Soak the baffle filters flat in a non-caustic degreaser. Keep every cleaner away from brass and chrome trim on the range-styled hoods, exactly as on the cooker below. Expect the filters to load faster than a standard hood, because a canopy over a six-burner range moves considerably more air.
An ILVE hood is usually a wide canopy, 900mm or often 1200mm, hanging over a range with five or six burners and frequently a fry top. That combination puts it in a different duty cycle from an ordinary kitchen hood, and the maintenance interval should reflect it.
The general method for any hood, filters out, soaked flat, then the impeller housing behind them, is covered on our rangehood cleaning guide. Two things are particular to an ILVE.
It is working considerably harder than a normal hood
A standard 600mm hood sits over four burners of which two are typically in use. An ILVE canopy sits over five or six, often with a wok burner running hard and a fry top putting up a great deal of vapour at once.
The consequence is straightforward. The filters load faster, the impeller loads faster and the ducting loads faster, and a service interval that would be fine on an ordinary hood is not fine here. Where most kitchens can leave filters two or three months, a hood over a working ILVE range wants them every six weeks, and more often if the fry top gets regular use.
This is easy to miss because the hood does not look different. It is simply doing more.
The brass and chrome trim, again
If the hood is one of the range-styled canopies sold to match the cooker, it carries the same brass and chrome detailing on its trim rails and beading.
Everything that applies to the cooker applies here. Caustic cleaner and most strong degreasers tarnish brass permanently, leaving it dull and blotchy where the zinc has been leached out. Metal polish will not recover a chemically etched surface, and on lacquered brass it cuts through the lacquer.
Clean the trim by hand with warm soapy water and a separate cloth, and dry it. The stainless around it is worked along the brushed grain, never across it, because swirl marks on a 1200mm canopy at eye level are extremely visible.
Baffle filters, and why they suit this hood
Wide ILVE canopies generally carry stainless baffle filters rather than aluminium mesh: overlapping angled plates with channels between them, which force the air to change direction so grease cannot follow the turn and runs down into a trap.
That is the right filter for this application and it is worth knowing why. Mesh strains the air, so it clogs progressively and its performance falls away as it loads. A baffle separates by inertia, so it holds its extraction rate far better as it fills, which matters over a range putting up this much vapour. Baffles are also heavier, they survive far more cleaning cycles, and unlike aluminium mesh they can go through a dishwasher without being ruined.
They still want a flat soak in preference, because a dishwasher redeposits some of what it removes and a baffle has channels for it to settle in. An hour in hot water with a non-caustic degreaser, then a brush along the channels rather than across them, and they come up properly.
If your ILVE canopy has mesh rather than baffles, treat it as mesh: never a dishwasher, because the alkaline detergent oxidises aluminium to a chalky grey permanently.
What actually goes wrong
Filters serviced on a normal schedule for a hood doing double the work, so they are always partly loaded and the impeller takes what they miss.
Tarnished trim, from the same cloth doing the canopy and the filters.
Swirl marks on a wide canopy, which on a surface this size are visible from the other side of the room.
Ducting nobody has looked at, on a hood moving considerably more air than the duct was probably sized for. This is worth taking seriously on an ILVE installation specifically: the duct run was often specified for a conventional hood and then a much larger canopy was fitted above it, so the restriction is at the duct rather than at the fan.
A hood run on its lowest speed because the higher settings were loud, which over a six-burner range means most of the vapour never reaches the filters at all and lands on the splashback and the cooker front instead.
Should you do it yourself?
Do it yourself for the filters, on a six-weekly rhythm rather than a quarterly one.
Get someone in for the impeller housing, for any trim that has begun to dull, and for a canopy wide enough that cleaning it properly means working above your head for an hour.
Most people book it together with the ILVE cooktop and the ILVE oven below it.