This is a great source of vexation for me. Our house a range hood (a small one with a lamp and a fan), but it does not vent outside, nor does it recirculate the air in the kitchen. It is, in effect, nothing more than a lamp.

When using the skillet, the whole house gets stunk up. A steak only smells good for so long. And several times a month the fire alarm goes off.

I've been meaning to call a contractor about knocking a vent in, but we've recently resided the house, and I hate the idea of having a vent dumping right out on the porch, both from an aesthetic point of view, and the likely hood of someone running into it.

Sometimes we put a box fan in the window, open the front door slightly (and have to block it, so the dogs don't decide to wander off...), and that helps, but it's still far from ideal.

Would someone like to fund a complete kitchen remodeling project? :)

None of my apartments had range hoods, so I well remember spring cleaning being especially crazy- having to scrub all the cabinets with baking soda paste inside & out! Thankfully, the kitchens were small :)

When my husband & I bought our house, we re-did the entire kitchen & made sure to put in a range hood. Now, if only we had installed it just a few inches higher so I didn't bang my forehead....

In our rental, the microwave is an under-cabinet model, mounted over the stove. It has a surface light and a fan, but is pretty worthless and doesn't vent outside. When we cook something that may smoke or has an odor that might linger in the apartment (like frying) we open the kitchen window and put a fan at the other end of the kitchen, to send all the air right out the window. Our kitchen and dining room is a long galley, so that actually works pretty well.

i hate not having a hood in my (rental) apartment.
i have crazy high ceilings, so sometimes a window fan doesn't even help. i just avoid cooking stinky things (goodbye fish!) in the seasons where i have to keep things closed up. sad, but true.

I think your landlord might be outside the law on hs one. Check your local code...he/she may have to install one.

I live outside the code. I've never had a hood and it's never been a problem. However, I'm a person who likes separate rooms, rather than an open floor plan. The walls could have something to do with containing cooking odors. Also, I'm vegetarian, so I don't deal with a lot of spatter.

Check your local code!

I've got the wimpiest range hood in the universe. It recirculates cooking smells effectively all over my tiny house to ensure that I sleep with the smells of sauteed foods.

I've found that using a spray bottle of fresh, cold water in the kitchen does a lot to help, but doesn't eliminate entirely.

My next approach will be the purchase of an electric hot plate which I'll use outside on my deck and do any sautéing/frying/browning out there. If my bbq had a side element, that's what I'd be using.

Foodelf

I have an OTR microwave. It recirculates the air back into the room, but it is effective. The air it sucks in goes through filters before it is piped back out. It works well enough to keep the smoke contained and prevent the smoke detectors from going off. I used it for this purpose last night when I was baking a pizza and I could hear the detector already starting to chirp. For cooking smells, it's useless, but there are some things you cook that cannot be killed by a range hood.

I do not have a vent hood in my apt. We usually just keep the door open when cooking to rid of smells. The oily dirt that builds up on everything in the kitchen drives me nuts though. I'm looking into installing one of the cheap ones just to maybe suck the air upward as opposed to it drifting everywhere.

I have a friend with a large, new kitchen in her mcmansion. She doesn't cook often, but when I have been there and she is cooking, she doesn't turn the hood on! It makes me so sad! I wish I could take it off her hands and install it in my own kitchen!

I live in an older house (1907) with original, built-in cabinets all along the kitchen, ending with the stove. There isn't a vent or hood, but the small kitchen window seems to help with really smoky dishes. (As does throwing a cloth over the smoke alarm.) When I moved in, I almost immediately covered the walls near the stove with 1/4 inch melamine because it's so darned easy to clean. As for the underside of the cabinets above the stove, I'm constantly wiping them down. Any time I boil water, I have to dry them off to keep the mold at bay. Oh to have a hood!

I have a shelf overtop my stove in my rental meant for a microwave.
Therefore I have a large piece of Wood in my way.

We have only moved in since the beginning of this month but I am very afraid of ruining the underside from my cooking.

