When you're choosing a rangehood, one of the first and most fundamental decisions you'll face is whether to go ducted or recirculating. The difference goes well beyond installation complexity — it affects day-to-day performance, ongoing maintenance requirements, and how effectively your rangehood manages kitchen air quality. Here's everything you need to know to make the right call for your kitchen.

How Ducted Rangehoods Work

A ducted rangehood pulls air from above the cooktop through a grease filter, then pushes it through a duct — typically running through the wall, ceiling, or cabinetry — and exhausts it outside the building. The result is that cooking smoke, steam, odours, heat, and airborne grease particles are physically removed from your home.

Ducted rangehoods are the gold standard for kitchen ventilation performance. Because the contaminated air is expelled outside rather than filtered and returned, they're far more effective at managing strong cooking smells, heavy grease from deep frying or wok cooking, and the heat and steam generated by extended cooking sessions. If you cook frequently, cook at high heat, or cook odour-intensive food like fish, garlic, or spiced dishes, a ducted rangehood will noticeably outperform a recirculating model.

The trade-off is installation complexity and cost. A ducted rangehood requires a duct run to an external wall or roof cavity, which means more involved installation — particularly if you're retrofitting in an existing kitchen rather than installing during a renovation. Duct routing needs to be relatively direct to maintain performance: long duct runs and multiple bends reduce effective airflow significantly. If your kitchen is on an upper floor of an apartment, or the external wall is on the opposite side of the room to your cooktop, ducting may not be feasible without significant building work.

How Recirculating Rangehoods Work

A recirculating rangehood (also called a ductless rangehood) pulls air through a grease filter, then passes it through a carbon or activated charcoal filter before returning the cleaned air to the kitchen. There is no duct run required — the rangehood simply plugs in and operates wherever it's positioned.

The obvious advantage is installation simplicity. Recirculating rangehoods can be installed anywhere a cooktop can be placed, making them popular in apartments, rental properties, and situations where ducting is impractical or impossible. They're also generally less expensive to install even where ducting would technically be possible.

Performance, however, is the genuine limitation. Recirculating rangehoods are good at managing grease and can reduce smoke, but they are fundamentally less effective at eliminating strong cooking odours than ducted models — the charcoal filter removes a proportion of odour molecules but not all, and heat and moisture are returned to the kitchen rather than expelled. In apartments with open-plan layouts, residual cooking smells after heavy cooking sessions are a common complaint from recirculating rangehood users.

Carbon filters also need to be replaced regularly — typically every three to six months depending on cooking frequency — which adds to ongoing running costs.

Choosing Between Them

The decision usually comes down to what's structurally possible in your home, how much cooking you do, and the type of cooking you most commonly cook.

If you're renovating or building and have the ability to run ducting, choosing ducted is almost always the right decision. The performance difference is real, and you'll appreciate it every time you cook something pungent or smoke-generating.

If you're in an apartment, a rental, or a situation where running ducting through walls isn't an option, a quality recirculating rangehood with a good charcoal filter is a practical and workable solution. Choosing a model with higher airflow capacity helps compensate for the inherent limitations of the recirculating approach.

If you're somewhere in between — ducting is theoretically possible but would require some effort — it's usually worth investing in the ducted installation. It's a one-time cost that pays dividends in performance for the life of the appliance.

One More Option: Canopy Rangehoods with Remote Motors

For situations where you want ducted performance but the rangehood's location makes a conventional installation noisy or architecturally complicated, a remote motor setup is worth knowing about. The rangehood canopy itself sits above the cooktop as normal, but the motor unit is installed in the roof cavity or outside the building, connected by ducting. The result is dramatically quieter operation at the cooktop while maintaining full ducted extraction performance. This is a premium solution used increasingly in high-end Australian kitchen renovations, and some Kitchen Alliance models support this configuration.