A modern kitchen is no longer just a place for cooking, but also a beautiful, neat, functional corner of an apartment or house. Every housewife wants it to be beautiful here, and while cooking, steam and foreign odors do not fill not only the room, but also do not spread to the rest of the dwelling. A modern, quiet and efficient cooker hood can help in solving such a problem.
Even a beginner can install such a device in the kitchen with his own hands. You just need to choose the right materials, tools, do everything carefully and use a few tricks. And then the kitchen hood will not only function reliably, but will not spoil, and even decorate the interior.
Types of kitchen hoods
Regardless of which version of the kitchen hood is chosen, the installation is generally the same. There are three types of such electrical appliances:
- recirculating ones that do not need an air duct, they use carbon filters or, in the cheapest version, lattice filters that can be removed and cleaned;
- with an air duct, intended for connection to the ventilation system of the house, but not having a rigid outlet for the channel to eject the air flow;
- dome or fireplace. Equipped with a tough, beautiful case, such kitchen hoods look very presentable, however, they have a rather long air duct, which imposes requirements on the placement of the device.
Many models of dome hoods provide for ceiling mounting. At the same time, there are several options; it is better to entrust such installation in the kitchen to specialists. We are interested in models that can be installed with our own hands without special skills. In the following video, you can see the varieties of kitchen hoods that are most popular on the market.
What tools and materials will be required
We will describe a complete set of materials and tools that will allow you to correctly install the hood in the kitchen with your own hands. So, you will need:
- impact drill or perforator (high power, when it comes to installing a kitchen hood on a reinforced concrete wall);
- drills and drills;
- fasteners. Both Novosel mounting kits (plastic plug and screw) and Euro-nail type fasteners can be used. However, optimum results are achieved using so-called spacers.
- screwdrivers and keys (depending on the type of fasteners used);
- small hammer;
- roulette;
- building level;
- marking tool - marker or pencil.
Small tricks of working with the tool. Experienced craftsmen use screwdrivers and bits according to the type of screw heads. Beginners who want the screwdriver not to slip and the fasteners to spin smoothly and accurately will need a little advice. Wood screws (black, with a cross-shaped recess on the head without additional notches) are screwed in with bits marked PH. Self-tapping screws for dense materials (chipboard, plastic, metal) are usually white or yellow, have notches on the head, located at an offset of 45 degrees relative to the main recess for a Phillips screwdriver. This type of fastener is ideally tightened using PZ-marked bits or similarly shaped screwdrivers.Using the right tool, you can significantly speed up the work and tighten the fasteners more tightly without damaging the heads.
By varying the types of fasteners, you can properly carry out the installation yourself on any walls. So, for a brick wall in the kitchen, the "new settler" or "euro nail" sets are ideal (it needs to be hammered, therefore some models of hoods will not be able to provide enough space in the housing for the hammer to move, this must be taken into account), work on reinforced concrete is best done using spacer tubes , on a wooden wall there will be enough black self-tapping screws.
A little trick. For work in the kitchen on a wall decorated with ceramic tiles, you cannot work with a punch right away - it will split the decor element. First, you should go through the tile with a drill on the glass, and then use a perforator to deepen through the adhesive and the actual wall material.
What is needed to connect the hood
To install a kitchen hood with your own hands correctly and achieve a neat appearance, you will need:
- clamps for connecting air ducts if a corrugated sleeve will be used;
- self-tapping screws for metal or a rivet gun with consumables of the required type, if a plastic or tin box is used as an air duct;
- decorative grill for the ventilation duct at home in the kitchen;
- in the case of a kitchen hood with a rigid air duct, adapters (corners) are required to mount the air duct.
If there is no outlet near the hood in the kitchen, you will have to make a connection.
Electrical connection
In any case, whether there is a socket next to the hood or not, place the electrical connection cable correctly with an approach from above. This ensures that it does not overheat by the heat from the stove, and also reduces the possibility of accidental damage. Ideally and correctly - lead the cable behind the duct, placing it on the wall in the installation boxes. This type of connection is invisible and guaranteed secure. The following video shows the connection and cable routing.
We fix the hood to a flat wall
In order to properly mount the cooker hood to a flat wall, it is enough to perform a few simple steps:
- Mark the locations of the fasteners in accordance with the location of the corresponding holes on the hood body.
- Drill indentations to the desired depth.
In the case of a wall made of wood, it is not worth drilling holes to the full length of the self-tapping screw. A depth of 1/3 is enough. However, it is still worth working with a drill - this is correct, the self-tapping screw will not create excessive mechanical loads in the surface area and at the same time rigidly fix the structure.
- Carry out the necessary communications for the electrical connection of the cooker hood.
- Install the fastening element or immediately fix the device case with them.
The subtlety of the markings is that the hood is positioned clearly horizontally. To do this, mark the point extreme to the wall directly along the body of the device, for example, after applying the kitchen hood to the wall. The rest of the markup is done using a building level and a tape measure, correctly marking the location of the fasteners and observing the level of the device.
After the hood is screwed "roughly" without tightening the bolts or screws, you can set the body in the ideal position by checking the horizontal and vertical. Only after performing this operation can the fasteners be tightened firmly.
Fastener tricks. The cooker hood body is made of thin metal. Therefore, the fasteners, when tightened with maximum force, will necessarily deform the housing wall.To avoid such a situation and to guarantee a good clamping with an even distribution of force over a large area, you can place a plastic backing under the flat head of a triangular screw (sold in any hardware store, widely used in the furniture business as a lining for fastening handles). For a flat surface of the heads of fasteners (correctly - choose just this type of bolts or screws), you can put a wide washer with an outer diameter of 16, 22 mm or more, under which (on the device body) apply a rubber lining, for example, designed for flexible cranes hoses or other water fittings.
Duct installation
Installing an air duct in the kitchen is the easiest. If a corrugated sleeve is used, it is put on the exhaust outlet, neatly laid to the ventilation hole in the wall of the apartment. A decorative grille is installed there, to which the corrugated hose is attached. It is correct to first lay the channel, check that the corrugated pipe is not pinched or deformed, cut off the required length and then fix the inlet and outlet parts with clamps on the bell of the kitchen hood and decorative grill on the ventilation of the apartment.
A plastic or tin box looks neater, it can be laid more invisibly. First, it is necessary to cut off the parts of the required length, which are sequentially installed in their places, connecting to each other with angular or straight adapters. The following video shows the process of assembling a rigid duct.
Installing the hood on an uneven wall
If there is a gas pipe or ledge on the wall, you can resort to trick. Bolts with two thread zones (studs) are used as fasteners. On one side, such an element is screwed into a plastic plug located in the wall. On the other side is the support nut.
The nuts on several mounting bolts are positioned so that they form a single surface, located at different distances from the wall. After completing this work, the hood body is put on the fasteners and it can be secured with another set of nuts using the tricks described above.
If the distance to be compensated is very large, the cooker hood can be correctly installed on metal corners. However, with such difficulties, it is better to consider the option of using a built-in hood, when all the unevenness of the wall is compensated by the design of the cabinet in which it will be installed.