Are there any suggestions of what I can do to protect it? I’ve been used to having a range hood in all my other rentals.

The grease just means more Cleaning (and harder)
and our small kitchen has the patio doors and a side window for the cross breeze.
It’s going to be cold in the winter but I don’t like smell eliminating sprays.

I use the light on the hood but never the fan. The fan recycles the air back into the room, which I feel defeats the purpose of removing the fumes, steam and smells. If the fan were vented to the outside, then I would use it. For now the hood is a good light.

My stove hood is connected to the same outlet tube as the two tenants below me, so we they burn something - or cook anything for that matter - and turn their fans on, it stinks up my house if I don't turn my own fans on in time (My desk is a bar table in the kitchen, and I can hear faintly when another tenants fans turn on).

The new person downstairs has managed to burn something at least three times a week since they moved in. >_<

Worst of both worlds. I have the clunky and annoying look of a range hood with cabinets. But it's not even positioned over the stove. It's about 1/2 over the stove and 1/2 off to the side of it (from some prior remodel work done before I bought the house). And it's incredibly feeble as well. So, it looks bad, doesn't work, and supposedly vents to the outside, but I'm not buying it.

It's on the list of things to remodel at some point.

I have no range hood an haven't for years. I just open a window and turn on a fan. The house gets totally smoked and smelled up but I have to eat. I just let it air out and shiver while I eat.

As for the mess, I wipe the stove, counters, surrounding walls and cabinets down with a lysol wipe after every meal. Its the last step of doing the dishes. I never have a build up or residue on anything.

We have an kobe ch-100 hood vented to the outside since we do a lot of high heat stir frying for chinese food with a gas range. It can be loud at it's highest setting, but it keeps the cooking odors and gas fumes at bay.

We recently did a minor remodel (repainted existing cabinets, new floor, countertops, backsplash and sink) and didn't have room for a standard range hood, so we had the contractor install a run-of-the-mill ventilation fan ($100 from Home Depot) with an adjustable solid state switch. Works great for our situation.

http://picasaweb.google.com/108726460781352514585/Kitchen

We don't have a hood but I use a portable HEPA filter in the kitchen when I sear steaks. Really, browning meat seems to be the only thing that really makes me want a hood.

When I used a grill pan for the first time, my entire apartment smelled like steak. So I installed a sheer cotton curtain on my kitchen door frame with a tension rod, and put a window fan at the very top of my kitchen window. When I cook anything I now will stink up the place, I draw the curtain closed and put the fan on exhaust - works like a charm! All the air blows outside.

@Fiero - could you remove the shelf and mount a recirculating microwave with mounting brackets? I think there are generic brackets that will work for most microwaves.

Our range hood broke like 4 years ago. We just never fixed it, and I didn't realize how much difference it made until I tried unsuccessfully to clean the grease-covered cabinet doors. We recently remodeled with an over-the-counter recirculating microwave. We chose recirculating because, like caseoftornadoes, our vent was connected to the apartment below ours, so we got to smell their cigarette smoke and burning food.

The microwave we got was a GE Spacemaker (model was JVM 1740) and it works quite well at getting rid of both smoke and smells. My only complaint is that it's pretty loud, but we never use it for long periods of time so it's not that big of a deal.

LOL - everyone has the same crappy hood that i have! no vent, just circulates the smell around a little faster. i gave up on the vent years ago and just open the two windows for fresh air. sometimes the smoke alarms can be a hassle, hence why i'm looking into buying the kind you can mute.

I have a hood, but there's nothing in it. When I moved in (to my rental) the kitchen had just been redone and they weren't quite finished yet. I assumed they'd be putting in a fan, but when I asked I was told that the hood was just for show. It's not a huge problem because the stove is right next to the window. I also live in a studio with the kitchen down a hall from the main living room, so smells aren't really noticeable. Whenever it gets smokey I open the window. (Sidenote- I also don't have a smoke detector in my apartment. sketchy? yes.)

