Hood Hook Up

The completed project. We're liking the effect of the lowered hood

Long on our list of things to do to complete the house is hooking up our kitchen vent hood. I've dragged my feet on doing this for a couple of reasons: First, I always picture the vent duct as a big hole in our house where all sorts of energy loss will occur. Secondly, not having the hood hooked up has not seemed to cause much trouble in terms of either air quality or residual cooking build-up.

The opening through the wall

I mentioned this during a presentation I recently made to the Super Insulation class at Yestermorrow Design/Build School.  It was suggested by John, one of the instructors, that I really should complete this project because it has notable effects on home air quality. Just because I'm not aware of it doesn't mean its not there.

This shows the hood before I lowered it. The duct connections are partially in place

The hood with the ducting complete and the hood lowered

Feeling nudged in a way I needed to be, I spent the next day completing the hook up. This was straightforward since I'd installed the main parts during the construction of the house. The remaining work was completing the duct connection from the wall to the hood itself. Taking this on became an opportunity to lower the hood about ten inches to better capture the cooking smoke, steam, and particulate. When we first were putting the kitchen together I was concerned that the hood would look awkward suspended down in front of the window, so I hung it at the level of the top casing and it has sat there since, acting primarily as a light source for cooking.

The duct vent on the outside of the house. Its neatly tucked away, so you really need to look for it to see it. 

Time will tell if its going to create residue on the outside of the house

To our satisfaction, lowering the hood has had the nice effect of making things cozier in the cooking area. It creates a lowered ceiling and doesn't detract from the overall feel or the view out the window.

The hood is still a little higher than it should be, so I will work on it some more sometime soon, but for the moment I am glad to have the whole thing operating. We've been using it whenever we cook and I find myself suddenly sensitive to the potential harm of particulates in the air.

Incidentally, the hood came equipped with incandescent bulbs and this has always bugged me. I've wondered if I could replace the bulbs with fluorescents but never got around to checking. To my satisfaction I found it was super easy. I was a little uncertain because the bulbs have candelabra screw bases and I'd never had reason to see if they make fluorescents with them. They do, so it's no big deal. The switch is made.

The hood light with new fluorescent on the left and the stock lamp on the right 

Nance and I also discussed creating a housing to enclose the duct work, so we may make that happen too. I don't mind the metal tube look, but I think I'd enjoy a wooden enclosure as well.

Making Decisions

Checking out dishwashers. We happened to purchase the second one in from the end...

...after we discovered that this "last one" had been sold while we were in the store.
We were indecisive about going with the black look versus the stainless look.

Today was spent trying to decided on which of the major home appliances we want to purchase for the house. This includes the range, the dishwasher, the washing machine, the woodstove, the light fixtures, and the plumbing fixtures. There's a lot of stuff to make decisions on and there are always the factors of cost, features, aesthetics and technical appropriateness.

Our first stop brought us to Bouchard-Pierce in Barre, a supplier of home appliances. We were impressed with the way the salesman's information actually informed our choices. Sometimes the choices are mostly surface deep, sometimes not. In the end we left having purchased a Bosch dishwasher that was on sale (thank you very much Dad and Tia Maria!) and feeling pretty well equipped to make further decisions. That said, there is something a little bewildering and humbling when one finds one's self faced with an array of similar but incrementally different objects that you are going to live with for a long time.

Taking a look at kitchen cabinets

We became a bit stumped with making a decision about cooking ranges. As the kitchen is currently designed, we have a window over the stove. This means having a backsplash control panel will not work and need to find a suitable slide-in unit with controls on the front of the stove. We have to do more looking.

Our future woodstove?

After an informative but non-conclusive stop at the lighting store, we ventured to the woodstove store to make arrangements to purchase a stove we'd already researched and decided on. This was going to be easy, or so we thought. The size of our stove is a major consideration and needs to be really small. Additionally it needs to be equipped with an outside air supply for combustion. It turns out that the stove we'd thought we were going to get was super tiny and we just couldn't get our heads around this being our future woodstove. Beyond that, this particular stove comes with a dubious "fresh air kit" that is not a dedicated supply. That killed the deal.

We then sorted through the other options and are now leaning towards a Hearthstone model, made in Vermont.

We left the stove store and called it a day. There's lots more to do and we're almost doing research as much as buying at this point.

Oh yeah, Vermont is holding a "tax holiday" on March 6th, so we're trying to line up our purchases for that date. It great this is happening because it's disciplining us to make these decisions.