Use this page to check kitchen cooker hood power consumption for your own kitchen cooker hood: enter your wattage, hours of use per day and electricity rate, and press Calculate. You see your daily, monthly and yearly cost plus your yearly kWh consumption. Those same results also cover kitchen cooker hood electricity consumption.
Your kitchen cooker hood electricity consumption is one of the smallest lines on your utility bills: a typical range hood costs about £11 a year to run in the worked example below. Only three things draw power, the motor, the lighting and a trickle of standby current, and homeowners can shrink every one of them with a few habits. This guide shows how the energy used breaks down, how to calculate it from a nameplate, and where the real money hides.
A kitchen range hood, sold in some shops as a stove range hood and listed by regulators among the cooking fume extractors, is a ventilation appliance built around a single fan and a small lighting circuit, so its power draw is modest compared with anything that heats. Whatever the range hood is called, the same arithmetic applies to every model. The number printed on the rating plate is the rated power, the most the unit can draw with the motor at maximum speed and every light switched on. Real use is far lower, because most cooking happens at the lowest or middle setting. Compare with concrete vibrator electricity consumption.
Across homes, the motor input power of a modern hood sits between about 60 W on its gentlest setting and 250 W flat out, while the lighting adds 5 to 70 W depending on the bulb type. For scale, a 1,800 W hairdryer uses as much in one minute as a hood on low speed uses in about 25 minutes.
The nameplate wattage is a ceiling, not an average. A hood rated at 177 W in total (168 W motor plus 9 W of lights) only reaches that figure while you run it flat out, and the motor draws noticeably less at lower settings because airflow falls much faster than power does. When you estimate your own power consumption, use the rated figure for the speed you actually select, not the headline number on the label.
Manufacturers describe airflow in cubic feet per minute, or CFM (1 CFM is about 1.7 m3/h), and every step up in speed roughly adds a step in watts. The relationship is not linear: doubling the airflow needs well over twice the shaft power, which is why the lowest effective fan speed is the cheapest way to clear a pan of steam or a haze of smoke.
| Operating state | Total draw (W) | Electricity per hour (kWh) | Cost per hour at £0.27 per kWh |
|---|---|---|---|
| High speed with LED lights on | 177 | 0.177 | 4.8 p |
| Low speed with LED lights on | 71 | 0.071 | 1.9 p |
| LED lights only | 9 | 0.009 | 0.2 p |
| Two 35 W halogen bulbs only | 70 | 0.070 | 1.9 p |
The last row is the surprise: a pair of old bulbs costs the same to light as the whole hood on its low setting.
The formula for any appliance is the same: multiply the power in watts by the hours of use, divide by 1,000 to reach kilowatt-hour units, then multiply by your tariff.
$$E_{\text{year}} = \frac{P \times t \times 365}{1000} \qquad \text{Cost} = E_{\text{year}} \times \text{tariff}$$
Take a household that cooks one proper meal a day and pays £0.27 per kWh. Their hood runs 12 minutes a day at high speed (168 W) while they sear and fry, 38 minutes a day at low speed (62 W) for everything else, keeps its two LED bulbs (9 W together) on for 2.5 hours, and sits at 0.8 W in standby all day. Each daily figure uses \(\text{W} \times \text{h}\):
Adding the four lines gives 114.6 Wh a day, so the hood's annual energy consumption is 41.8 kWh, which at the tariff above is an annual cost of £11.29. Every part is small, and the table shows how the total divides.
| Component | kWh per year | Cost per year | Share of total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Low-speed fan | 14.3 | £3.87 | 34% |
| High-speed fan | 12.3 | £3.31 | 29% |
| LED lights | 8.2 | £2.22 | 20% |
| Standby | 7.0 | £1.89 | 17% |
| Total | 41.8 | £11.29 | 100% |
Fewer than half of those kilowatt-hours come from the high setting you associate with a roaring hood. Lights and standby together make up more than a third of the bill, even though they do no ventilating at all. That is why the biggest saving is usually not a quieter or slower hood but a change to the parts that run when nobody is cooking.
The lamps under a hood are the easiest place to waste power, because people leave them on as ambient light long after the extraction has stopped. An older unit carries two halogen bulbs of 35 W each, 70 W in total, while a modern one uses two LED lights that draw about 9 W combined.
Keep both halogen bulbs on for the same 2.5 hours a day and they use 63.9 kWh a year, which costs £17.25 at £0.27 per kWh. That single circuit costs more than the whole LED-equipped hood in the worked example above.
Replacing the halogen pair with LED lighting cuts the lamp circuit from 63.9 kWh to 8.2 kWh a year, a saving of £15.03 minus £2.22, or £12.81 a year. Most hoods use a standard fitting, so the swap takes a few minutes and a small purchase that pays back within the first year.
The motor is the largest component of a hood, and its design decides how many watts you pay for every unit of airflow. Three designs are common. Related: how much electricity does a gas furnace use.
A brushless motor delivers the same airflow from fewer watts, so a hood that moves a large volume of air can still be an energy efficient choice. In practice a quality DC or BLDC unit cuts the motor's share of your bill by a third or more, and it usually runs with less noise, which tempts people to use it more sensibly.
Touch controls, remote receivers and heat sensors keep a control board awake all day, a phantom load that never switches off. Our example hood draws 0.8 W of standby power, which is 7.0 kWh and £1.89 a year, as much as a fifth of the whole total. A mechanical switch removes it entirely, and a unit with touchscreens and a wifi module is where to look first if you want to keep the figure low. If your hood has a wall switch or a plug socket, switching it off at the end of the evening ends the drain.
