A fume hood's containment must be verified during the dynamic performance measurement commissioning phase. This dynamic containment performance may be defined in terms of a measured response time, or it may be defined in terms of containment of vapors under specified conditions. Response time measurements are required for each fume hood because of the interaction of dedicated fume hood velocity controllers, as noted above. However, containment tests may only be required for some representative sample of hoods because of uniformity of the design and installation.

The following fume hood containment criteria were developed for design specifications from meetings of five manufacturers of fume hood control and monitoring devices and have been repeated here, as presented by Rizzoref111 (1994) in an analysis of a research building and hospital construction and renovation project.

• Constant fume hood face velocity should be maintainable within a tolerance of 10 percent given any operating condition.
• The reaction time for the controls must be within 30 seconds from minimum to maximum.
• Control could be either bypass sensor type or sash position sensor type.
• Hood-mounted displays should be simplified to provide status lights indicating "danger," "caution," "safety," and "high" velocities. Meters indicating actual velocity were considered unnecessary, as was manual adjustment of hood velocity. an override switch was provided for emergency use, and an audible alarm would indicate low velocity.
• The hood alarms and overrides were to be centrally monitored via the hospital's 24-hour computer monitoring system.
• The hood system should be of the same manufacture as the room control devices.
• Room pressurization would be accomplished using air volume tracking in lieu of differential pressure devices.
• All control devices would be of the pressure independent type.