Product review (4 stars): Perfect greasy restaurant tech for home but terrible to install
I had three generations of microwave hood in the house and always know that it is a very bad idea if you do any stir fry. And I do it every day. Last time when the microwave broke these hoods with well over 400 CFM (typical of microwave hoods) cost over $1000. Now if you add the price of this and a counter top microwave, it's the same as a 400 CFM microwave hood I had years ago.

Microwave hoods are flush with the 12" deep cabinet but I stir fry in the front stoves because of the large wok, so the smoke goes straight to the ceiling. Range hoods have a roof extruding out to catch the smoke.

Grease will be collected in the hood and will drip somewhere. In my microwave hoods grease were everywhere, getting out from the door latch holes, or from the control panel seams. The last one is the worst, grease drips from the ceiling vent inside the cooking chamber and into the food down there. There's no way you can clean it without dissembling the microwave.

In this hood there's an easily removable oil tunnel to collect grease. There's a round tunnel circling each fan to collect grease falling onto the fan wall by centrifugal force. There are tubes to connect the circular tunnel to the removable oil tunnel at the bottom of the hood. All you need to do is occasionally pull it out and rinse it.

The hood comes in with a few dings at the top that will be covered by the cabinet after installation. Am I lucky? Some foam padding is broken inside. But I believe the packaging and delivery is not bad at all, relatively. You cannot believe how may broken things I have received lately across the board.

The hood seems to be well made. It looked like a twin turbo jet engine inside a strong, brushed stainless steel box. The box is precise, no sign of welding, more like a plastic mold with abrupt or gentle edges at will.

I do not know if it's over 900 CFM. But even for 400 CFM, the same as my microwave, it will be infinitely better because the air have to go through an obstacle course before getting into the vent. For the reviewer who said it's struggling to keep a tissue up, I tried with 4 typical kitchen paper towel stacked together as one and somehow they stay right there on the grease filter. Noise is irrelevant as I can only hear the air hitting hard on the vent above. From the sound of it I can say it's much more powerful than my microwave hoods.

The touch controls WERE the way to go. Many years ago touch buttons with absolutely no movements began to appear on fans and light switches. But then they were never really popular. Until those cheap rubber membrane buttons conquered the world. They are cheap and provide feedback but it's mad to put them on range stoves. The heat created all sorts of problems. I'm living with it now as I have to replace the whole panel costing a few hundred dollars at least. And I didn't bother to repair the leak in my stainless steel dishwasher because only the on off button works, remembering the last favorite cycle. I throw it away and got a plastic one. These membrane like buttons are only good for electronics, where a few years is like eternity.

The manual is not bad at all, language is perfect. But the content can be improved. The "original" state means the off state when the power button is red and most buttons are dimmed. Is it difficult to say that? The standby state means all buttons are functioning and most of them are white. To turn the fan on you need two button pushes - one for entering standby (or you can say power on), and another one to start the fan. The hood will return to  "off" mode if idle for a long time. That's a little inconvenience to save the standby current and to save the world.

The heat sensor button and auto mode mentioned in the manual doesn't work. Perhaps not for this model. And it's not described in the listing, fair enough.

It's a lot lighter than a micorwave hood, with equally distributed weight that one person can easily lift it. But it's much more difficult to install than a microwave hood, professional or DIY. You have to consider that before buying this excellent product.

If you make it easier to install like a microwave hood, you can just add $100 to the price. Nobody will bother to turn up to install it for you for $40 here. Only if you are in good terms with a handyman and it happens you are on his route that day. It cost me $90 to clear the kitchen drain outside the house for an unlicensed retired fireman. Then I found out 20 years ago that it will clear if I pour one or two full bottle of strong acid drain openers. And if I don't install a grease trap, it will clog regularly. A mains pressure regulator for living on the hills? A quote over $1000 !

