We have a glass rangehood similar to Futuro Futuro's Acqualina Glass product and I love it. The top and bottom of the glass gets given a clean about once a week with citrus multi-purpose cleaning spray and then wiped down with a moistened glass cleaning cloth for a pristine finish. Takes around 5 minutes in total. Cleaning the brushed stainless part is more difficult. As mentioned previously, its hard to remove all the marks. Will definately try the WD40. Me, personally, I don't like the mirrored finish. Given the window is acting as the "splashback" I would have gone for something invisible like what Sheryl Horton showed.

Wow, well, I didn't see that one, and since I tried bristle brushes anyway without success it may not have worked. What I did find, thanks to your suggestion, was this thing, which has fine grit embedded in the nylon bristles. So harder than a brush, softer than wire. The problem with my ceilings (all five of them) is that for the past 122 years, the thin pressed tin was the ONLY surface between the room and the corrugated iron roof. An oven in summer, an icebox in winter, and huge temperature fluctuations between night and day - so although the paint is only one or two coats thick, it has crazed as well as peeled or bubbled. Totally impractical financially speaking as well as impossible time-wise, to strip it back, so it's just remedial work for me. Getting rid of any hanging flakes, and filling in the tiny cracks. Togged up with eye protection, face mask, ear muffs when using the grinder, and a shower cap, I used a combination of the fan grinder below, a hand held small wire brush, the wooden handle of my paint brush, and the plastic end of a broom (when standing on the floor) to scrape flakes and crunch 'blisters'. After discussing the problem with a local specialist paint manufacturer I came away with a fantastic primer which primes ANY surface, even aluminium, bonds the paint, fills tiny cracks, and covers amazingly well. I used a soft brush. Much to my surprise it only took half a pot to do a ceiling of just under 13 sq metres. I found it was less exhausting to do first the scraping, then painting, whatever was in reach before moving the ladder. This saved a lot of double handling.. I hung my paint pot on the ladder, so just threw a cloth over it while doing the scraping. One more tip is that you can do touchups from the floor very nicely with a foam roller mini brush on a pole. The foam roller squidges into the hills and valleys of the tin patterns. I have now finished preparing this first room and only have the top coat to finish off. I don't think I'll need more than one coat, as the prep coat is so good already. I'm going to use a good quality flat white ceiling paint (they usually have a bit of black in them for better coverage). I don't pretend it will look as glorious as the original, but I'm not doing a full-on restoration, just a renovation/refreshing of a very humble cottage. I think it will still look attractive, flaws and all, and show the history of the house. Photo also below of work in progress, and the 'after' of the prep coat. If I remember, I'll post an after picture once I've finished the final coat. :)

@suancol, You are alone at present but what if that changes and you hook up with a chef for example??.....who will cook your home into oblivian ha-ha In my opinion, if you cook in your kitchen even a little, if you don't have a foolproof extraction system, then all the steam etc... even laden with perhaps minimal fat but cooking particles non the less, will eventually see you plastering the entire open plan living with a serious mess. I'm not having overheads as such either for height reasons, I'm very short and overheads serve no purpose for me personally but I wouldn't dream of not having a rangehood, so I will still have two cupboards, one on either side to simply balance the rangehood, so you can have both without covering your entire uper wall area with wall to wall cupboards. I strongly suggest you search Houzz photo's for rangehoods in kitchens and see if you can find a design and rangehood you might be able to live with, as I certainly wouldn't be paying the sort of price suggested for a Gagenau system nor do I think you will ever be happy with an after market wall fan, I think it will look cheap. Good luck with your search.

Hello Tallitha For your question "How high can you mount a rangehood?" and "I can see minimum heights but not maximum" the minimum is related to Fire regulations and so there actually is no maximum. You can install a canopy hood higher than the standard 700mm if that is what you want. The problem with this are; two fold, One being the balance of aesthetics to the adjacent structures, which you can decide on how this looks for yourself. The second is the extraction efficiancy of a Hood / Canopy where the higher it is placed away from the source of the vapors, the more these vapors disperse beyond the cachment area of the the hood. How bad this extraction will be at any set height will then depend on how many cubic metres of air the extractor's fan you choose can move. Some Hoods extract as little as 420 cubic meters an hour (m3/hr). To compensate for the extra height you could consider for an example a hood like the Falmec Latina that can extract 1140 m3/hr or a model upto 2010 m3/hr when compared to say a standard canopy hood like the Robinhood RWC3CL9SS that moves 736 cubic meters. Though something like the Falmec Hood is still not the price you mentioned above, you can however expect that a hood with a higher capacity will cost more than one with a low capacity. I hope this information helps. Regards Malcolm