Portable Range Hoods for your Indoor BBQ: Are they Worth It?
When you live in an apartment, especially an HDB, you’ll want to try and minimise the amount of smoke and smells produced by your BBQ so as not to disturb the neighbours, and of course, not make your home smell like you lit a BBQ-scented candle. Yes, it’s definitely possible to have a BBQ in your HDB apartment, but doing so requires a bit of planning.
First of all, you’ll need a well-ventilated area like a balcony. Most of us who live in HDB flats don’t have the luxury of having a balcony, like those in maisonettes and DBSS apartments, but we can definitely make do with the service yard. Now, to properly do this, you’ll need to check with HDB on how you can cook in this space which is originally meant just for doing your laundry (check out this example). Some HDB homes don’t even have a division between the kitchen and the service yard, so in this case, you’ll have to check with HDB on where the service yard ends and the kitchen starts if there’s no clear boundary.
Other things that help with keeping the neighbours from pulling out the pitchforks are if you’re on the highest floor, using electric grills, cooking on a griddle attachment, and even avoiding ingredients with more oil and marinades. Of course, not everyone can do all of the above, nor would you want to. So to help with this smoke issue, we decided to test out some portable range hoods!
Do portable range hoods really work and are they worth getting? We test out 2 different hoods from 2 different price points, ORIA (in the $20-$30 price range) and AMZChef (in the $180-$200 price range), so you don’t have to! Prices depend on where you get them from.
AMZChef on the left and ORIA on the right
Let’s begin with ORIA because it was the first to arrive in the mail. This hood was very basic, with a filter that didn’t look like it would do much filtering – it had very big gaps between the pores so it’s very unlikely to trap grease, let alone odors. While the tripod stand it comes with is foldable and removable, which makes it convenient for storage, it also made it quite unstable when propping it up to stand on the side table of the BBQ. The good thing about it is that once it’s charged, it’s wireless so it really is portable. The hood itself is quite lightweight and compact, which at first seemed like a plus, but I soon realised this fact made the hood somewhat of a white elephant when it came to function.
The very large “pores” of the ORIA filter.
Now onto the actual use of the product. Contrary to all the positive reviews on Lazada, which surprisingly, was all 16 of them at the time of writing this post (one of the reasons why I chose this brand), the ORIA hood was severely lacking in the one thing it was supposed to do, which is to pull smoke into it and trap grease and odors, and then release the clean air back out. Even at the highest speed (no. 3), it did nothing, or if it did, it was so weak that you wouldn’t be able to tell because the service yard still smelt very strongly of BBQ and smoke filled the whole area when it was being used. But at $20 and the fact that it was overly simplistic in design, I really shouldn’t have expected much from this product.
I’m not going to mention anything about the noise these hoods create in the post because I’m more interested in the actual function of them. Regardless, the permanent exhaust hood that sits over our kitchen stove is way noisier, so I don’t think these portable ones will disturb the neighbours as much as the smell of BBQ will.
AMZChef’s oil collection compartment.
Moving onto the AMZChef. Upon setting it up, I was already impressed by its robustness. It had more weight to it than the ORIA, a proper-looking filter and even an oil compartment for collecting grease. When I say a proper-looking filter, I mean it looks just like the filter inside my dog’s drinking fountain which is a sort of cotton wool-like material. My hopes were higher for this hood already.
The AMZChef also has 3 speeds, and I went straight to the highest speed because mamma ain’t taking chances on her apartment smelling like steak (as much as I love a good ol’ sirloin cooked in tallow). At the highest speed, the AMZChef actually did make the apartment less smokey and the smell of BBQ was definitely less strong. Usually, I’d be able to smell the BBQ in the living room, but this time, it stayed mostly in the service yard with a hint of it making its way into the kitchen if you stand near the sliding door. You could actually see smoke being sucked into it, though not all. Some of it still wafted around the hood.
Grease collected on the filter of the AMZChef.
When we took out the filter after use, you could see evidence of grease getting trapped in it. However, no oil had made its way into the oil collection area. Perhaps we’ll check back again on it after many more uses. But overall, I am quite satisfied with this product. Could it be better? For sure, it’s not as good as a permanent exhaust hood. However, it definitely helps with the smoke control, and its suction is powerful enough to make a difference.
So, the question is, are portable range hoods worth getting if you’re going to BBQ in your HDB apartment or any apartment that doesn’t have a balcony for that matter? I would say yes, but I would be wary of the ones that are too cheap. If the price looks too good to be true, it probably is. Widen your budget and get one that actually works.
