DIY Doctor UK DIY Forums

Hi all,

After some advice on kitchen ventilation. If a kitchen doesn't have a window and a fan is to be fitted for ventilation, my understanding is the options are a recirculating or extract fan attached to a duct? Can you get ceiling mounted recirculating fans? Something around the size of a centrifugal extract fan. I know you can get recirculating range hoods but I'm wondering about a more discrete ceiling fan. Can't seem to find much on these online.

Thanks

u0362565 wrote:Hi all,

After some advice on kitchen ventilation. If a kitchen doesn't have a window and a fan is to be fitted for ventilation, my understanding is the options are a recirculating or extract fan attached to a duct? Can you get ceiling mounted recirculating fans? Something around the size of a centrifugal extract fan. I know you can get recirculating range hoods but I'm wondering about a more discrete ceiling fan. Can't seem to find much on these online.

Thanks

Kitchen recirculating fans are fitted into cooker hoods as a way of funneling and filtering anything that comes from the cooker. A recirculating fan in the ceiling would only return fumes back in to the room with no way of collecting fumes.

Could you core drill a hole in the wall and vent directly outside with no need for filters?

The reason I ask is that my neighbour has a kitchen with no window and they have a fan in the ceiling, a bit smaller than a shoe box. The nearest wall to it has no protrusions from the outside at all as there are chimney flues running down the length of the wall. Likewise there are no ducts on the other walls which all suggests to me that the fan is not ducted at all so I don't really understand what function the fan serves if it doesn't somehow at least filter smells and recirculate.. The worst scenario is that its just an axial or centrifugal fan that's just exhausting into a narrow roof space between that flat and the one above.

With electric cooking simple carbon filled filters are enough, with gas cooking you need fresh air, we moved to an induction hob, this resulted in kitchen being a lot cooler in the summer.

Houses are not built as they should be, in theory my house had a gas fire central with should heat the whole house, but the builder fitted flue bricks to take the fumes out, but no duct to bring combustion air into the room, so for fire to work it needs to draw air from the room which is replaced in the form of drafts under the door.

If I stopped the draft then when using the tumble drier it would suck flue gases into the house.

Mothers house much older but same problem, 4 open flue fires, no vents or ducts to bring in combustion air so huge drafts across the room. Even when vents have been provided often people fill them in, either by accident or design, the number of vents filled with foam has to be seen to be believed.

Likely the easy way with a cooker is a heat recovery unit, they heat incoming air from out going air and look very like a simple extractor, but because it does not cool the room too much can be left running longer so you get fresh air, they use the pipe through the wall as the heat exchanger.

Yes I think I've read about these heat recovery units, still don't seem that common in the UK. I've never seen an installed one for example but not seen that many new properties to be fair. I wish people would just stick to building regulations, they're there for a reason. If you make a mess of electrics you're in trouble for obvious safety reasons but that doesn't excuse cutting corners in other services.