Recirculating Kit | Under-Cabinet Range Hoods

The workmanship of the stainless steel is beautiful. The shipping box packaging was excellent. The online video is helpful, but you definitely need two men to install the Recirculating Box into the above cabinet and side cabinets, to get it just right. Also needed to call Customer Service to verify about removing the blue protective coating from the box. The answer, was yes.

It seems to me that if the recirculating kit and the vent hood are made to go together there should be a way to attach them. Since there is not the vent hood should not be advertised to be usable as both a vented or non vented hood.

Quality is great but installation appears to be difficult at best. I assumed the recirculation kit would snap on to the hood but that is not the case. We won't be installing for a few weeks so hope that it goes better than I expect. None of the videos adequately explain how to attach the two units to each other.

Range hood has excellent ventilation. The mounting is not easy with the recirculating hood. The ventilation hood would be much easier to install if there were pre drilled holes in the backs along with flanges in the recirculating hood that extend far enough for the hood to accept bolts. Trying to drill through the hood into cabinets is very difficult since there are not predrilled holes. Very hard to explain however whoever the engineering team is, they can reach out to me and through video I can show them what needs to be engineered for easy installation.

There were a number of concerns dealing with this installation. Metal edges are very sharp to run electric cables from the lower unit through the housing so this could turn into a long-term issue if vibration were to cut through the electrics as the cable snakes through the twist and turns to get out to an outlet. I had to create a Gromit strategy around the whole that they pre-cut in the hood and you bend to remove if you want to run your electric line through there.
There was no gasket between the hood and the filter box, with the only suggestion that some sort of double-sided tape be purchased. Practically speaking this is not realistic trying to get the hood pushed up into the position to meet with the filter box without potentially getting things off center and thereby compromising efforts to put the 4 screws in place..
Moving on to the four screws that are supposed to hold the range up to the filter box was quite difficult without creating extensions or having a magnetic screwdriver that’s at least 12 inches long to get up inside and join the two units. Moreover, the metal of the filter box is so thin that it was easy for me to strip out the first screw.
Directions for this process were minimal at best, and with no videos available,it was a good thing that I had significant background to help me problem-solve solutions.
Another consideration is that there are many holes and cracks between jointed components that the air pressure from the lower unit could blow through instead of being forced through the filter, itself. There is no gasket between the filter head and the inside box so Air can blow out many areas as this would eventually result in a large amount of grease escaping and collecting on various surfaces, not caught by the filter.
The filter itself does not have a pre-filter beyond what is on the hood and it seems this would be a very practical strategy to help the carbon filter last longer. It is very thin and thus questionable in it’s overall effectiveness.