Mini-Project 2: Range Hood of Horror

As those of you who helped us clean the kitchen upon moving in will remember, the kitchen was originally covered in grease. Lots of grease. Big meat-eaters, apparently, or just never cleaned anything. The whole kitchen took multiple scrubbings, and still there was grease. Plus the light burned out a year after we moved in-it was a wiring issue because merely changing the bulb didn't help. We never used the fan because it just blew the air (and mystery crungles) right back down onto the stove, which was immensely appetizing.

Well, the kitchen is dark, and without the light it's even darker over where the stove is. That makes it tough to see while you're cooking (as if I ever voluntarily cooked). And although we don't cook meat or generate a lot of grease, we still generate a lot of steam when we cook, which just fills the kitchen and leaves everything damp. Tired of the damp and darkness, we finally decided we'd had enough and tackled the range hood of horror.

The trick to getting the fan to work properly turned out to be cleaning the vent to the outside. It was so caked with sludge that the vent was actually stuck closed. Yum! We had to use lacquer thinner to get the grease off, since we didn't want to replace the fan. Here's all you really need to see.

That's the brush we used to clean. We had to throw the brush away. And this picture was taken after we cleaned off the brush itself a little bit. *shudder* Here's a shot of the filthy open holes.

After some exploratory troubleshooting and some wrong turns, it became evident that the light socket itself had shorted out. Instead of repairing the socket, we just put a new one in (simple is best, sometimes). We also wired it to the fan switch so that both turn on at the same time, since we had cut all the wires to the original light switch and didn't feel like going back and wiring it all up again.

But, at long last, success!

It seems like a small thing, but we are SO happy to have a fan and functioning light. We'll take whatever little victories we can get.