How to Clean KitchenAid Range Hood Filters — and the One You Cannot Wash

How to clean KitchenAid range hood filters, and which filter is which

There are two kinds of filter in a range hood and they have almost nothing in common. One is metal, washable and in front of you every time you cook. The other is charcoal, invisible, consumable, and only exists on some installations — and it is the one behind most of the "the hood does not pull any more" calls we take.

Get the difference straight and the rest of this page takes ten minutes a month.

The metal filter — mesh or baffle — is a grease filter. It catches the oil that would otherwise coat the blower, and it goes back in after washing. The charcoal filter is an odor filter. It exists only when the hood returns air to your kitchen instead of sending it outside, and it is a consumable part with a life, like a water cartridge. Washing it destroys it.

How often should hood filters be cleaned in a Miami kitchen?

About once a month if you cook most days. Every two months if the cooktop mostly boils water and reheats.

That is shorter than the interval a lot of general advice gives, and the reason is what South Florida cooking actually looks like. Frying, searing, a pan of oil for tostones, anything on a high burner with fat in it — that is what loads a filter, and boiling pasta is not. Your cooking sets the interval, not the calendar.

There is a second reason to keep to it. A loaded filter does not simply stop filtering; it restricts. The blower pulls against a partly closed screen, so the hood is louder, moves less air, and the motor runs warmer for a worse result. Every month, ten minutes, is cheaper than a blower.

Taking the metal filters out

No tools. Switch the fan and lights off first and give the hood a minute if you have just cooked, because the filters sit directly over the burners and hold heat.

Then, for each filter:

• Baffle filters — the heavy stainless ones with vertical vanes, standard on the Commercial-Style hoods. There is a small finger pull on the lower edge. Push toward the back of the hood, drop the front edge, and it lifts out.
• Mesh filters — the lighter aluminum ones with a wire loop or a slide catch. Same motion: push against the spring, tilt the front down, and it comes free of its frame.

If it feels like it needs force, you are pulling the wrong edge. Nothing in there unscrews.

While the filters are out, look up into the hood with a flashlight. You are checking two things: whether the blower wheel has a visible coating, and whether there is a second filter behind the metal ones. Both answers are useful.

Washing them

Fill the sink with water as hot as the tap gives, add a good squirt of a degreasing dish detergent, and let the filters sit for fifteen minutes. A spoonful of baking soda in the water helps on filters that have been left far too long.

Then brush both faces — a soft brush along the mesh, or down between the baffle vanes — rinse until the water runs clear, and let them dry completely before they go back. A filter reinstalled wet drips onto the cooktop and marks it.

The dishwasher route works for most of these, laid flat or on edge in the lower rack on the hottest cycle. Check your own use and care guide, because repeated hot cycles can dull or darken aluminum mesh, and never run them in with dishes.

Filters go back the way they came out, with the spring edge toward the rear.

The charcoal filter, and why nobody knows about it

If your hood recirculates — filters the air and gives it back to the room rather than ducting it outside — there is a charcoal filter behind or above the metal ones.

It is not washable. Charcoal works by adsorbing odor into its pore structure, and once those pores are full, they are full; soaking it in hot detergent just fills them with detergent. It is replaced, ordered against the hood's model number, and roughly twice a year is a sane rhythm for a kitchen in daily use.

How to tell which installation you have: look above the hood. Pipe leaving the top or back into the wall, cabinet or ceiling means ducted, and there is no charcoal filter to find. A grille on the front of the upper chimney or on the cabinet face, where air comes back into the room, means recirculating. In condo towers across Brickell, Aventura and Fort Lauderdale the answer is very often recirculating, because the duct route was never the owner's to build.

Write the date on the new filter's frame with a marker. It is the only record that will exist.

If your ventilation is actually a microwave sitting over the range rather than a hood, the charcoal filter is in there too, behind the vent grille at the top, and the same rules apply — that appliance has its own page on this site.

When it is not the filters

Cleaning is maintenance, and maintenance does not fix everything. Come back to us if:

• The fan does nothing on any speed while the lights work. The hood has power, so the suspects are the switch or control, the blower motor, or a thermal cut-out that has tripped after the hood ran hot.
• The hood is loud in a new way — a rumble or a whine that arrived over weeks. That is usually a bearing telling you about itself in advance.
• Clean filters, and it still does not pull. On a ducted hood, check the damper flap where the duct leaves the house. They stick shut with grease and lint, and a stuck damper undoes an entire hood.
• A downdraft will not rise or will not go back down. Do not help it by hand — the gearing is what holds the carriage, and forcing it turns a slow lift into a stuck one.

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