Cooker hood light not working but fan still runs — how to fix it

Your cooker hood light not working but the fan still running is actually a good symptom, because it narrows the fault down at once. If the motor pulls normally, power is reaching the hood and only the light circuit is at fault: the bulb, its holder, the switch, or the LED driver. This article shows you how to find the real cause step by step, which bulbs are a two-minute swap, and when the control block has to come open.

This is an honest read from the bench. Cooker hoods in Riga kitchens work in hot, greasy air, and the light assembly is exactly where heat and grease collect the longest. That is why lighting failure is one of the most common hood faults — and often one of the more worthwhile to fix.

Light dead but the fan pulls: where to look

The most important clue you already gave yourself: the fan works. That means the hood is getting mains voltage, the fuse or breaker is fine, and the main power board is alive. The fault sits only in the light branch that runs from the control to the bulb. That rules out most of the serious scenarios and leaves a few specific points.

Before you touch anything else, go through these steps in order — from the simplest to the more involved:

1. Unplug the hood from the mains. Pull the plug or trip the relevant breaker. The bulb holder is live even when the bulb is off.
2. Look at the bulb. On many hoods the bulb sits behind a removable decorative glass or a metal ring. A burned-out incandescent or halogen bulb is often visible to the eye — a black film on the envelope or a snapped filament.
3. Check whether both lights are dead, or only one. If the hood has two bulbs and only one is out, it is almost certainly that bulb or its holder, not the shared circuit.
4. Try swapping the bulb over. If both holders are the same, put the "working" bulb into the dead holder. If it lights there, the bulb was the fault. If it stays dark, the fault is in the holder, the wiring, or the switch.
5. Check the switch. On many hoods the light and the fan are on separate switches or touch pads. Make sure you are pressing the light button specifically and that it reacts at all.

If the light comes on after a bulb swap, you are done. If neither bulb lights and the switch responds normally, the fault is deeper: in the contacts, the driver, or the light channel on the board.

Halogen, incandescent and LED hoods: replacement differs

Before you buy or change anything, work out what kind of light your hood actually has. That decides whether the problem is a replaceable bulb you can swap yourself, or a whole built-in module. On older and newer hoods these are three quite different cases.

An incandescent bulb is the simplest case. It is a screw-in E14 (small cap) or E27 bulb; take it out, screw in a new one of the same wattage and cap, and you are done. Many hoods no longer use these because of the heat, but older models still do.

Halogen needs a little care. G4, GU5.3 or GU10 capsules often sit behind a glass, and a new halogen must not be touched with bare fingers — finger grease on the envelope causes local overheating and shortens its life. Hold it through a tissue or wear a glove. A halogen can often be replaced with a same-shape LED bulb, but only if the hood has no separate halogen transformer that demands a minimum load — more on that below.

A built-in LED module is the trickiest. Almost all modern hoods use a flat LED light panel with no replaceable bulb. Here you cannot "change the bulb" — either the LED panel itself or its driver has failed, and you usually replace a whole assembly. It is worth repairing, because it is one part rather than the whole hood — but it is done at a service centre, not with a screwdriver in the kitchen.

Touch panel or switch contacts for the light

If the bulb is good (you proved it with the swap) but the light still does not come on, the next suspect is the switch or touch panel. For the light circuit specifically this is a frequent weak point, and the reason is the environment.

Mechanical light switches get dirty over time. The air around a cooker hood carries grease and moisture; they settle on the switch contacts, and the contact either stops conducting or starts to "stick". The typical sign: the light sometimes comes on if you press the button harder or several times, but not always. That is a contact symptom, not a bulb symptom.

Touch panels (sensor buttons with no physical click) fail differently. There are no mechanical contacts to foul, but there is electronics that "reads" the touch and sends a command to a light relay or transistor on the board. If the light channel itself fails — the relay or the driving element — the fan buttons keep working, but the light button no longer switches anything on, even though the panel reacts to the touch (it beeps, the indicator lights). That is the classic "fan yes, light no" pattern on electronically controlled hoods.

