The smell of cooking fumes collects in our HVAC filter overtime

My mom got me in the habit of cooking regular meals before I even graduated high school and left for college. By the time I moved into the freshman residence halls in undergraduate school, I had a small hot plate and an electric griddle and was making a surprising number of home cooked meals even though it was highly against the rules. In retrospect I get it because they didn’t want a situation where an avoidable fire could start out of nowhere and potentially kill dozens or hundreds of students in the process. And since a roommate during my sophomore year once used my toaster oven when I was away without my consent, I can totally see a situation like this happening when you have these grownup children who never learned how to take care of themselves dealing with lethal appliances. At least I managed to get away from the college campus by the following year and was living in a studio apartment for a number of years. My cooking improved with time, and now I’m constantly in the kitchen from one day to the next. I cook so much food in this house that the fumes collect and leave oil deposits in my HVAC filter. I notice the smell of burnt food whenever I open the filter tray in my air handler and replace the filter with a new one. That’s when I realized I need to better utilize my vent hood above my stove top more, as well as putting a charcoal filter inside to collect some of the cooking odors before they can permeate the rest of my house and the HVAC system along with it.

 

temperature control