I cooked on my gas burners under a filter-only hood for eight years just to avoid drilling through the wall: the day a meter ran for 24 hours in my kitchen, I understood what that charcoal had never caught
After eight years of cooking under a recirculating hood, a 24-hour air quality meter exposed the dangerous truth: the charcoal filter was capturing odors but allowing combustion gases—nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, and formaldehyde—to silently accumulate in the home. What the numbers revealed about indoor air quality changed everything.