We have a Kenmore hood that has three ventilation settings (300 CFM max) and three lighting settings. The lighting is really my favorite part. It has two halogen bulbs that go from very bright to very low.

I don't have a range hood and do have an apartment kitchen without a window, so about my only option would be one of those recirculating vent things which I found useless in past apartments. That said, my kitchen's got the original '60s metal cabinets which, it seems, were one of the better ideas of our parents' and grandparents' generation as they not only wear like, well, iron, they clean up pretty easily. I painted mine because I was less enamored of the color palette of 1963 and a coat of rustoleum made 'em even easier to wipe down, even though they have a kind of pebbled texture on the front. I also tiled the backsplash (in truth I thought kitchens like mine were the reason behind the glass tiles that started turning up in stores until I found it was just trendy) and it's not really all that bad to clean up. That said, the living room/dining room are basically a large box with the kitchen a perpendicular room to it. So, if I open the balcony doors it makes a decent pull that vents smoke to the outside before it hits my bedroom on the other side of the unit. And I have built in bookcases in my dining room with all my glassware on them and even proximity to the kitchen doesn't make them cruddy.

We did a small remodel last summer and the most expensive thing was the hood. We got a HUGE professional grade hood that actually makes it difficult to close the front and back door when it's running on high because it's sucking so hard.

We have remodeled almost the entire house, and by far, the most awesome, worthwhile investment was the hood.

Broan makes some fairly good under cabinet recirculating hoods. Higher CFM is better, and the Allure III will give you a decent amount of air movement and has good filtration. They usually run somewhere between $300-$400. They will never do as well as one that is vented to the outside, but will really help eliminate smells through the house.

One tip is to make sure to turn on the fan before you start cooking. It will create a draft that will help the air to start moving in that direction.

Also if you have a gas range/cooktop you absolutely have to have a vented hood or OTR microwave. The fumes from the combusted gas can build up if you don't.

We have no range, no backsplash, no nothin'! The range is just up against the wall (which, thankfully, I painted with an easy-to-clean eggshell paint when I moved in!). When we're cooking anything smoky, we open the window, and sometimes drag a fan into the (tiny) kitchen as well. Sometimes, if we're cooking something especially smoky, we open the living room windows too, even though the kitchen isn't open to the living room very much at all.

And yeah, renting this cheapo apartment makes me not want to spend any money on major reno. I did install an IKEA pot rack above the stove though - yeah, my pots and pans get a little greasy from time to time, but better for them to be hanging from the wall than cluttering up the cabinets!

i just cook less often, do more poaching, and do simpler stuff. beans in the crockpot, baked chicken that i cut up and use in sauces that only need gentle heating. quesadillas. easy!

I have one of those (apparently popular) cheap, useless, recirculating hood in my rental. I don't have too many issues with smells, partly because I avoid dishes that could potentially smoke and partly because the kitchen is a closed room, but the major issue is with the slime that accumulates everywhere. During spring cleaning, I even find it on the back side of the refrigerator. It's not like I'm deep frying every night either...

@caseoftornadoes
My vent-pipe is also on a stack with 2 others.
>First, look inside behind the fan blades to be sure the damper flap is opening and closing freely. You can push it with a pencil or, using a flashlight, watch it move when the fan is turned on and off.
>Second, try to have a positive pressure in the apartment as opposed to a negative pressure. If the dryer or bath fan are running, open any window a bit so that there is relief air coming in.
>Third, if all else fails here's what I did in another apartment situation. I lowered the filter and placed a folded old towel against the fan-blades to block the opening. I only removed it when I was using the fan, then the towel went back into place.

We have a recirculating vent system, apparently. I don't use it. It's hideously loud & doesn't seem to do much. Instead, I open a window and, if it's smoky, turn on the fan in the bathroom off the kitchen. Oh, if they'd only asked my opinion about the kitchen before they remodeled it... And they only seem to have remodeled it in order to help sell the house. There are lots of little shortcuts we've noticed that now have us shaking our heads--just little things it would've been easier to deal with while they were doing it than after the fact. (But that was never going to be their problem, was it?)

