Partly to mostly cloudy. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 64F. Winds light and variable..

Partly to mostly cloudy. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 64F. Winds light and variable.

An oven hood should be able to inhale without coughing.

An oven hood should be able to inhale without coughing.

There was a fireplace in the basement of our early 1970s home that I called Michelangelo — because it could draw so well. Where are the modern oven hoods worthy of such a nickname?

When I was a teenager, I could enjoy clandestine cigarette-smoking sessions beside Michelangelo free from fear of being discovered. As long as a fire was burning, the smoke from my smoke — every stinking particulate — would float toward the flame and fly up the flue.

If I heard the door to the basement steps open, I could quickly torch the evidence with the flick of a finger and preserve my innocence. Sometimes the door would open and close again. Other times the visitor was one of my friends coming over unannounced. Such false alarms led to my placing the Marlboro just inside the fireplace screen to avoid premature torching.

I have no idea what they’re charging for cigarettes these days, but popular brands were, by comparison, dirt cheap back then. Still, we bought them one pack at a time, and the Jiffy Market was a half-hour walk.

During the planning stages for a new house a few years ago — my tobacco-related youthful indiscretions firmly in the past — I went against those recommending a traditional, wood-burning fireplace. Ventless gas logs are quite the engineering marvel these days. But none can provide cover for sneaking a smoke.

The professional-grade oven hood we installed, however, should do that and more.

It is well and good that my wife, Sharon, designed our wonderful kitchen. It’s beautiful, and she loves it. She got the big stainless-steel oven and gas cooktop that she wanted. And she picked out the massive 45-inch insert hood that lives overhead. I installed the exhaust venting myself.

There is a do-it-yourself backstory regarding the vent pipe, but not one that should affect the performance of the twin-blower hood that feeds it.

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The vent is made of 10-inch stainless steel pipe that travels across the attic and out. It is not the insulated variety, and I didn’t think to wrap it during the install. When warm air enters a metal pipe in a freezing attic, it can produce enough condensation to drip from a seam and ruin a ceiling on the other side of the house.

I went back and insulated the pipe. But how any warm air got that far into the pipe remains a mystery because that twin-jet oven hood doesn’t seem to be blowing in the right direction. If it were, one would think it capable of sucking an entire Marlboro right out of a teenager’s hand — not that such a scenario exists at our house.

For the second time in recent months, smoldering cheese drippings have blackened the oven floor and filled our house with smoke. Both times, the hood — with its “1,500-cubic-feet-per-minute blower” — fell down on the job. Everything, including the dog, became pizza-smoked.

Sharon consulted the owner’s manual for her massive oven hood. I searched online to see if others have experienced similar problems. And I discovered another potential do-it-yourself pitfall.

It is possible, apparently, to install the fans upside down so that they operate in reverse. I will further troubleshoot — hopefully before the next mozzarella mishap — to see if fan direction might be the problem.

Either way, we’ll still own a very large oven hood that really sucks.

Contact Mark Rutledge at mrutledge@reflector.com.

Contact Mark Rutledge at mrutledge@reflector.com.

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