So, what is duct cleaning? You know, how you clean your house. You mop your vacuum and clean the dust. As your ductwork is inaccessible, so, it goes untouched for many years. This means that it collects dust and all types of contaminants that can make you sick and can cause your house to be dirty.
Why You Should Clean Air Ducts?
So, duct cleaning is actually touching the surfaces on the insides of your duct, brushing them, and vacuuming them out, so they are also clean like the rest of your house. Now, why do homeowners have their ducts cleaned?
The main reasons why people call to have their ducts cleaned are for these three reasons:
- Odor.
- Allergies or other respiratory symptoms.
- Proton smells.
So, I’ll start with number one which is odor. The odor could be anything from construction materials or from a musty smell from your crawl space. It could be anything from the exterior smell that comes into your crawfish, attic, your duct system and it could be something caused by your furnace or your heating system. There could be a lot of different reasons why.
If your ductwork doesn’t get touched or cleaned for a long time, the sources for these smells will just propagate and will cause a lot of discomfort in your home. This is how dirty ducts affect allergies. Our clients tell us that when they first turn the furnace on in the fall, they had a hard time breathing and their allergies get a lot worse and that’s because when the system starts, it pushes all that air out and the air brings a lot of the dust and all of the other particles with it.
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They get blown into your house and sometimes you can even see the particles coming out of the ductwork. If the sun is shining through a window but even If you can’t see it you can definitely feel it and it will make you’re breathing a lot harder than it should be.
So, the third reason why people call to have their ducts clean is because of rodent smells. So, this can happen for two primary reasons. One, because rodents live in your ductwork and they don’t smell good, and second, because they die in your ductwork or next to the ductwork and it doesn’t smell good either. So, If you ever experience this kind of smell feel free to give us a call and our air duct cleaning specialists can help you with that.
How to Get Prepared for Duct Cleaning?
So, here’s the most common question we get from homeowners, How do I prepare for duct cleaning?
Number one, we have to have access to all of the registers and your return one or multiple. So, when we arrive at your home, we are going to set up in the garage, in most cases. If it’s a mobile home, it’s most likely going to be at the furnace inside of the home. In some homes, the furnace is downstairs in the basement, so then we’re going to have to set it up there. We are going to remove all of the registers If they’re dirty we’re going to wash them for you.
The first part of the duct that we are going to clean for you is the return. This is between the intake grill and your equipment. This next one is important because a lot of people are concerned with the contaminants in their ductwork being pulled through their furnace or the coil. So, to avoid this we are going to cut a hole in the supply duct to connect our duct cleaning machine and this will ensure that all the contaminants will be sucked directly into the machine and not through your furnace.
Next, we are going to go to every single register, opening in the floor, the ceiling, or the wall and we’re going to clean every single duck branch. As a bonus, we’re going to clean your blower in your furnace If it’s accessible and you’re going to clean your dryer vent.
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After we remove our duct cleaning equipment we are going to seal all the penetrations in the duct to make sure they are airtight and they don’t allow any new contaminants to enter your ductwork.
We are also going to clean up and leave your house better than when we came and If we have found anything that gets their attention we are going to bring those up to your attention. We might be using pictures or videos to show you what we have found.
An important thing to note is the noise of the duck cleaning machine. Duct cleaning can be considered loud in comparison with your everyday activities in the home but rest assured that we are going to take every precaution to keep this as quiet as possible the good news is the duckling process may take several hours but utilizing the machine may only be about two hours.
Some homeowners ask us, “Will the duct cleaning machine stir up a bunch of dust in the house?”. And, this is a good concern. The answer is no, you don’t have to be worried about that because the machine exhausts all of its air outsides and there are filters internal to the machine that filter all of the dust. So, it’s rare that we can measure any amount of dust that gets stirred up in the home so this should not be a problem.
Can Duct Cleaning Hurt Your Ductwork or Home?
The answer is yes and here is what can happen. There are complaints out there and they are very legitimate complaints our goal is to minimize that because we know the right way and the wrong way to clean the ductwork.
So, some of the concerns that people have are when the contractor uses too large of a duct cleaning machine which collapses ductwork and this doesn’t do anything for you doesn’t clean that work and it defeats the purpose of having someone out.
So, what we do to ensure this is we have different sizes of equipment that are correctly matched to your home size and we can clean everything from a tiny home to a 5 000 square foot home or from a small office to a huge business or a huge commercial building. All these systems can be adjusted and dialed up and down to match the correct pressure that your ductwork needs.
Another concern that people have is, can the duct work be damaged by the cleaning equipment? And that’s a very good question and it’s a very good concern. Again the answer is yes. It can be damaged and it happens all of the time.
So, what do we do to ensure that this doesn’t happen, first of all, we do before and after video inside of your duct. With these pictures and video, we can prove to you and show you the condition that we found the ductwork and how we have left it behind. So, basically, you have proof that we have not damaged anything and we leave your duct system in a better condition than when we arrived.
Types of Duct Cleaning Machines
There’s also a very important point to be made about the type of duct cleaning machines and there are several kinds several sizes and several qualities out there. Some people use the smaller type of duct cleaning systems that only have a small vacuum and a small brush and what happens is the brush damages your ductwork and the vacuum is not strong enough to pull out the contaminants in your ductwork.
We use machines that are large enough to pull out large things. Everything from pop cans to burger wrappers to small particles of dust. So having the correct equipment is very important and we ensure that we use the right system for your house.
Conclusion
Air duct cleaning is a very important process and if you haven’t had your air ducts cleaned in a while, you should better call a professional air duct cleaning company near you.
