Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Cooking activities are a major source of indoor air pollutants. To control pollutants generated from cooking activities, a range hood is commonly used in residential kitchens. Several building codes require that a range hood be installed in new homes to control pollutants from cooking, and the required airflow rates for range hoods are specified by indoor air quality standards. However, airflow alone does not show how much of the cooking pollutants are exhausted by the range hood. A better metric to evaluate range hood indoor air quality performance is capture efficiency—the fraction of contaminants emitted during cooking that are exhausted directly to the outside via the range hood. The current article summarizes the development of a range hood capture efficiency test method for use in laboratory testing and equipment rating.