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Sunday, September 4, 2016

Range Hood

AKDY 30-Inch 3-Speed Under Cabinet Range Hood AZ-W0175WHT
I replaced our old range hood with a new one yesterday. Someone got a little over enthusiastic about cleaning the old one and scrubbed off some of the paint so it no longer looked pristine. I suspect that a film of some kind of nasty had accumulated over the last 20 years and it reacted with the paint, so wiping it down with a soft cloth was all it took to wipe off the paint. Or the person doing the cleaning attacked it one of those Scotch Brite scrubbers. Those things will cut through anything. Cause remains unknown, and really, at this point we don't care.
    The old range hood never worked very well. Turn it on and it sucks air very well for about three seconds and then the tone changes, the air velocity drops and you realize that the only way to get rid of the smoke is to open all the windows. Problem is that when the house was being built, the duct that leads to the outside got an extra kink. The old hood probably would have worked fine if it had a straight shot to the outside, but this extra kink made pushing the air out more than it could handle.
    We have a party coming up and some people want the kitchen to look 'nice' and the range hood was the one big eyesore, so something had to be done. I could have painted it, but that would have meant sanding and masking and making a mess and agonizing over whether the sanded surface was smooth enough and then spray painting and hoping that there wasn't any overspray and then cleaning the entire kitchen to get rid of the overspray. So no, I'm not going to paint it.
    Taking the old range hood out was not a big problem until I touched something inside the hood. OMG. Didn't anyone ever clean this thing? It was nasty. Light bulb goes in the trash, I'm not even going to try and clean it. Metal parts in the recycling bin. Feed that shit to the smelter.
     Installing the new hood was a real pain. Even though the screw holes are all laid out on a standard pattern and even though the hood fits perfectly in the space under the counter (less than 1/32" of slop anywhere), the screw holes don't line up. Electric screwdriver solves that problem. Connecting the duct is not a problem either. The exhaust port from the hood is the same size as the old one and fits in the duct just fine, but it's a loose fit, it needs to be sealed. I can seal the two sides and the front with duck tape, but the the back is right up against the cabinet wall. How the devil are you supposed to seal that? I finally gave up and went to Lowe's and bought a can of Great Stuff spray sealer for $6. I think I used about ten cents worth.
    The absolute worst part was hooking up the electrical lines. I won't mention how the guys running the masonry saw out in the garage kept turning the power back on because their saw quit working. Never mind that the breaker controlling the circuit to the fan had nothing to do with the outlets in the garage that the saw was plugged into.
    No, the problem was having to make like a snake to be able to put the screws in the cover over the electrical connection. I ended up having to bend over backwards with the back of my head lying on the range, looking straight up. Then I was able to see and reach the screws. Lucky I didn't break something on the range.

Bought the hood from Amazon

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