This is a really nice hood for the price. Looks great, and the fan seems good. Love the stainless steel permanent baffle filters. Just pop them in the dishwasher. Although the lights are bright, they are a cool white (blue-ish hue) not soft white (warmer hue). Food looks way better under soft white, and most kitchens (indeed most home interiors) are lit with soft white light. So your hood light probably won't match your other lighting. Love the touch controls, especially that they are on both sides. But setting the time is not intuitive. And even though either control panel operates the fan functions and lights, the digital time display in each panel needs to be set separately. Obviously, it's two separate clocks. Weirdly, the chimney sleeves and perforated steel angle-iron brackets are too long to hang from a standard 8-foot ceiling -- at least to install it at 30" above a cooktop that's at normal counter height. I had to cut everything down, which would be daunting for any DIYer who doesn't have an easy way to cut through the heavy sheet steel. I used an angle grinder. This is a ducted hood, which means it is vented to the exterior. I vented mine through the attic and out the roof. But the hood came with the ductless inner chimney (vent slots in the sides). It would've been so easy for the manufacturer to drill mounting holes at BOTH ends of the inner chimney, so you could flip it around and install it without the vent slots at the top. But no. There is no opening in the ceiling bracket to accommodate the power cord, probably because they figure you'll use the flexible duct they supply and just squeeze the cord through the ceiling vent hole beside the duct. But I used rigid 6" duct, all the way, and there was no way to feed the cord through the ceiling through the bracket. So I had to cut the plug off and feed the cord up into the ceiling through a small hole I made between the outside edge of the ceiling bracket and the stainless chimney sleeve. Up in the attic, I attached a screw-on plug and plugged it into an outlet I installed. The hood arrived in great shape, mainly thanks to the rigid molded styrofoam clamshell encasing it inside a heavy-duty cardboard box. But the unit was manufactured with heavy protective film in place on the stainless steel, instead of having the film applied after the hood was assembled. And the film is a nightmare to remove, especially from the seams. You have to partially disassemble the hood to get all the film out of the underside (so it doesn't melt into blue goo and weld itself to the hood when you cook, especially the light panels). But good luck getting all the film off of the upper exterior of the hood. Seriously, plan on spending an hour or two. And you still won't get it all. By the time you're done, you'll have to clean all your fingerprints off the hood, because the film adhesive is so strong, you have to brace the hood with your other hand when you pull off the film. It's ridiculous. Bad, bad, bad customer experience. Oh...and take the protective film off of the interior chimney before you install the hood. Impossible to remove all the film otherwise. In summary, once you set the clocks, you've done that, and the annoyance is soon forgotten (at least until the next power outage). In time, you'll forget you had to figure out how to custom-cut the chimney sleeves. And eventually, I suppose you'll forget the complete mess and waste of time caused by the way-too-strong protective film on most surfaces and the fact that it was sealed into the seams during manufacturing. I haven't looked yet, but you can probably find different puck lights with a warmer hue, so your food doesn't look like something in a coroner's video. And then you'll forget that too. After you've forgotten all these seriously annoying things, you'll be left with a nice-looking hood that works well and hopefully will for a long time. So, yay. But unless you drill your own mounting holes at the other end of the interior chimney sleeve (hope they line up), you'll have to look at those vent slots at the top forever. Dang. I'd still recommend this, because it is a good value. And forewarned is forearmed. Learn from my experience, and enjoy your hood.
