Galaxy Frost Hoods

Look at how this page is built and the structure becomes obvious. The wood shell is one line. The internal blower is another, offered at 250, 400 and 600 CFM — GF RHBB 250 CFM, GF RHBB 400 CFM, GF RHBB 600 CFM. GF RHBB DCT, listed as Duct Cover, is in fact a recirculating kit — charcoal filter, soffit grille, stack boot and duct — for kitchens that cannot vent outside. GF RHBB FLTR is that kit’s charcoal refill, and it tells you something useful on its own: in a ductless hood the charcoal is a wear item, not a fixture.

• The shell, at the width the run is drawn for.
• A blower, at the airflow your appliance and your duct run call for.
• Only if the hood cannot vent outside: the recirculating kit, and charcoal refills for the life of the kitchen.

Order the shell alone and you have bought a handsome non-functioning box. It happens more than you would think, because the shell is the part with the photograph. The price spread here — $71.50 for a charcoal refill up to $4,277 for a large shell — tells you where the attention belongs.

Two measurements decide the width, and both need settling before the cabinet order, not after.

The first is the appliance. A hood should be at least as wide as the cooking surface below it, and going one size up — a 36″ shell over a 30″ range — is a common and defensible choice, because the edges of a cooktop are where capture falls off. Shells here come at 30″, 36″, 42″ and 48″.

The second is the wall. A hood is a fixed-width object sitting between two wall cabinets, so it is part of the arithmetic of the whole run. Change from a 30″ to a 36″ shell late in the process and the cabinets on both sides change with it, along with the fillers between them. That is a new box list, not an adjustment.

Mounting height above the cooktop is set by the range manufacturer and by local requirements. It is not a number to take off a web page, including this one — pull it from the appliance installation manual, because it determines how much wall the shell occupies and therefore how tall the cabinets beside it can be. Our kitchen dimensions checklist covers the rest of the measurements the range wall depends on.

Shells appear on this page in a finish-matched version, the SKUs with no wood-tone suffix, and in two wood tones: Timber and Walnut. Those are the same two tones the undercabinet light bars come in, which is not an accident and is worth exploiting.

There are only two strategies and they pull in opposite directions. A finish-matched shell disappears into the run, so the range wall reads as one continuous piece of cabinetry — carry the same crown profile across the top of the shell and you genuinely cannot see where the cabinets stop. A Timber or Walnut shell does the opposite: it becomes the single warm object on a white wall, which is the cheapest way to keep a bright kitchen from reading flat and considerably easier to live with than a wood island.

Pick one job. A wood-tone hood plus a wood island plus a wood shelf is three focal points, which adds up to none. The crown and trim page has the profile you would carry across a matched shell.

Not every family is offered in every width and every tone. The live list above this article is the authority on what is orderable today; if the combination you want is missing, ask and we will check the factory.

This is where most catalog pages start inventing numbers, and we are not going to. The three blowers offered here are 250, 400 and 600 CFM, so the shell does not lock you into one answer. Which is right depends on what you cook on, the length of the duct run, how many elbows are in it, and whether the house can supply the air a big blower pulls out. A long run with several turns delivers meaningfully less than its rating, which is why two identical hoods perform differently in two kitchens.

The bigger decision is whether the hood vents outside at all. If there is no exterior wall or roof path from the range, that constraint reshapes the whole plan — the cabinet above the hood, the soffit, sometimes the location of the range itself. It is a day-one question, not a day-ninety one.

A hood never gets ordered alone — it is the middle of a wall that has to be specified around it.