It’s important to clean your hood vents to keep your kitchen safe and working properly. Use these helpful Tips for Cleaning Your Kitchen Range Hood Vents.
Working in professional kitchens, I know the importance of cleaning large, professional hood vents. I was stunned to find out many people didn’t know that they were supposed to clean their home kitchen hood vents as well. Cleaning your hood vents is important to keep them running properly as well as keeping your kitchen safe. If you don’t clean often enough, you could end up with too much smoke, food odors staying in the air, and even fires. If you are wondering where to even start, here are some helpful Tips for Cleaning Your Kitchen Range Hood Vents.
Tips for Cleaning Your Kitchen Range Hood Vents
First, start with a good place for cleaning the filter. You will need a large enough heat proof vessel for your filter such as a pot that is aluminum. You don’t want to use one with a coating as it could get scratched.
Add water and allow it to come to boil on your stove. If you prefer, use a plastic, heat proof bin (I like to use a dish bin) and bring water to boil in a kettle and pour it over the filter. Allow it to sit like this for 5 minutes or so and the hot water will break down a lot of the grease.
Add some dish soap to the water and stir and sprinkle in some baking soda. About a ⅓ cup will do the job just fine. Soak like this for 10 minutes or so, allowing the water to cool enough to be able to touch.
While the water is cooling, use a cloth damp with hot water and dish soap and wipe all surfaces around your hood. Don’t worry about taking apart anything and be careful around moving parts and wires. You don’t want to get them wet.
When your water is cooled, use a scrub brush and clean off any remaining grease or particles. Pull your filter out of the water, rinse it off and allow to air dry before replacing.
Your hood vent should be cleaned more often if you cook at home a lot. If you do an average amount of cooking, once every 6 months or so is fine, and many people can get away with only doing this once a year.
More Kitchen Cleaning Tips:
5 Steps to a Sparkling Clean Kitchen
How to Organize Under Your Kitchen Sink
Cheryl says
Those are great tips and you make it sound so easy to clean that oven range. I’d say this is more important if you fry foods on the stove top and eat meat. As a vegetarian who doesn’t normally fry foods, I don’t get a lot of mess on my stove top or in the hoods. But I still think this hood cleaning needs to be done from time to time. At the least to remove dust or dog hair – both big problems in my house! Thanks for this article!
MPaula says
I have been thinking lately that I needed to clean the vents. I’m sure this is easier than my last effort.