Soak the aluminium mesh filters flat in hot water with a non-caustic degreaser rather than putting them through a dishwasher. On a rental hood, expect the filters to be original and the impeller housing behind them to have never been touched.
Euromaid hoods sit above Euromaid hobs in a very large number of Sydney rentals, and they occupy a peculiar blind spot.
Nobody considers it theirs
A tenant cleans the oven because an inspection will open it. They wipe the hob because it is at waist height and visible. The rangehood is above eye level, it looks acceptable from below, and there is no point in a tenancy at which anybody is prompted to deal with it.
The landlord does not see it either, because a routine inspection looks at condition rather than at filters, and an agent is not going to reach up and drop a filter out during a fifteen minute walkthrough.
So the hood accumulates across tenancies. Three years, three tenants, no attention. On a property that has been rented for a decade it is entirely normal to find original filters and an impeller housing that has never been opened.
If you are a landlord or a property manager, this is worth adding to a turnover checklist precisely because nobody else in the chain has a reason to. See our property managers page.
The filters are mesh and may be past saving
Euromaid uses aluminium mesh. On a hood that has run for a decade untouched, mesh frequently loads solid through its interior layers where no soak reaches, and the honest answer is replacement rather than another hour of work.
Replacement filters are inexpensive and the standard sizes are widely stocked. The general soaking method is on our rangehood cleaning guide.
What a soak actually reaches
It is worth being clear about the limits, because on a hood this neglected people either give up too early or persist far too long.
A flat soak in hot water and a non-caustic degreaser will clear the outer layers of a mesh filter reliably and will keep clearing them for years if it is done every couple of months. What it will not do is penetrate a filter whose interior has set solid, because the soak simply cannot get into the middle of a compacted stack of mesh.
The test is visual and quick. Hold the filter up to a light after an hour's soak and a brush. If light passes through it evenly, it is working and it will keep working. If the middle is dark and the edges are clear, the interior has gone and no further soaking changes that.
That distinction saves a great deal of wasted effort in both directions, and it is the single most useful thing to know about a rental hood that has been left for years.
What actually goes wrong
Original filters at ten years, loaded solid.
An impeller housing never opened, which is where the smell and the noise come from.
Grey mesh from a dishwasher cycle, on the rare occasion someone does try.
A hood switched off permanently because it was noisy, so everything it should have extracted went onto the Euromaid cooktop and the oven front instead.
Should you do it yourself?
Do it yourself for the filters, and replace rather than persist if a soak does not clear them.
Get someone in at tenancy turnover, or if the hood has become loud, which means the imbalance is behind the filters where cleaning them does nothing.