In the European Union, ecodesign requirements apply to every hood sold, and the matching energy labelling scheme puts a rating on the box so consumers can compare running costs before they buy. Anyone shopping for an efficient range hood gets a clear first filter: the better the class, the lower the declared yearly energy. The scale for hoods runs from A+++ down to D, and a stricter set of rules has phased out the least efficient models over several years.
The energy label shows the energy efficiency class as a coloured arrow, together with the declared yearly kWh. Three smaller classes sit underneath it:
A final figure gives the sound power in decibels at maximum speed, which matters if the hood sits in an open-plan room.
An A+++ hood combines an efficient motor, LED lamps and optimised airflow, so it needs far fewer kilowatt-hours to do the same job as a class D model. The label's declared figure is calculated for a standard one hour of extraction and two hours of lighting every day, so your own total will differ once your habits are different from that standard.
Moving from a mid-range class to A+++ might save a handful of pounds a year, while a daily timer that runs 10 minutes too long wastes more than that. Use the label to rule out poor models, then choose the one that fits your cooking and your budget.
The electricity a hood uses is only part of what it costs. A hood that vents outdoors removes conditioned air that your boiler or air conditioner already paid to bring to temperature, and the replacement air arrives through gaps in the building shell.
In winter the hood pulls warm air out of the room, so the heating system works harder to reheat the incoming cold air. In summer the cooling system does the same in reverse. Modelling for United States homes found that the site energy for range hood use is dominated by this makeup air plus the fan, and that the source energy, which includes losses at the power station, is higher still. The average household's yearly cost stayed small, yet the HVAC share of it was larger than the fan's.
An oversized unit forces a bigger motor to draw more watts and exhausts more makeup air than the hob needs, so match capacity to the hob and keep the ductwork short and smooth. If your home is tightly sealed, a window cracked open nearby, or a unit that can recirculate air through a charcoal cartridge, avoids a pressure problem. On a recirculating hood, change the odor filters on schedule, since a saturated cartridge lengthens the runtime you pay for.
A hood is already cheap to run, but the same few changes that trim the bill also improve the air in your kitchen. Each of the following works without any new equipment.
A delay shut-off or timer function runs the fan for a set time after you finish cooking, then stops it. Ten minutes of extra running at 62 W adds 3.8 kWh and £1.02 a year, a reasonable price for clearing residual odors. Set it once, and you never again leave the unit running through the evening by accident.
Use the low speed for simmering, steaming and boiling, where cooking odours are mild, and keep the boost setting for searing and stir-frying. In the example, the low setting carries 34% of the fan energy over 38 minutes, while the 12 minutes at the top setting carry 29%, so a few minutes at the wrong speed shifts the total.
A clogged grease filter restricts airflow, so the motor runs longer and draws more watts to clear the same pan of smoke, which shows up directly in your kWh. A monthly rinse of the metal baffle filters or a mesh panel keeps the runtime short.
Compare the wattage of the motor and the lamps, not just the suction headline. Look for a low declared extraction rate power figure on the label, because a hood that clears the air quickly can be switched off sooner.
Good installation shortens runtime. A range hood mounted 65 to 75 cm above an electric hob captures more of the plume than one hung too high, so you switch it off sooner, and a short straight duct keeps the motor\'s workload down. Capture at the source also lowers the extraction rate you need for a given pan, which gives real energy savings and extra savings on running cost.
Put in context, the hood is a minor item. A modern fridge freezer runs all day and draws a couple of hundred kWh a year, and among appliances that cook, ovens use hundreds of times more energy per hour than a hood. Even dishwashers and washing machines in a family home use several times the 41.8 kWh a hood needs, and refrigerators cost far more to run per year. A hood that barely registers on the energy bill is not where the savings are, except for the lamps and standby draw.
Official figures bear this out. The average new hood sold in the EU in 2020 had a declared annual consumption of 110 kWh, based on one hour of extraction and two hours of lighting each day, and the stricter regulation that applies to new models is expected to push that average down further. Under that ecodesign regulation, every new range hood must also meet minimum energy efficiency limits, and the energy saved on each unit sold adds up across millions of homes.
Cooking itself dwarfs the extraction. Electric ovens and hobs draw kilowatts while they heat, so the hood that clears their fumes adds only a few percent to the electricity of a typical dinner. If you want to test your own household, change one input of the worked example at a time: doubling the minutes at high speed adds 12.3 kWh and £3.31, while doubling the tariff doubles the whole £11.29, and a house that cooks only at weekends cuts the fan lines by more than half but leaves the lights and standby lines untouched. Seeing which line moves tells you which habit deserves your attention, and in most homes the answer is the always-on lines rather than the fan.
At a few pence per hour, the question is whether you can afford not to use it. Gas flames and frying release nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and fine particles known as PM2.5, and a hood is the cheapest way to take these pollutants out before they spread, which is why research on indoor air quality treats effective hood use as the main control for cooking. Extraction also removes the humidity from boiling and steaming that would otherwise settle as condensation, then damp and mould, which cost far more to put right than the 41.8 kWh in the worked example. And since the same hood draws so little, each kilowatt-hour you never use is a small gain for sustainability, fewer emissions and lower exposure to rising electricity prices.
The fastest fix is almost always the cheapest one: swap the bulbs, set the timer, and clean the filter.
For a quick check on any hood, read the nameplate for the motor and lamp watts, estimate your daily minutes at each speed, and run the formula above. If the answer is close to the worked example, your cooker hood is already behaving like an efficient one, and if it is several times higher, look at lamp type and standby draw first, because those are the quickest to fix. When the kilowatt-hours are higher than expected, a dirty filter or a long evening run is the most common cause.
Whichever model you own, the worked numbers show that kitchen ventilation is among the cheapest comforts in a modern home. Your cooker hood can run every time you cook without moving your bill in any way you would notice.