the roof. It is beautifully made, powerful, and quiet. I'm using a 10 inch round duct with 3 elbows, which is pushing it.
-- The best price I found on the Abbaka fan was at www.dvorsons.com

Is it oversized? If not, do you wish it were?
-- The hood is oversized at 54 inches wide and 27 inches deep. Frankly I wish the hood were deeper, and here's why. Because of the shallow capture area under the hood, smoke plumes reach the front edge of the hood. Also, the front edge of the hood is occupied by halogen lights and controls, so the real suction area extends 21 1/2 inches from the tiled back wall. But, we've never noticed any spillover of the smoke out of the hood.
-- See more comments below about dimensions.

Do you wish it was quieter?
-- Yes, but it is pretty quiet. The noise is from the air flow through the baffles and there's not much to do about that. Actually, a lower hood will sound quieter than a higher hood, if there is a direct line between your ears and the baffles with a high hood, and a indirect line between your ears and the baffles in a low hood.
-- No one has ever commented that it sounds loud. The Abbaka fan is the quietest I could find. Abbaka publishes its sound level and Broan refuses to do so. I even called Broan's technical support people and they refused to give me a noise level for their fans.

Do you wish it was more powerful?
-- No. I wish the hood extended deeper than 27 inches. Maybe I wish I had more capture area (height of open space under hood) but it would mean losing the low profile of the front edge of the hood.

Other comments about dimensions:
-- After tiling the backsplash the 27 inch deep hood became a 26-1/2 inch deep hood.
-- The rangetop cabinet is deeper than the adjacent cabinet, and we pulled the rangetop out slightly from the back wall so the back of the stainless back ledge is 3/4 inch out from the finished backsplash. We like having the extra space behind big pots and big flames on the back burners. We should have made the hood deeper to the extent we pulled the rangetop forward.
-- The CC installation drawings are terrible. You should call them to clear up some of the ambiguities in their dimensional installation drawing.
-- The front lip of the wood hood is 7 inches high.
The bottom of the hood is 70 inches from the floor. My wife and I are both 5-11 and we don't come close to hitting our heads. Remember, the front knobs stick way out so they keep you from rubbing your body against the front of the beautiful and curvaceous rangetop.
-- Our countertop is 37-1/2 inches from the floor and the bottom of the hood is 32-1/2 inches above the counter.
-- The hood is 31-3/4 inches above the rangetop stainless and 31 inches above the cast iron grates.

I hope this helps!

By the way, we went with a Liebherr refrigerator in part based on your kitchen and we love it! Good luck with your new kitchen!

Billy

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Here is a link that might be useful: Abbaka Blower - 1400 CFM

Sorry - here's the photo:

I have a 36" Capital Culinarian with 6 burners and am using a Tradewind liner with an Abbaka Hyex 1.0 external blower.

It's working very well so far, even at a low speed. I burned bacon the first time I cooked with the cooktop (takes some adjustment!), and the vent hood didn't have any trouble keeping up at all, even set at a pretty low setting.

I only hear the air moving when it's on. I've had conversations with my DH while standing right next to it with no problems, and the blower is not all that loud outside, either.

I, too, bought my Abbaka from Dvorson's. They improved the shipping cost when I called and asked them for an exact cost instead of paying the estimated cost.

Hi Bee!

Here's my Rangecraft Viser. This is the best pic of the hood, but it's before the 6 burner CC was installed. You already know what that looks like. :)

It's 42" wide and 24" deep. So far the size has been fine, although I haven't given it a super-duper Olympic sized workout yet. The burner grates are about 30" from bottom of the hood.

It only has 600cfms though. Rangecraft makes hoods to order, but I found this beauty on their clearance page (the only way I could come close to affording a RC hood) with a 600cfm blower already installed. I had planned a bigger blower in a Kobe hood and debated long and hard about compromising. When I posted my dilemma about whether or not to buy it, Mojavean convinced me to do it by saying that it would make me happy to see that hood everyday when I walked in to the kitchen and that that happiness would make up for the occasional times I might have to crack a window because the hood couldn't keep up with the HOGS. Sure enough, the hood makes my eyes happy everyday.

Yes, I do wish I had more cfms because then it would be quieter on low. I'm very noise sensitive so knew that any fan going at low speed would annoy me. I can hear everything going on around me when the hood is on, but if I had unlimited $ I would have done a more powerful hood with remote blower to get that darned noise away from me.

