Product review (5 stars): Best hood for half the cost, but be prepared to make your own repairs
I bought this hood here at Amazon and installed it last week.

Today I was in a local Best Buy and noticed they had an appliance section with high end equipment. (First time I've been in a Best Buy in maybe ten years; is it an illustration of Amazon dot com's success?) I saw about a dozen range hoods made by Viking, Thermador and Vent-a-Hood, and though I was no longer in the market, I was curious how my hood compared with the big dogs.

Bottom line up front: the Cavaliere has the same, often better, quality for half or less the cost.

Some of the most expensive hoods used the same type filter system, where you grasp the bottom of the filter to extract it from the hood in order to put it in the dish washer. The Cavaliere, in fact, has larger handles, easier to grasp.

A few of the hoods had their filters off, giving me a chance to look underneath at the fans. Some hoods had only one (!?) fan. Even the hoods with two fans, those fans didn't look as large or rugged as the fans in the Cavaliere.

Most of the hoods had controls in front (like the Cavaliere), but some had them underneath the hood. That seems a sure way to get covered with steam and grease, and is why I didn't buy a Broan at Lowes.

The only way I saw that some of the big-dog hoods were better than the Cavaliere is that their controls were push button. Want to turn the lights on or off? Push a button. Want to decrease the fan speed? Push a button. Want a higher speed? Push a different button. And so on.

I like this method. Switches are easy and inexpensive to replace, plus there's not a lot about switches that can break.

Which leads me to my main concern with the Cavaliere: it's that while the Cavaliere uses more elegant controls than switches -- simply tap a screen -- the controls need an electronic circuit board to make them work.

In other words, everything -- on/off, lights, fan speeds, timer, clock -- goes through the circuit board. If the board goes out, so does the hood.

In fact, that's what happened to me, and is instructive in this review.

I installed the hood with the help of a pro. The hood weighs about 60 pounds, too much for my wife to hold while I'm drilling screws into the underside of the cabinet. When we then tested the hood, the fans worked but the lights wouldn't turn on, neither by using the hood's control panel nor by using the remote control. (Yes, we also get a neat little remote.)

I emailed tech support and got a reply the same day. (Big points there.) The email gave me a phone number to call. I then talked with a tech in Support, describing the situation. To be sure I had all the parts needed to fix the problem, the tech sent me a new circuit board, a new control panel, and two cable assemblies. (More points.)

Long story short, the new circuit board fixed the problem. (Still more points.)

However, replacing a circuit board in this hood is not at all like replacing a circuit board in a desktop computer. It's not a case of dropping it into a connector. Almost ten wires have to be attached to the board, and the location of the board is awkward to access. I was an electronic maintenance tech in the Army many years ago, but someone without experience with wires and circuit boards in tight places will probably find themselves in the deep end of the pool.

I don't know what Cavaliere would have done if I couldn't have fixed the hood. I'm not sure if they have techs to send to our homes. It may not even be something they can do.

So let me summarize:
1. The hood's quality and appearance are first rate and impressive. Thick stainless steel, solidly put together, 900 CFM, quiet (even quieter than the 200 CFM hood it replaced), halogen lights easy to remove and replace (unlike other hoods, according to reviews here at Amazon).

2. Tech support is excellent, responsive to both email and telephone.

3. The price is many hundreds of dollars less than other more famous brands.

4. However, repairs - even warranty repairs - are done by the homeowner. (If I'm wrong on this, am hoping someone from Cavaliere will correct me.) That's the nature of buying something online and not from a local retailer, so it's not the fault of Cavaliere. We pay much less for the hood in return for taking on some risk if the hood needs repair.

My wife, a great and enthusiastic cook, loves this hood. She had misgivings about our spending so much money for a brand we'd never heard of and from an online retailer. (By the way, the shipping box is excellent. No worries in that area.) Now she thinks I'm a very smart fellow (finally, after 45 years).

If the hood continues to work, it will be one of the best purchases I've ever made. If it doesn't, I'm not sure where I'll find someone to fix it.

19 June 2017, an update a couple years later. Everything is still running perfectly. Once or twice a year the fan and lights turn on by themselves. Has never happened in the middle of the night, when it would wake us up. Am pretty sure something is sending an erroneous signal to the fan, but as infrequently as it happens, I haven't yet seen a pattern. If it happened more often to where it was an issue, I'd get out my troubleshooting helmet and work on it. As it is, though, it's a quirk, not a problem. We're delighted with the fan, and pray night and day for it not to break because we don't know if we could get it fixed. :-)

October 2017, another update. My wife is diagnosed with breast cancer, so I'm starting to do some cooking. And finding the sharp corners of the hood can give a nasty poke to the forehead. Here's what I used: https://www.amazon.com/Protector-Furniture-Pre-Applied-BC-Family/dp/B01MSJU1RI/ref=cm_cr-mr-title. Look for my 4-star review for more before buying it.

We take the time to write reviews in order to help others and to recognize great products and companies. Hope I succeeded in both areas.