Cooking pollution
Frying on a gas hob can push PM2.5 past a London roadside reading in six minutes. Most domestic extractors were never designed for it.
Your kitchen is an industrial chimney.
Cooking is the single biggest source of indoor particulate pollution in most homes. Oils, burning sugars, toasted crumbs and meat all produce fine particulates. Gas combustion adds nitrogen dioxide and low-level carbon monoxide. Stir-fry at high heat is basically a small industrial process — the air gets filled with the chemistry of it.
Most UK kitchens have a recirculating extractor that filters grease and returns the air to the room. These do almost nothing for fine particulates or gases. External-vented hoods help — but only if they are sized for the hob and run long enough.
You would suspect this when any of these feel familiar.
- Visible haze in the kitchen during cooking
- A cough or sore throat after cooking
- Cooking smells that linger into the next day
- A recirculating extractor that never really clears the air
Quietly watching the exact signals.
PM1 / PM2.5 / PM10 spike within seconds of a hob coming on. Envora surfaces the curve live so you can see your extractor working — or not.
CO is tracked across 0–10 ppm, catching the quiet leak from gas cooking long before any alarm fires.
VOCs from burnt oils and residues join the fused IAQ score, so you see how long the room stays compromised after you stop cooking.
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PM2.5 > 35 µg/m³ sustainedCooking plume not being extracted.
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CO > 1 ppm during cookingGas combustion inefficiency.
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Slow IAQ recoveryResidue off-gassing into living space.
Practical steps, not panic.
- 1 Run the extractor from the moment the hob is on — not at the end of the session.
- 2 If your extractor recirculates, upgrade to external-vented where possible; it is the single biggest kitchen IAQ intervention.
- 3 Induction hobs eliminate combustion particulates and gases entirely; the upgrade pays back in air quality alone.
- 4 Open a window for five minutes after cooking to finish the purge; Envora shows you when the numbers are back.
- 5 In open-plan homes, place the device at the boundary between kitchen and living area — it is the most honest measurement point.
Strongest fit in these settings.
Catch cooking pollution before it shows.
Envora One reads the channels that catch this risk early — fused into one IAQ score, calibrated at our bench. £249 one-time. Free for personal households.
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