I also do not have a vent hood and it makes me crazy! We end up avoiding cooking certain things inside an opt for year round grilling of certain fishes and meat. We have one of those small Weber bbq's outside of our back door and have certainly been the crazy neighbor donned in a down parka when it is 25 degrees cooking a steak. Other than that, I think we just find alternate ways to cook our food as needed (broiling less oily fishes, roasting) and open the windows. Not ideal but it will work until we have a home that we own with a hood.

We don't have a hood but try to keep the kitchen as uncluttered as possible for easy cleaning. When we repainted a while ago we chose a very glossy paint so it would be easy to wipe clean (also for the cieling) We are only two and rarely cook greasy food and we use the oven alot. That's how we like to cook and less grease and smell is a bonus, and if it gets smelly anyway, we open the window.

We ripped out the range hood at our house when we bought it because there is so little counter space that we really needed to go with one of those microwave range hood combos. The new unit sat on my basement floor for two and a half years before we installed it! Needless to say, we survived. Unfortunately though, because we went without for so long, we always forget to use the darn thing.

That said, if you can afford to add it, I would. Though I would discuss it with your landlord first. He/she may be willing to add it for you.

Stop renting places with no hood?

Anyone know how much it costs to get a hood w/outside vent installed? I'm sure it varies, but I have no idea what the ballpark price is, and we're looking into a partial remodel (mostly replacing old cabinets).

Himalayan salt lamp solved our problem with odors. It truly does work and probably our most important buy after moving into an apt. or the first time. Now we are trying to figure out how to deal with the grease, smoke alarm aspect.

Range hoods. Ugh. When installed properly, fantastic; I've seen too many in my rental days that weren't though.

My worst story -- a range hood that looked like it was installed properly was actually blowing all of the smoke into the attic rather than outside...where it set off the fire alarm. After assuring the firemen and the landlord that it was a false alarm, I discovered that the hood was just blowing everything back into the apt. The landlord's response? "Well, this doesn't usually happen..."

These days I'm in an apt. sans hood. I leave the back door and windows open for a cross breeze and haven't had any problems.

I have a recirculating range hood, windows, and ceiling fans. That handles everything my husband or I like to eat, except seafood. When my husband wants seafood, he orders it at a restaurant. I'll upgrade the range hood as part of a kitchen renovation, some day.

We just had a fan installed under our oven since the layout of our kitchen doesn't allow for a vent. Simply turn on the switch before starting the oven or stove. Since we have a gas oven, we were told that the carbon monoxide that would leak each time we turned the stove or oven on was toxic. Works like a charm!

My experiences with the recirculating fans have always been really disappointing. I cooked bacon wrapped scallops once, fan on, windows open and still smelt it for over two weeks. At one point I was joking about taking a match to the whole place and walking away.

My old house (1918) has no hood, and I work with the windows alot. My stove is located on an outside wall and I'm saving my nickles and dimes for a strong and QUIET outside vent fan. I need to go down to the fancy appliance store and stick my head inside to check all the noise levels.
In the meantime, if you have access to a grill they are often your best fix.

Oh. I was under the impression that it was lawfully required to have ventilation to the outdoors above the stove?

My RV has a range hood and I use it every day. I always turn it on a the same time as the stove, even if I'm just boiling water, since I have a gas (propane stove) and believe in having as much ventilation as possible when using it. It's also great for carrying away smells in my tiny home as well as sending away extra moisture in the air (if I cook pasta without the hood fan on my windows steam up). It is super noisy, but I've gotten used to it.

@melle - No outside-venting range hood was in any of several Florida apartment homes that I've occupied. It probably was illegal of their owners to rent them. Apartment buildings and single-family residences have different building codes. My current home is the first one I've owned, and my first house home as an adult. Its hood is legal since it was code compliant when installed. Inspectors repeatedly have approved it along with the rest of my 1954 house. I bring my home up to current code as I replace damaged things, like the roof (twice).

