A common question people ask is “I’m having a new cooker hood and I’ve been told I need a ducting kit to get the air outside. What is a ducting kit and how do I fit one?”
The ducting kit
Well a ducting/venting kit comprises of a few components, as shown below, and allows you to direct warm air and cooking odours out of your kitchen and send them outside through an external wall.
As you can see from the image above, the square section of the ducting kit with the vents will go on the outside of your home. The piece of conduit then attaches to that the goes through the wall to the inside of the house. The square section that you can see in the middle attaches to the wall inside your home to cover up any unsightly mess that was created whilst creating the hole. The rest of the conduit attaches to the top of the extractor hood with the supplied 125mm circular connector in the ducting kit, that fits onto the end of the conduit.
This is what the top of the average cooker hood looks like where you attach the conduit and connector to.
A ducting kit is pretty universal and whichever one you buy should be able to accommodate the cooker hood that you have purchased. If in doubt, have a look at the extractor first.
How do I get the hole in my wall?
Now, this is the hard bit! Inside your house you probably have plasterboard walls, then some breeze blocks then the outdoor bricks That’s 3 layers of materials that you have to get through!
Having recently created the hole in my kitchen myself, here is how it was done. Unless you have the tools and knowhow, it might pay to get a professional to do this for you.
(1) Checks were made to ensure that there were no wires or pipes behind the section where we intended on drilling the hole in the wall with a Stud Detector. The last thing you want to do is drill into a water pipe!
(2) A pilot hole was created from inside the house to outside, with a 13mm masonry bit and a powerful drill. Those battery powered drills don’t really cut the mustard here so a mains powered one is best. The recommendations were that a rotary drill with a minimum power drive of 850 watts should be used and capable of speeds up to 3000rpm.
(3) A 127mm diamond core bit (below) was then used to drill a hole on the inside of the house so that it went as far as possible in the breeze blocks but not as far as the outside bricks.
(4) The 127mm diamond core bit was then used on the outside, with the drill guide in the centre of it, to ensure that the drill bit maintained its positioned and the 2 half holes met in the middle. Can you have half a hole?? hum…
So, this is what the hole looks like at the moment. I would not recommend performing this exercise in Winter!
As you can see, the hole on the inside is pretty neat but there are bits of chipped plaster on the edge of the whole. You could use some Polyfilla One Fill to tidy things up but with the 17cm plastic covering that attaches to the wall and the 20cm wide chimney that covers the hole, nobody is ever going to see the imperfections behind the extractor.
Well that’s a ducting kit and how it fits into your kitchen!