Baumatic BT9.3GL Stainless Steel 35" Kitchen Hood

Does what it says on the box ... it's a cooker hood with a stainless steel two piece chimney. For those who are brand conscious, it doesn't have a badge - so no one knows it only cost £135 - the Bosch equivalent is about £650, but that comes with a remote control (very useful if you're planning to turn the extractor fan on and off from the sofa...)

The instruction manual is basic. You can download it from the Baumatic website at http://files.baumatic.com/usermanuals-uk/bt9.3gl.pdf. There is no explanation of the parts you should have in with the unit, and you have to guess what is what.

Useful tip - the rubber washers are for holding the glass to the unit, as are the washers and the cross-head, flat-head screws. After that, the remaining pieces are pretty obvious.

First, you have to attach the unit to the wall. The minimum height above the hod should be 700mm (not mentioned in the manual, but gleaned from Baumatic technical support). It attaches by 4 screws (supplied, with rawl plugs as well).

Next, you fit the ducting to the cowling (which itself attaches to the top of the unit). The manual tells you to buy 125mm ducting, but the cowling is about 112mm in diameter. Fortunately, I had a couple of 50-70mm jubilee clips (£1.89 for a pair from B&Q), which I was able to join together and clamp the ducting onto the cowling.

Then, you fit the chimney, and this is where the fun starts as the chimney comes in two parts (the upper part slides up and down inside the lower part). This is fine until you screw the lower part to the wall mounting bracket, and then you will find that the round heads of the screws foul the upper part of the chimney which will then not slide up and down inside the lower part. A phone call to Baumatic technical support was no help (the gy I spoke to admitted that he'd never installed a unit himself, but he assured me that many customers had, and then he cut me off).

The solution is to not tighten up the screws fixing the lower half of the chimney to the wall. The upper half of the chimney will then slide under the screw heads, rather than having to clear them - the screws just stop the chminey hood moving from side to side. Once that is sorted, the upper half of the chimney can be fitted and job done.

Apart, that is, from peeling off all the blue protective cellophane from the stainless steel bits and then cleaning all the finger prints off.

Once installed, though, the unit really looks the business.

Hope that helps everyone.