Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Air Duct Cleaning

Q: Does anyone have recommendations on air duct cleaning services? We also have an unpleasant urine-like smell coming from one of the floor vents. Any suggestions as to how to deal with that?

A: They’re expensive. I just called them today for a duct cleaning (for October) so I know they do them. $3xx+ for 13 ducts (additional ducts are extra) but it sounds like they clean them the right way (as opposed to basically doing nothing and charging you for it).

A: That actually sounds too inexpensive for that many ducts done the right way, unless they know all the access holes have already been cut during a previous cleaning. Even then it’s a bit low as this is not a quick service, easily 4hrs (our 10-vent took 6hrs for one worker because it was the first proper cleaning it had ever had, and there were no pre-existing access holes).

A: They told me roughly 6 hours for this.

A: “Access holes” ? Man, that’s pretty thorough, more thorough than I want. (Access holes sounds a bit unsightly).

What Duct Cleaning company does depends on the design of your system, mine was difficult for them. Basically they drag a huge vacuum into the house and connect it to one of the vents most central to the system. The then go around and block off all of the other vents in the house. They then figure out the path from the central point to the most outward vent, and start with that vent: unblock it, stick a hose in there with compressed air, and blow dust / debris towards the vacuum. If the system is undamaged, this provides them with quite enough suction to clean out a lot of stuff (they were pulling cat food out of my ducts, and my system has a hole.) Once they get to the next vent, they re-block the last vent, unblock the new vent, and continue. Eventually they’ve pushed everything to the center of the system where their vacuum captures it.

This is pretty much “good enough” for dust and apparently cat food.

A: Sounds similar to what I had done, but:

The huge vacuum is a MONSTER truck outside with a flexible duct around 1’ in diameter that they run through your house to the central furnace and hook up to the intake of the furnace.

The compressed air hose has a spider attachment that flails around scraping all the dust/mold/etc out of the ducting

The access holes (1” circles) were needed to do a really thorough job at areas that had T intersections.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

We need to find the ways to get rectified the unpleasant smell in the flooring. For that we may need the help of air duct cleaning service at any cost.

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Kelly Martin said...

Experts agree there is value to air duct cleaning, although there's no scientific evidence it improves air quality.

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