Your guide to buying
a range hood

In this step of this range hood buying guide we're going to take a look at your stove power. You might ask yourself: what does my stove have to do with anything? Good question. Your cooking stove produces a certain amount of heat, you know, to cook stuff. Well, this heat will need to go somewhere. In most cases, your range hood will need to capture it and either transport it outside or recirculate it. That’s why the maximum power of your range hood and the maximum power of your cooking stove need to match up. Chances are you already have a stove and aren’t willing to buy a new one based on the power of your future range hood. That’s why we’re going to flip it around and check the power of your cooking stove, so that we can find a range hood which matches the power of your stove.

amount of heat coming from the gas burners on your cooking stove. Finding the BTU of your stove is pretty easy and straightforward: check the manual of the stove. Some people might panic because they’ve thrown out their manual right after they unpacked their current range hood. For those people: look at the brand of your stove and use Google to find the details.

Now that you have the BTU of your cooking stove, we can check how many CFM your future range hood will need. (The PDF will do this automatically.) To do this we’re going to use the 100-to-1 rule:

Your range hood needs to have at least 1 CFM per 100 BTU.

Let's make it a bit less abstract by using an example. Let's say your cooking stove has 4 gas burners.

When we add up the BTU of all four burners, we will get 32000 BTU. Since the 100-to-1 rules says that we need 1 CFM for every 100 BTU, all we need to do is divide 32000 by 100 and we’ll have our answer: 

32000/100 = 320 CFM

BTU), but rather a measurement of how much energy an appliance  or electronic device uses. But, don’t worry about that. Go check the Wattage of the individual heating elements and write them down. (If your manual states things in KW, know that 1KW = 1000 Watts.)

Great job! Since we can’t directly compare Watts and CFM, we will have to convert the amount of Watts to BTU before we can check the amount of power our future range hood will need. If you're using our PDF, you can skip this part and continue to the next page, because your BTU will automatically be converted to CFM.

For your convenience, we’ve put together a handy table of the most common heating element Wattage. So, take the Wattage you wrote down and convert them to BTU by using the table below. Once you’ve done that, add up everything and you will have the total amount of Wattage of the heating elements on your electric cooktop.

Alternatively, if the Wattage of your stove’s heating elements fall outside ones in the table you could also calculate the total amount of BTU yourself by adding up all the Wattage of the individual heating elements and multiplying the total amount by 3.41214163513 (sorry for the ultra long number).

After calculating the amount of BTU our electric cooktop has, we’re going to use the 100-to-1 rule again (1 CFM per 100 BTU) to get the CFM. Simply divide the total amount of BTU your electric cooktop has by 100, and voila, there’s the necessary power of your future range hood in CFM.