Every time you cook food using your hob you will cause some degree of air pollution during the process.
Whenever food is heated, a portion of the food will evaporate into the air. This is usually most obvious if you’re cooking high-fat food such as bacon on a very hot griddle plan producing a large cloud of smoke full of airborne carbon particles.
Smoke might be the most obvious pollutant when you cook on your hob, but every time you cook with oil you’ll also release small particles of grease into your kitchen which float around and can leave an unpleasant odour.
In addition to smoke and grease, boiling or steaming foods such as vegetables, rice and pasta spreads moisture each time we cook, which can then cause damage to your kitchen such as rusty metal or rotting wood.
Cooker hoods clean the air each time we cook, but do all cooker hoods remove smoke, grease and steam effectively?
Cooker hoods can be divided into two basic types: extraction and recirculating.
What Do Recirculating Cooker Hoods Filter?
Recirculating cooker hoods use filters to clean the air before reintroducing it back into your kitchen, and are an option if ducting can’t be installed in your home–if you don’t have a suitable external wall, for example.
A carbon filter removes smoke and cooking smells, and needs to be replaced every so often to work effectively, and a built-in grease filter will remove grease before passing the air through the carbon filter.
Recirculating cooker hoods are able to filter out smoke particles which are several microns wide, but they are unable to filter out water molecules which are thousands of times smaller than smoke particles. Because of this, they are unable to remove steam and moisture from your kitchen.
What Do Extraction Cooker Hoods Filter?
Extraction hoods remove grease, steam and cooking smells outside of the kitchen via a hole in the wall and ducting which the air can flow through.
Extraction hoods are an effective solution for cleaning the air in your kitchen, but they have to be mounted to an external wall and aren’t always suitable for every kitchen.
Summary
Recirculating cooker hoods are unable to remove steam or moisture caused by cooking, but they can still effectively remove grease and cooking odours improving the environment in your home if you are unable to fit an extraction hood in your kitchen.
Extraction hoods remove cooking smells, grease and steam from your kitchen by extracting outside of your home using ducting, and if you are concerned about moisture in your kitchen then an extraction cooker hood is the best option if suitable for your kitchen.
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