Modern RANGE HOODS
22 May 2008“Now You See it, Now You Don’t”
A couple of weeks ago I wrote quite a bit about range hoods and the many design things that could be done with them. It is a topic that I could write about for a long time, simply because manufacturers have taken this seemingly most mundane of products and done the most extraordinary things with it. The Elica Mini OM hood shown here is very much a case in point.
It’s hard to believe that it actually is a range hood, and to tell you the truth, my first impulse on seeing something like this is to want to know if it’s actually going to do the job for which it is intended.
Well, sir!
If we may believe the statistics given by the manufacturer, I would have to say that this item, despite its almost minimal appearance, will do the job very well indeed.
First, it has a three-speed fan that will pull 450 CFM (Cubic Feet Per Minute). Some of the larger kitchen hoods we featured earlier will pull 900 or more, but you really have to ask yourself how much of that power is actually necessary. By way of comparison, I will tell you that the admittedly cheap range hood we have in our kitchen pulls 190 CFM, and in the fifteen years we’ve had it, I’ve never once felt the need for more power. Unless you’re running something close to a commercial kitchen, I have to believe a 450 CFM range hood will do just fine.
The other big consideration in the purchase of a range hood is the amount of noise it makes. This unit runs at 4 sones at its highest speed, down to just .3 sones at its slowest speed. A sone is a newer unit they’ve come up with for measuring loudness instead of decibels, which I like better because two sones is twice as loud as one sone, instead of that old ten times as much, or whatever logarithmic scale methods they come up with for taking a relatively simple chart and turning your head into a pretzel if you try to use it. As for what it means, your average refrigerator chugs along at about one to two sones in loudness. And I’ve just found out that our current range hood (OK, it’s cheap, and it’s old) runs at 6.5 sones on high speed.
Finally, I know that Elica would want us to mention that this product is made of tempered glass and painted steel and that it comes in black, white, and six other colors. The flat glass surface makes it easy to clean, and they’ve gone so far as to ensure that the unit’s controls are almost invisible when the hood is not in use. All the better, they say, to preserve visual elegance, which is a nice touch when you think about it, because the whole point of a range hood like this is that it doesn’t look like a range hood.
So, basically, what we have here is an incredibly stylish item that will actually do the job. How often does that happen?
Joseph
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