Overall, I'm happy with my hood in the small amount of time I've been using it. The real test will be more time using it. Good luck with your search! (FWIW, I briefly considered a VAH and decided against it for the noise and cleaning issues I read about.)

I have a 36" CC Ragetop. Love the thing after working out a few kinks in the beginning.

I put in a 36" Broan E60E36SS hood and the Broan 335 external 1200CFM. Its on the louder side, the blower sits right on the other side of the wall. On low speeds you hear the motor droan, on the high speeds you just hear the wind noise (hitting the baffles). Other than that for $1200 it looks and functions well.

You need to consider make up air. We also installed 1 x Broan 8" Make up air unit(MD8T). The manual said we may need 2. We do need 2x 8". When the fan is on, the make up air units open the dampers. Since we only have one, the 1200 CFM blower sucks so much air out of the house air is drawn in threw the Chimney. Not a big deal but the house will sell like smoke and sometimes there is ash on the floor. the down said is 8" is freaking huge, then again 2 of them. Also the External blower is a large unit too. Some of the largest my high end builder has seen, not a big deal to me, but its a large unit on the outside of the house.

If you have the space, i would go with the 42" hood. We had the space, I just had my head up my butt when i ordered the 36" Hood.

I spent a ton of money on an overhead exhaust system only to be duped by some automatic fan that kicks on when the oven is on....and it kicks on at all sorts of temps and times (not at all predictable). I can cook at 325 for 3 hours and it doesn't come on, but then I turn off the oven and it comes on (?), or when cooking at 375-425 this lasts about 1 cycle before the fan kicks in - go figure.

My main complaint is this automatic fan is sucking all the heat out of the oven...so I end up having to cook things way longer and/or without the "crisp" a hot oven should provide.

My oven has the "convection" option but I never use it, and when I purchased this I had no intention of using it either...it just came that way.

Anyone else have this problem, or know how to kill this automatic fan. This feature was not mentioned in the specs prior to purchase, so this is also new.

Many thanks - Laura

Laura, do you have a manual or self-cleaning range? What kind please, you don't say....

Bee -- I have a 36" range, not cook top -- does that count?

I have a discontinued Wolf hood without any "guts" and then I bought an inline -- blast, I can't remember the name, it's totally standard, and big -- that inline fan and a muffler inline between my kitchen and the fan. It's 1400 cfms I think. We don't need MUA b/c we live in a leaky, socal house. It's noisy, sort of. I was worried it would be noisy outside and irk the very-close neighbors, or kids in upstairs rooms. But neither is the case. It's just me, with time, who has become increasingly sensitized to the noise and likes it less and less. At first I was thrilled at how "quiet" it was, because I was so primed from all this chatter to expect a roar. And it wasn't so bad, so I was happy. Then it turned out that I hadn't removed plastic tape from the baffles sent with the hood and without the wrapping, things got a little noisier. Not too much, but then with time, my tolerance kinda went down. I'm very aware of it being on now, but it's not like I can't think when it is (anymore than usual that is).

The hood is 36" x 27". If I had it to do again I'd actually make it deeper than 27" if possible, for the same reasons noted above. Smoke for me isn't so much of a way-ward problem side to side as front to back. It's not a terrible problem, especially not if I'm good about turning on the fan a titch before it's needed to get a good suction plume going.

I do really like my setup and spent a lot of time thinking about it. I recommend this. I see-sawed between this inline and the outside abbaka but was worried about the outside noise on neighbors' behalf. Your particular setup matters of course. To use an inline design you need enough piping to get the fan away from the kitchen, physically. And good layout and space for the big muffler. I have 10" pipes. All the joins and joints and size-changes -- that's where the noise gets added and it all matters. These things are incredibly specific to your house configuration.

Good luck!

I have self-cleaning 36 inch range

1835Laura, did you ever resolve how to turn off the automatic fan? We used our 36" self-cleaning range for the first time today, and the sound of the automatic fan that turned on when we sat down to eat really ruined the atmosphere during our dinner. We couldn't believe how loud it was! It didn't turn off until we were washing dishes after dinner. We are quite unhappy with the situation, an would appreciate any suggestions on how to resolve the situation.... (We also paid for an expensive external blower, and feel like it was all a waste of money, given the loud oven fan....)