I can only offer my experience with baffles at 33 " above the gas cooktop. I have a Tradewind 1400 cfm liner 54" wide over a built in Miele deep fat fryer and a 36" Caldera gas cooktop with a large center wok burner. We have had this set up for over 7 years. We regularly deep fat fry and stir fry with lots of hot chilies and spice and peanut oil.

I know the system works perfectly as the baffles are a mess of oil every single week ! That is a good thing. I shudder when I think where all of that oil would go otherwise. Also I can stand anywhere in my kitchen when DH is stir frying and if I was blindfolded I couldn't tell you what he was cooking. My woodwork and hood surround and open shelves have never had one drop of oil/grease residue on them. They do get dusty as we have a 120 yr old house :)

Now as for cleaning the baffles. You are correct that if they do their job they will be coated with oil ,which mine are. Also I tried one time to put them in the dishwasher and was not pleased. Mine are very large and the top rack has to come out also which is a deterrent to placing them in the d/w. The way I clean them is to lay them in my large single bowl sink and spray them well on both sides with Greased Lightning . I leave them for about 10 min. I then take a 1" soft bristle paint brush and quickly brush in each baffle...take a few minutes. I rinse with hot water and dry with a dish towel and I am finished. After 7 yrs they still look like they did when installed. Best of all so do my cupboards and open shelves and walls ! It is worth the hands on 10-15 min a week to have a kitchen and home that are completely HOGS free ( heat/grease/odor/steam) when cooking and after. Hope this helps with your decision. If you have any other questions please ask. Here is a link to Tradewind. They are a wonderful company. c

see the vent at work :

baffles ( there are 3)

Here is a link that might be useful: Tradewind liner

I don't put my baffles in the dishwasher either ... they are too tall. I spray Simple Green on them and use a grout brush to get inside the baffles. Rinse and air dry. Also, when I remove the baffles for cleaning, I wipe down all the area underneath ... the baffles do not trap all the grease and some will attach itself to the fan housings.

Like trailrunner says, they pick up a lot of grease and I have to clean them much more often that I want to because I don't like looking up there and seeing that grease. I do most of my grease-producing cooking on an outdoor grill so it's not too much of an inconvenience.

FWIW, we have a three-year-old 36" Kobe chimney hood with the same squirrel cage/baffle filters as the one you're looking at. We do wash the filters in our dishwasher, and they fit wonderfully (in a Miele Inspira) and come out sparkling on the pots and pans setting. Only downside is that you can't fit more than two at a time unless you have nothing else in there so I sometimes rotate them through. (There are three total so they are smaller than the baffles on some hoods we looked at that used only two for the same space. Looks like Kobe also uses three for the 30" hood, so presumably they're even smaller and maybe you could fit all three in at once.) The hood seems to do a good job. We didn't look at the inverse impeller design, only at their lower end version with mesh filters, so can't compare to that. But I would recommend the version with baffle filters with no concerns.

Our hood is also 33" from our cooktop and we've had no problems with that as far as I can tell. (We made the executive decision to fudge the recommended space because it was the difference between being able to use the hood as-is and having to get the $$$ chimney extension for it, given our ceiling height.)

These responses are all very thorough and I thank the responders for them. Still, no one has yet to address the question of the the different design of the inverse impeller -- I'm curious whether anyone out there has such a unit and what the experience has been.