Cautionary Tale

20070629 We've been using our EHD3018SCH Dacor range hood since Dec 2003. The lights have been on an hour in the morning and 3 hours in the evening every day since then, and for 6 or 7 hours at a time on "cook all day" Sunday. Tonight, the glass covering the bulb on both of the light bulbs dropped out! Fortunately, the cook pan was on the back burner when the first one fell. We immediately switched off the lights. After the remaining one cooled enough to touch, we noticed its glass was loose also, and safed it up with a couple pieces of masking tape. It fell out about 10 minutes later. I haven't yet found out if these are Dacor brand proprietary bulbs or not as it's Sunday evening. It appears the glue holding the reflector and the lens cover dried up.

20070813 Looks like those bulbs are proprietary. Ordered some that were real close from an online source, and they are an eighth of an inch too short to allow the bulb to make contact when it is installed with the chrome trim ring. Solution? Leave the trim ring off! Lots of light now.

As to the actual functionality of this range hood, it exhausts much better than the "builder special" GE that came with the house when it was built in 1989. The exhaust filters are dishwashable which motivates me to clean them more often.

When adding wet food to hot oil, the greasy exhaust is removed quickly and completely. Odors from cooking broccoli and steam from boiling water for pasta are all removed well. The kitchen stays much cleaner than before. (We don't have experience with cooking meats so I cannot address frying that and how well the exhaust performs)

With all those positives, I must explain my No recommendation.

In 2003, we remodeled in the kitchen and added a couple rooms. Part of the kitchen redo included a new range and matching range hood. I had been lusting after a Dacor, factory fitted for LP, convection range since I first saw it in 1999 so we didn't even shop for anything else. Turns out that although the stove looked really, really good, it had so many unresolvable problems (it was replaced once under warranty) that Dacor finally bought the second one back.

So although the exhaust hood functions well, it now sits above a Maytag convection range and I would much rather have a matching hood. After spending $1300 for the Dacor, it will remain for quite awhile.