Do you have an exhaust fan in your kitchen?
 

I just moved here to a new construction villa. The microwave exhaust does not exhaust to the outside I found out. It blows upward from the front of the microwave to the ceiling. I asked a designer home owner and their kitchen exhausts to the outside. I am in a patio villa. Did the builder decide not to vent the smaller homes, and what can I do to fix it? I have a walk through in a week. Thanks.

Ask for a copy of the house plans, these will show if there is an outside vent, the other option is to go into the attic and look for the rectangular vent. The other item to check out is if the microwave was installed correctly, some have a plate that needs to be removed, others have some type of lever (or similar) that changes the direction from inside to outside.

Ask your builder to add a vent, or recommend a good subcontractor. Might cost a little but will be worth it IMHO

99.999% of the time, Villas have the microwave exhaust venting recirculating back into the kitchen, where designer homes have the vent exhausting to the outside, either up and out of the roof or out an outside wall, if the unit is on an outside wall.

Changing it after the build to be vented outside would be costly....and different remedies dependent if you have a wood frame vinyl sided home, or stucco, and if the unit is on an outside wall or not.

Perhaps villa kitchens are just for show, not for cooking.

I thought all kitchens in TV were for looks not for cooking..........:clap2:

You might not be allowed to vent it through the wall as the space between your wall and your neighbors windows is pretty narrow. That might be why they don't vent them in the first place.

The Tinker is spot on... That microwave plate is usually not removed and these installers look for the easy way out!

I live in a more upscale home, and I also have a microwave oven over my stove that has a small fan that blows air through a charcoal filter (I think) to remove odors and back into the kitchen. In any case, it does blow air into the kitchen, so cooking broccoli still fills the house with the nasty stench of cooking broccoli (I love to eat it). To my mind, this is one of the worst design decisions in The Villages, though to be fair, that over-the-stove microwave oven is a much-wanted item, and I use mine a lot and rarely use the stove or oven. The alternative is one less cupboard or just keeping it on the counter, where it takes up a lot of room.

The thing is, the fan in your microwave oven is NOT adequate for exhausting the smells and clouds of water vapor from your cooking on the stove. Just venting it to the outside won’t help very much. To do that, you need a range hood of an adequate size and shape, and it needs to be a specified number of inches above the stove, or it won’t do its work. (Probably 24” maximum.) You need a fan in it that sucks hard enough to really pull out the smell. That means probably 300 to 360 cubic feet per minute for an electric stove and more for gas. (Compared to maybe 20 cfm in your microwave oven.) If you want to be able to hear yourself think, get an ultra quiet fan. These cost more, but they are worth it. Even so, that much air rushing through an exhaust duct makes quite a bit of noise, like a big window fan. It’s possible to mount the fan in the attic.

The exhaust has to be vented outdoors. Venting it just into the attic is illegal, partly because of what might happen if you had a fire on the stove with the exhaust fan on—it might suck up flames. If your stove is on an outside wall in your kitchen, it’s quite easy for an installer to install a 4x8” rectangular vent through the wall with a damper. If like mine it is on an inside wall with a living room behind it and a cathedral ceiling, here is the process. Remove the microwave oven. The range hood will go there. Cut a hole, probably 6” or 8”, in the bottom and top of the 12” high cupboard above the microwave oven. My kitchen has a 14x16” soffit above all the cabinets, then an open area to the ceiling. The same hole has to be extended through the top and bottom of the soffit and through the ceiling and through the roof. The vent pipe gets pushed down through the ceiling and attached to the range hood. The fan is installed in the attic (ideally, to further decrease the noise) wired to current, and a switch is installed in the wall or is already on the range hood. (Get a range hood with bright lights to light up your cooking.) Then the fan is vented through the roof, and the pipe is carefully sealed to prevent leaks, and a hood is placed over the pipe so rain doesn’t enter. Then you decide where you want the microwave oven. As for the vent pipe above the soffit and below the ceiling, you could leave it exposed or build a little box around it.

