---
title: "A Kenmore Range Hood That Runs and Does Not Pull"
description: "A Kenmore range hood not working may be recirculating rather than ducted. How to tell, which filters each needs, and why hoods publish no error codes."
url: "https://kenmoremiami.support/blog/kenmore-range-hood-not-pulling-air/"
date_modified: "2026-09-01"
Category: "Common Problems"
---


# A Kenmore Range Hood That Runs and Does Not Pull

## Kenmore range hood not working: ducted or recirculating first

This is the appliance most often described as broken when it is doing exactly what it was installed to do.

A hood either sends its air **outside**, through a duct, or **filters it and returns it to the kitchen**. That single choice, made when the kitchen was fitted, decides which filters the appliance has, how much it can realistically achieve, and what it means when it stops seeming to work.

To find out which you have, look above the hood. A duct disappearing into the cabinet or through the wall means ducted. A cabinet with nothing in it, and warm air coming back into the room through a grille at the top of the hood, means recirculating.

## If it recirculates: the filter nobody knows about

A recirculating hood has two filters, and only one of them is obvious.

**The metal grease filter** is the mesh or baffle panel you can see. It washes in hot water with a degreasing detergent, and most people have found it.

**The charcoal filter** sits behind or above it, and it is what removes smells rather than grease. It is a consumable — it is **replaced**, never washed — on an interval of somewhere around six months to a year depending on how much cooking the kitchen does.

A charcoal filter that has been in place since the kitchen was built is a solid block of resistance. The fan runs, the motor works hard, the hood is loud, and almost no air moves. This is by a distance the commonest reason a recirculating hood stops seeming to pull, and it is a part rather than a repair.

## If it is ducted: the run matters more than the hood

A ducted hood has metal grease filters only and no charcoal.

When it stops pulling, look along the run. Grease-loaded filters first, because they are free to wash. Then the blower wheel itself, which coats in grease over the years and loses a surprising amount of its ability to move air. Then the duct: a crushed section, an excessive number of elbows, or a flexible run that has sagged. And finally the flap outside, which lint, paint and birds all close in their own ways.

A hood at the end of a long run with several bends was never going to achieve what its rated figure suggests, and that is a design limit rather than a failure.

## Why the appliance tells you nothing

Range hoods publish no error codes. Not the Broan-built 233 hoods that carry this badge, not anybody else's. There is no display, no code table, and no diagnostic mode — so every question on this page is answered by looking rather than by reading.

That is worth stating plainly, because people search for a Kenmore range hood code list and find pages offering one. Those lists have been assembled from other appliances.

## What is left for us

Three things, once the filters and the duct are ruled out.

**The blower motor**, which can fail outright or on one speed only, and which on some hoods has its own thermal cut-out that trips when the motor overheats behind a blocked filter.

**The switch or speed control**, which is the answer when the light works and the fan does not, or when one speed works and another does not.

**The lighting circuit**, which on newer hoods is a driver rather than a bulb, and is its own small repair.

None of that is expensive work. Almost all of it comes after somebody has taken a filter down and looked at it, which is why that is where this page starts.

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