Rangehood Cleaning in Sydney

Rangehoods are sold as one product and are not one job. Which of the four kinds you have changes what actually needs doing, and it is worth knowing which one is above your cooktop before anybody quotes you.

A ducted canopy pushes air outside through a duct. It is the best kind to own and the easiest to bring back, because everything that matters is either a filter or the fan behind it. A recirculating hood has no duct: it pushes air through a charcoal filter and back into the room. Those charcoal filters are consumable, they cannot be washed, and once they are saturated the hood is moving air and removing nothing. We clean the metal filters and the housing, and we will tell you if the charcoal needs replacing, but replacing it is a part you buy rather than a clean we sell.

An undermount hood sits inside the cupboard above the cooktop, which makes it the one most likely never to have been touched, because the grease is out of sight behind a cabinet front. A slide-out pulls forward on a runner and hides most of its filter area when closed. On both of these the visible surface is a small fraction of the greasy surface, which is why a wipe of the front has never made any difference to the smell.

The filters themselves come in two forms. Aluminium mesh is a fine expanded lattice, and grease sets inside the lattice rather than on it, which is why a scrub across the face achieves very little. Baffle filters are the steel chevrons found on heavier hoods and on almost every commercial one. They shed grease better by design, but what they shed runs into the channel at the bottom of the frame, and that channel is almost never emptied. Both come out of your kitchen and go into the heated tank in the van rather than getting scrubbed at your sink, because soaking is the only thing that reaches inside a mesh and because nothing that greasy should be washed where you prepare food.

The part that decides whether a hood works is none of the above. It is the impeller, the caged fan wheel behind the filters. Grease builds unevenly on its blades, the wheel goes out of balance, extraction drops and the noise goes up. Most people read that as a hood wearing out. It is usually a hood that needs the fan cleaned, and that is the part of this job that takes the time.