Our 1958 small ranch had/has a thru the wall fan, about 3 ft away from the stove, which is placed as its own peninsula. It worked well with the second-hand 1984 Caloric range with the modest btu's, but we just upgraded and the new gas cooker has some horsepower...so I placed a small table top fan (6") on the adjacent counter, to direct the fumes over to the wall fan. That wall fan has been a great workhorse, tho. In the summer, it removes the fridge heat from the room. We are planning on totally moving the kitchen, and I will have a range hood with outside venting. (thanks for the reminder about the height!) It will not have paint on it, as they use crummy metal and the paint is dissolved by the grease, and cleaning ruins those. Stainless only, for this cleaning professional. Our current bathroom remodel is finally giving me what I've dreamed of for over 20 years...a bath fan! Moisture, either the lack or surfeit of it, are one of humanities challenges.

I put a range hood in my apartment for about $45! It got rid of the smoke odor that was bad enough to set off our fire alarm. You need a very basic understanding of shelf mounting and electricity do this.

Home Depot:
(1) NuTone Economy Recirculating Range Hood/w filter $39.99
(1) Sleeve of small toggle bolts $3.99
(1) Electrical Tape $.90
(1) 6ft extension cord

Install summary:

Mounted hood directly to wall behind range using butterfly 'spring' bolts. Spliced extension cord into electrical box of hood and plugged in.

Total Time: 35 min.
Total holes to be patched: 4

--------------

Detailed Install:

Tools needed:
-Level
-Screwdriver
-Pencil
-Scissors or wire cutters

I had my roommate to help me, but it could be done alone with more patience and measuring

(1) We unboxed the hood and decided to mount it 25" above the stove

(2) While I held the hood at 25" my roommate made sure it was level and centered. He then marked inside the back 4 holes on the wall.

(3) Roommate took screwdriver to hole marks on drywall and reamed out four individual 1/2" holes for butterfly bolts to fit though.

*** I was no where near electricity when I was doing the following step, however 110v electricity should be respected as it is potentially lethal.

(4) On the floor I opened the electrical box on the underside of the hood and spliced in the extension cord.

(a) I cut off the receptical of the extension cord leaving a plug an 6ft of wire that I separated into two individual wires.
(b) Using scissors, I stripped back a 1/2" of bare wire on the end of the two wires on the extension cord.
(c) I identified the three power wires in the hood electrical box called Hot (Black), Neutral (White), and Ground (Bare copper wire.)
(d) I also identified the two wires on the extension cord Hot (smooth wire) and Neutral (ridged or 'rough' wire)
(e) I fed the extension cord through the hole in the back of the hood.
(f) I twisted the bare copper wires of hot to hot, neutral to neutral and left the ground disconnected.
**IF you somehow connect hot to neutral, it is not dangerous. Its like flipping a power cord upside down in an outlet. Reversing the wires may make the fan reverse direction however.
(g) I applied a generous amount of electrical tape to cover twisted together copper wires and about 4" down the two wires to make sure they could not easily come apart.
(h) I plugged in the hood and tested it. Everything was fine.

(5) My roommate fed the 4 bolts through the hood and then threaded the toggle nuts on the end.

(6) I held the hood up near the wall while he guided the bolts through the holes in the wall. When each butterfly nut had opened inside the wall. I gently pulled the hood away from the wall to create tension. My roommate then screwed the bolts down until they were snug, but not tight. At this point the extension wire was sandwiched between the hood and the wall and hung out the bottom. It seemed okay with us.

(7) While I was holding the hood my roommate made sure it was level. When it was, I held it firmly in place until he screwed each bolt down tightly.

(8) I installed a lightbulb, Plugged it in and voila! This $45 hood isn't super powerful, but if you cook smokey food on the back burner it does just fine. Super investment.

Our landlady loved it too and is going to give us $100 for it when we leave.