My 3 generation of micowave hoods all uses the same old vent pipe setup, where the ceiling vent is about at the middle of the cabinet. The vent outlet of this hood is close to the front of the cabinet. So you may have a problem of alignment. Flexible duct is not the recommended solution. Noisy (?) and collect grease. I got a rigid but adjustable 90 deg elbow. First align the dotted joints together to give a straight one. Twist the 1st section to give the maximum of 22.5 deg. Twist the next section to give 22.5 deg in the opposite. Then you have a upright vent with a little offset. Since you need a reducer, there's little room to maneuver. You have to sort out the vent first before installing the hood. I sort of followed the instruction doing the vent last, so I ended up doing it all over again. 8" is the industry recommended duct size for 900 CFM. I have 7" that will do but six and four is definitely on the small side. If you need to cut vent, I suggest oscillator tool with metal blade. You will find use for them. It's noisy but won't take long.

First, there's no bracket to help you hang the hood on the wall so you can proceed to secure it. There's a pair of brackets but it's either wall mount, OR top mount. If you want top mount, the brackets get in the way. Then there's no template for the screws. The mounting hardware is of good quality. How much does a piece of paper cost? And you can at least jack up the price by $10 if you have a template. The dimensional drawings are very good but I don't want to do a simple technical drawing on my greasy cabinet bottom. And I don't have something 30" wide that I can draw on.

Now if you have a modular cabinet, that each cabinet have it's own walls when you split them apart, the screws are supposed to go up on the vertical side walls. You can't use any other methods like nuts and bolts, toggle bolts, by drilling holes at the cabinet bottom. You have to destroy part of the side walls and still the rest of the wall will get in the way.

The keyhole shape of the mounting holes suggests that you can put in the screws half way in first, lift the hood and let the screw head go through the hole, then push the hood towards the wall to hang it. Finally, tighten the screws from inside the hood. The problem is, the screw head matches closely the bigger end of the mounting hole. The screw positions have to be precise.

Assume you have the screws in almost perfect position, you still need a two person crew to lift the hood, eyeball the screws so that all four of them goes through the mounting hole at the same time. That's why you can't just hire a crew to travel 20 odd miles just to install a few screws for $40. If they don't do templates than it's a 3 person crew to mark the positions while the hood is lifted in place.

And that's not the end of the story. I doubt if you can use a screw driver vertically to tighten the screws from under the hood, not even a very long driver. That also eliminates the possibility of using power tools. A short driver may go in but can tighten at most two of the screws. So I have to bring out my snake driver part that I never used for about 2 decades. It works but first you have to use power tools to tighten and loosen the screws without the hood to make sure the screws can be tightened by hand via a snake in the final step. The pilot hole was narrow because the screw have to hang the hood upside down. So it's tough to drive the screws in by hand.

The screws are of good quality but given half the chance, a power driver will grind off the screw head instead of driving it. I ruined 3.5 of the 7 screws that I received.

The 2nd time I installed it, I figured out how to do it by myself. Use two c-clamps on the cabinet side walls. It's only the sides are in contact but if yours are really expensive, you can pad the clamps, protect it the way you want. They will hold the hood with the back leaning against the back wall. You can slip in the hood close to the bottom of the cabinet above so you can put the long screw into the predrilled holes and start tightening.

The 1st time I installed it with a two person team, we managed to lift the hood into the half way in screws. All four of them and it's a miracle for me. I was thinking of 2 to 3 screws and then figuring out how to get the rest in position. So I share with you how I make templates without big papers and not even a triangle or t-square. First cut small triangle piece of papers as pointers to critical points on the top of hood, like the screw positions, cord hole position, the corners and the edges of the hood. Then use a paper hole punch to make a hole in the middle of the triangle. Use a small piece of painter's tape to secure the triangle to the top of hood via the hole. You can easily take out the paper that way. When all triangles are in place, put small amount of school glue on them. Then put papers on top to connect the triangles. Align straight paper edges with edges of the hood. In the end you will have a single piece of multilayered template with all the right markings. Then you use double sided glue pads to stick it to the cabinet bottom. A crafty method that you can get all supplies in Joann.