Stove With No Kitchen Exhaust Hood? Here Are Your Options

Cooking creates a lot of dangerous PM2.5 air pollution that travels throughout your home. Therefore, cooking in a kitchen without a range hood is dangerous. Unfortunately, I know many people with no range hood or kitchen exhaust fans. That raises the question: Is there an easy, cheap range hood alternative for your stovetop?

Cooking Creates a LOT of Deadly Air Pollution

If you looked at an air quality monitor while cooking, you might be startled at how much dangerous PM2.5 air pollution is filling your home.

Cooking air pollution mitigation — Healthy home interventions: Distribution of PM_2.5 emitted during cooking in residential settings

The study showed cooking raises air pollution levels in all rooms of the home to “hazardous” levels. Deep frying raised particulate pollution by 170-fold!

Why PM2.5 Is So Dangerous

No Kitchen Hood? Here Are Your Options.

Ideally, your home has a kitchen hood that can be used in combination with the below tools for optimal effectiveness. If you do not have a stove hood, make sure to have a strong combination of HEPA air purifiers and improved ventilation.

1. Use HEPA Air Purifiers

HEPA air purifiers are extremely good at removing dangerous pollutants created from cooking such as PM2.5. In fact, the combination of ventilation and air purifiers even outperformed a kitchen hood in reducing PM2.5 levels.

Combination of Ventilation and PAC decayed PM_2.5 levels to standard background levels within approximately 30 min, making it the most effective intervention from the particle decay perspective.
Study: Healthy home interventions: Distribution of PM_2.5 emitted during cooking in residential settings

Additionally, the use of air purifiers in other rooms in the house during cooking also dramatically reduced air pollution levels in those rooms.

Air Purifiers Reduced PM2.5 Similarly to Stove Hood.

The study stated there was no statistically significant difference between the combination of ventilation and stove tops and the combination of ventilation and air purifiers in reducing PM2.5. Ventilation and air purifiers reduced PM2.5 levels by 88%.

Since cooking creates a lot of air pollution for a HEPA air purifier to deal with, you will need a powerful HEPA air purifier with a high CADR (measures air purifier effectiveness). We recommend a powerful HEPA air purifier such as the Blast Mini HEPA (see video below).

2. Improve Ventilation

When cooking, turn your ventilation on high and crack open as many doors and windows as you can. Ideally, create cross ventilation by opening doors and windows on opposite sides of the kitchen. This will help dilute the polluted air with less polluted air.

What Air Purifier Should I Get for the Kitchen?

Air purifiers can help significantly reduce air pollution from cooking if you do not have a range hood. But, not all air purifiers are created equally. The amount of air an air purifier can clean is called CADR. The higher the CADR, the more air the purifier can clean. Because cooking creates A LOT of pollution, the stronger the better.

Therefore if you do not have a range hood, we recommend an air purifier with at least a CADR of 400-500 m3/hr. If interested in Smart Air purifiers, we recommend either the SA 600 with a CADR of 500 m3/hr or the even stronger Blast Mini with a CADR of 740 m3/hr.

Interested in other brands? Check out our 4-step guide to choosing an air purifier so you get a great air purifier at a great price.

Smart Air Family


QT3	Sqair	SA600	Blast Mini	Blast
Room Size	Personal Space	40 m²	55 m²	85 m²	130 m²
Effectiveness (CADR)	40 m³/h	315 m³/h	500 m³/h	740 m³/h	950 m³/h
Max Noise	44.5 dB	52 dB	52.5 dB	49 dB	43 dB
HEPA Lifespan	7 months	6 months	8 months	13 months	22 months

Cheap alternatives to a kitchen hood?

There is no statistically significant difference between the combination of ventilation and stove tops and the combination of ventilation and air purifiers in reducing PM2.5. Ventilation and air purifiers reduced PM2.5 levels by 88%.

Smart Air