What you can check yourself: whether the light button reacts at all (a click, a beep, an indicator) and whether the bulb is ruled out. Cleaning the switch contacts or changing a relay on the board is already bench work — there is mains voltage and fine electronics in there, so do not open the casing yourself.

LED driver and flicker: why it is not just the bulb

This is where people go wrong most often. In LED hoods the light is not fed straight from the mains — between the mains and the diodes sits a driver (the LED power module) that converts 230 V AC into a low DC voltage with regulated current. If an LED light behaves strangely, the fault is very often in the driver, not in the diodes themselves.

Typical signs of a driver failure:

• The light flickers or pulses, especially at startup or after a few minutes.
• The light is dim or has a wrong, yellowish or bluish tint.
• The light flashes on and goes out after a second (the driver drops into protection).
• It does not light at all, but the diodes are clearly not damaged.

So if you replace the LED module and the flicker comes back, the driver was the fault all along. And the reverse: one burned-out LED in a string can take out the whole panel, because they are often wired in series. That is why the "just change the bulb" approach does not work on LED hoods — both have to be assessed: the LED panel and the driver. Which one to change is decided by measurement: the driver output is checked with a multimeter against the rating on its label (for example, "DC 30–42 V, 280 mA").

Another common trap: someone has fitted an LED bulb in place of a halogen in a halogen hood. If there is an old electromagnetic halogen transformer in there, it demands a minimum load, and one small LED bulb is "too little" for it — the result is a flickering or completely dead light. The fix is either an LED-compatible driver or going back to halogen. Often only a service centre spots this.

Overheating and grease around the bulb holder

Heat deserves a section of its own, because the light assembly of a cooker hood works in the worst conditions in the whole kitchen — right above a hot hob, in greasy steam. That produces two specific kinds of damage.

First, grease around the holder. Over years a sticky film builds up on the holder contacts and the bulb cap. It worsens the contact, creates local overheating and eventually "burns out" the holder — the contact scorches, melts, and the bulb no longer gets power. You often see a black or brown film and melted holder plastic. This is a classic failure on older halogen hoods.

Second, driver or transformer overheating. LED drivers and halogen transformers are often built into the hood body itself, in the hot zone. Heat shortens their life — capacitors bulge, solder joints crack. The sign: the light starts to misbehave exactly when the hood has been running with the motor on for a long time, once the inside has warmed up.

An important safety warning: if you smell burning from the light assembly, see melted plastic or a holder with black scorch marks — disconnect the hood from the mains immediately and do not use the light until a service centre has looked at it. A scorched holder in a greasy environment is a real fire risk, not just cosmetic.

What you can do as prevention: with the hood unplugged and cooled down, clean the glass and the area around the holder of grease with a kitchen degreaser. That alone often restores the contact if the problem is still early. If the holder is already scorched, it has to be replaced, and that is bench work.

When it is a two-minute swap and when the control block must come open

Let us put it all into one decision table. The line between "do it yourself" and "needs a service centre" for a cooker hood light is fairly clear.

The simple principle: if your hood has a replaceable bulb (a screw-in or a halogen capsule) and the holder looks clean and sound, it is a job you can do yourself. As soon as it is a built-in LED module, a driver, switch contacts, or a holder that has scorched, the control block — where mains voltage lives — has to come open, and that is done at a service centre.

On repair versus replacement: a cooker hood lighting failure is almost always local — one bulb, one holder, one driver or module. So replacing a single part is usually more worthwhile than buying a whole new hood, because the motor and body are intact. Only on a very old hood whose module is no longer made can the balance tip toward replacement — and we say so honestly at inspection.

If the fault is not only in the light and the hood pulls weakly or the motor hums, that is a different circuit with different diagnostics — see cooker hood weak suction.