If this were all done during construction, the range hood, fan, and venting would cost maybe $500. You could save by buying a range hood with fan and lights built in, along with the switches, but get one with that number of cubic feet per minute and an ultra quiet fan. Installing it during construction would be relatively cheap and easy because the wiring would be accessible, etc. If I were to have this done in my kitchen today, done right, on an inside wall, through the roof, I’m sure it would cost over $1,000. That’s about four times the cost of the big microwave oven over the stove.

It was an easy decision for the developers: Give people the over-the-stove microwave oven people wanted without their noticing that it is worthlessly venting into the kitchen and keep the house prices down or put that savings into other nice touches people like.

Doc’s guesstimated $1800 a year ago just to run a vent through the roof. That didn’t include new microwave (ours is 2004) or stove the rest of the remodel. Gas stoves produce a lot of heat & moisture. I cannot bake in the summer. It demands a lot of the a/c. Venting to the outside would be smart, and logical like the dryer to the outside. Amazing how this isn’t a requirement in Florida. I think homeowners would appreciate it.

My CYV is out the top of the microwave. Doesn't really bother us at all.

:bigbow::bigbow:

We have a patio villa and looked into exterior kitchen venting. We called the architectural review office and were told if we vented thru the roof, no approval needed. If we vented thru the wall, approval needed. We decided to get an estimate first and the only company we could find to do this was Doc's Restorations. They quoted us $900 to vent thru the wall. No idea what they might charge now. But we decided against it. This is only one of several money-saving corners cut in TV construction. Good luck.

I don't know why it would be so expensive to vent through the roof as they put in plenty of solar tubes throughout the villages in the area

All of the new houses I have looked at in St Catherine has their exhaust fans going to the outside. You never want a fan to exhaust into the attic, that would cause mold, there’s more than just air going thru that exhaust. Also I don’t think it’s legal to exhaust into the attic

Not just villias, my house is the same way.

What????

Money saver for the builder
 

Anything like this is a money saver for the builder. In other words a cheaper house to build.
The location of the stove is another thing, if the way to the roof is not clear then they can't go straight up and the vent has to be straight so it doesn't become a grease trap.

Most only go back into the room. That’s the way they are designed. If that’s a deal breaker for you, then that’s not the home for you. For us it’s not a big deal.. plus a neighbor of ours paid close to 2000. To have it run outside. After a year, they are having problems with squirrels and other rodents knawing at their vent, and getting into the duct. But they live near a pond so more critters I guess.

Not legal to exhaust into the attic.

I was told by previous owner that my kitchen fan vents out to the outside, but I have a suspicion it goes into the attic. Just one more of many things that will need to be changed/repaired/renovated in my old 'new' home. One thing at a time...

I have two vents coming out of the roof neat the kitchen. The straight one is the dryer as I can see. Does anyone know what the curved one is for ( per pic attached )?

The curved one is the dryer vent. The straight one is a vent from one or more of the plumbing fixtures. Every plumbing fixture has a vent, but some of them are combined in the wall before they exit through the roof.

Begs the question.
 

Assuming we all have exhaust fans in our bathrooms to get rid of moisture from bathing, why not in the kitchen as well to get rid of moisture from cooking???

Solar Tubes don't move anything except light. Codes cover exhaust fans and who can move your air and grease through your house. Apples and oranges.

We rarely turn the vent fan on but ours vents through a filter in the microwave and back into the kitchen.

Same with me. Ridiculous system!!!!

Same here, but even if you rarely use it make sure you clean or better yet repalce the filters. They can get pretty gross. We moved into a 9 year old home and it seems they always used it but never changed the flters (or if they did, they cooked a lot of greasy food).

Thanks for your post. Before we moved here, we had a countertop microwave with no vent button. As a result of your post, I examined the microwave above the stove, and saw that there is a vent fan button!! After reading online about microwaves, I guess we should start using it!