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The gas stove panic of 2023 taught a lot of people the basics: Cooking pollutes (PDF) your home, especially if you cook with gas, but even induction can kick up particles that are risky to breathe. dc exhaust fan
Researchers already know how to keep air clean enough that long-term health risks should be minimal, and the surest solution is mechanical ventilation. That means a fan, ideally in a range hood above your stove, to suck up air and whatever pollution is floating in it, and blow it outside through a duct. It also helps get rid of steam and odors and can control grease buildup.
But vented range hoods aren’t always required by law (PDF) even in new buildings, and they can be expensive and impractical to retrofit. Cracking a window will flush out the pollution eventually, but what if you want to do more to keep the air fresh?
If you can’t get a real range hood, consider a window fan instead. No installation needed, no buy-in from your landlord required. The air-quality experts we spoke to stressed that it’s an imperfect solution but an improvement over other low-cost, low-effort strategies to manage cooking pollution.
I put it to the test by burning a few pancakes and measuring my air quality, and the results were solid.
This longtime Wirecutter pick typically doesn’t cost much and moves plenty of air—an adequate combo for clearing out kitchen pollution. But almost any window fan should do the trick.
Researchers agree that any kitchen ventilation is much better than none. Even opening a couple of windows or turning on a bathroom fan is a huge improvement compared with stewing in a smoky, fume-filled kitchen.
New York City’s building code counts a kitchen window as sufficient ventilation—though, from a public health perspective, a stricter standard would probably be a good idea. That’s because growing research shows that this kind of passive ventilation strategy doesn’t do enough to prevent risky levels of acute exposure to some types of pollution, especially if your stove runs on gas and you live in a small home.
Experts say that a vented range hood is the best way to keep your kitchen’s air clean, and it’s basically a small fan sucking air through a hole in the wall. A window fan does something similar, but through an open window.
“Yeah, it’s definitely ventilating the space,” said Jason Brown, chair of the ASHRAE Kitchen Ventilation Technical Committee, an applications engineer at Melink Corporation (maker of exhaust systems for commercial kitchens), and a 20-year veteran of the ventilation industry. “If you had the ability for a cross-draft,” with the fan in one window and a cracked window across the room for fresh air, “it’s pretty much going to evacuate the space. That’s the best case scenario.”
“Running a window fan in the kitchen is better than nothing,” said Edward Louie, a building energy efficiency research engineer at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “Anything to dilute the cooking emissions with fresh air is good.”
I put it to the test at home: my vented range hood, manufactured by some no-name brand and with no discernible industry certifications for effectiveness, compared with Wirecutter’s budget-pick window fan. Here’s how I did it.
A window fan won’t eliminate your exposure to hazardous particles or gasses. But most range hoods don’t either—both allowed my kitchen to rise into Very Unhealthy territory, as defined by the air quality index, though a regular evening in the kitchen shouldn’t produce anywhere near the amount of smoke that I made. And both options almost certainly remove dirty air a lot faster than just cracking a window.
The range hood kept the peak pollution lower than the other methods, which is not a surprise. Research suggests even a lousy range hood does the most to prevent exposure to pollution, because it should remove at least half of the undesirable particles before they float away from the stovetop and into the rest of the home. And my hood is pretty lousy! Too small, too loud, no makeup air system, not certified by any industry standards groups. These test results would probably have been better with a bigger hood that extended further over the front of the stovetop.
The window fan also kept the pollution reasonably low and actually got rid of the lingering particles faster than the hood did. That also makes sense, because this fan is more powerful than the hood. I’m certain that I was exposed to a higher peak level of pollution with the fan than with the hood—I could smell it—but I wasn’t stewing in it.
With no ventilation at all, almost four times as much pollution built up in the kitchen alone, and persisted at unsafe levels for much longer, too. Adjacent rooms were clearly very smoky as well, which I didn’t notice when I used the hood or window fan.
I didn’t run the test with just open windows (no fan), or while running a bathroom fan. But I’d smoked up my kitchen enough for one day, and I think common sense would tell us that the hood and the window fan work better: A typical bath fan only runs at 50 cubic feet per minute, compared with 100 to 150 CFM for a range hood on low (plus the advantage of being right above the stove), and significantly greater for a window fan. With open windows, the airflow rate is unpredictable and depends on the weather.
Air pollution aside, window fans do have some weaknesses—though they mostly overlap with the downsides of other types of ventilation.
Without ventilation right above the stove, “you end up with cooking oil vapors on every surface,” Louie said, “which becomes a nightmare to clean up.” Even a mediocre hood like mine works much, much better than anything else on this count.
Ventilation removes pollution, but it also leaks comfortable, conditioned air—and pulls in any humid, frigid, or otherwise unpleasant air from the outdoors.
Brown pointed out you have to pick between these “lesser of two evils—indoor air quality, or comfort and energy” with almost any ventilation strategies, hoods included, unless you have a heat- or energy-recovery ventilator. (I’d venture to guess that window fans have the biggest effect on indoor comfort, because they typically move more air than range hoods or even built-in wall exhaust fans.)
Another option: Senior staff writer Rachel Wharton, who covers kitchen appliances at Wirecutter, told me that she mostly just avoids using her gas stove at all in the winter and summer, and instead cooks with a portable induction burner and other electric countertop appliances.
Sometimes the air outdoors is dirtier than anything coming off your stove. A window fan draws in wildfire smoke, for example—but so can a range hood or open window. The workaround here is a filtered make-up air system that activates when you run a range hood.
This one is unique to window fans. You either leave it in place and block the window, or wrestle it in and out of the frame whenever you cook. (The rose-colored version: You can move the fan to whatever room you want, when you want.) Most people don’t ventilate their kitchens at all because it’s moderately annoying or inconvenient—but you could at least keep it around for the times you really smoke up the kitchen, or you’re cooking a feast and keeping multiple gas burners PM2.5 roaring for long stretches of time.
One alternative to look into is a permanent kitchen fan (here’s one example). It’s a small, through-the-wall unit with all the same basic strengths and weaknesses of a window fan, except it’s a permanent installation. It’s much more expensive to buy and install than a window fan, and if you rent you need to get your landlord to buy into the idea. But it could be more convenient than a window fan when a ducted range hood is impractical.
This article was edited by Megan Beauchamp and Maxine Builder.
My beat is home improvement in a broad sense: I cover tools and maintenance and upgrades (DIY or otherwise), as well as air quality and energy efficiency, plus big-ticket purchases such as major appliances and HVAC.
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