Can a kitchen extractor fan prevent cooking smells in other rooms?

Can a kitchen extractor fan prevent cooking smells in other rooms?

By Ruth MacEachern

Product Manager

Whether it’s the place where the whole family can get together and enjoy a meal, or somewhere that you can cook adventurous new recipes, your kitchen is the heart of your home.  Of course, being the place where you try out new dishes and cook favourites, the enticing smells from your kitchen can also spread elsewhere in the house – where they might not be as welcome, especially if they linger for a few days, or get picked up by clothes and furniture in other rooms.

Just closing the kitchen door when cooking is not normally enough to prevent the smells of food from escaping into the rest of your home, especially if you leave the windows open, as this will cause air to move out of the kitchen and into other rooms.  In fact, to minimise the smell of food escaping into the rest of your home, you need to ensure that you have a suitable extractor fan in place.

What are kitchen extractor fans?

Something that you will find in almost all homes is an extractor hood above the hob.  This is designed to capture rising steam from cooking and pump it outside to prevent condensation from forming, however the effect of an extraction hood is limited to a fairly small area of the kitchen, and it will do little to capture smells from other sources such as the oven.

A dedicated kitchen extractor fan is a separate appliance, usually mounted on an exterior wall which can ventilate the whole room more effectively.

An extractor fan in a kitchen works in the same way as one in your bathroom, expelling the moist and odour laden air from inside the kitchen safely outside and allowing it to be replaced by air drawn in from elsewhere in the property.

BY creating negative air pressure in the kitchen compared to the rest of the house, the humid air – and the smells of cooking – are effectively contained and unable to spread out into the rest of your home.

Are Kitchen and Bathroom Extractor Fans Different?

The same fans can be used in kitchens and bathrooms, but the requirements are different in terms of the amount of airflow required.

According to building regulations, a kitchen extractor fan needs to be able to have a minimum extract ventilation rate of 30 litres of air per second if it is being used intermittently and 13 litres per second in constant use.  This is more powerful than a bathroom extractor fan which needs to be able to extract a minimum of 8 litres per second constantly and 15 litres of air per second intermittently.

In practice, most extractor fans are much more powerful than the minimum building specifications – the popular Cyclone 8 extractor fan from EnviroVent is suitable for use in kitchens and bathrooms and is manufactured to be extremely efficient and easy to clean, with a Filterless design, and the ability to adjust fan speed to increase air flow when humidity levels are high.

Find out more

If you are troubled by cooking smells throughout your home, improving your kitchen ventilation can help.  Book a free home survey from our local ventilation specialists.  They will visit your property and identify sources of condensation and odours and advise you about the best solution.  Simply fill in your postcode below to find your local specialist.

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