I thought I would share my notes on my talk about what I did to put an exaust hood on my basement brewery.
I wanted to go AG, but really needed to do it indoors since my work day never seems to end when I would like. I started this little project about 6 months ago, maybe more. I collected a couple of natural gas wok burners from a customer. My good friend Tom found a discarded but NEW hood on a job site. I had a blower from my furnace and AC change out.
I have put in a few hoods over the years, but they were ENGINEERED and very expensive. I found the MN Kitchen Hood Guidelines and made some calls to my friends. First things first SAFETY! If your going to attempt to do this, it is your RESPONSIBILITY to make sure ALL the gases and undesirables get taken out of the house without back drafting the other appliances.
Everyone has gone into a restaurant with doors are hard to open, and slam shut. This is an unbalanced system, and dangerous, because the system is most likely starved for air. I call it make up air, and if you don’t have the right amount it will come down your chimney or from another vent and into your living space.
Now to the fun I thought. I have every thing right? Wrong, I looked in the guidelines and the blower was not the right size. Dang it! So, me being the cheap skate I get another from a buddy. Oh still too big, so I called a friend at the city of Minneapolis, a true expert on kitchen hoods. The numbers we talk about told me; I need a make up air heater to use this thing in the winter.
I spend more time reading the commercial hood guidelines and MN mechanical code book. This is where I discover duty rating and how I should size it for the what I call my system. I installed a boil pot in my basement for making pasta!
So I finally find a inline draft inducer that gave me 250 cfm on a 7 inch pipe. Why is this important? Well a few years ago when the state of MN adopted the housing energy code they came up with 300 cfm and the free air before I would have to start using make up air.
Based on the type of system mine is light duty, this comes from MN mechanical code and MN kitchen hood which states in need 50 cfm per foot of hood. My hood is 5 feet long and it comes to 250 cfm.
Smoke test, a necessity when doing a hood. This is basically a smoke bomb I have used to check weather a furnace heat exchanger has a hole in it. I turned on the blower set the bomb by where the burners and make sure the neighbor knows I’m not on fire and test the draft. While this is going on I checked the draft on my water heater to make sure it wasn’t back drafting. You may have more than one Natural Draft Appliances – they ALL need to be checked.
Hood size the needs to be larger than the area you are collecting from. The guidelines do a very good job of explaining this. I designed my burner and pot locations based on the the free hood I got from Tom. I would not design my system from the beginning the way it has ended up (another topic for the future).
Safety! I have given you information to help you understand what I did. My system is safe, I have gone the extra mile to make sure. With knowledge comes responsibility, you have been given the knowledge to build and test a system. Don’t use this information and not test your system. Test your system often to make sure it is preforming.
Cheers Todd