> Something weird though is that turning on my extractor fan didn’t really do much.

Does your extractor fan vent to the outside, or just recirculate through a filter? In my experience, people often overestimate how much protection ventilation provides. It mostly dilutes contaminants rather than removing or isolating them. For example, with moderately hazardous compounds, a fume hood works fine under normal use, but in the event of a spill it can’t bring levels back down quickly enough to protect the operator. In that kind of situation, an isolator makes far more sense or adding PPE, though that can be burdensome.

What really surprised me is how high the values get from just a single pan. It makes me wonder what it’s like in a commercial kitchen with multiple pans at higher temperatures, especially if the extractor fan fails and there’s no time to shut down operations to fix it.

>In my experience, people often overestimate how much protection ventilation provides.

Do you have references to back this up that I could read? Assuming the same fan size, ventilation would act like a perfect filter and remove everything out of the room that the fan pushes, whereas a filter will allow some particles to pass and recirculate. Especially useless if it is those metal fiber filters that are in a range hood that just remove some grease.