We just bought a house in Tonawanda and I’m looking for someone to come in and clean all the ducting. I took all of the vent covers off(to blast and paint) and found 2 inches thick of dust caked in there, so I want to have them cleaned. Does anybody know of someone who’s good and reasonably priced?
Indoor Air Professionals?
+1
Bump.
Any one else have their ducts professionally cleaned? Do they snake the interior wall runs with a spin brush?
how is this even possible… did they not run a furnace filter?
I have been doing hvac for about 3.5yrs and ive never cleaned any ducts. I think the company i work for residential side doesn’t clean ducts.
And to the original poster, are you sure its not insulation?
The ducts can get in them from not running a filter and/or having dust from home projects fall into the registers/runs.
Only my return air ducts were loaded with a solid 1" of dog hair/dust/nail clippings. I just vacuumed them out the best I could and changed the disgusting in furnace filter and they are fine since. Shortly after I moved out here I got a coupon in the mail for duct cleaning but wasn’t done sanding floors or I probably would have paid the $65 I think it was.
not local but i can share an experience with you. footnotes- its expensive.
i had a particular troublesome tenant at a property i own who basically thought ever creak, squeak, drip or random dust bunny was the beginning of some kind of cataclysm. he discovered a pea-sized ball of material on the furnace filter and demanded i get to the bottom of it as he had thoroughly convinced himself there were poisonous fibers floating through the air.
i went ahead and had the ducts cleaned as it was the only way to resolve the situation short of having the material analyzed by a lab or something. my personal opinion was that it was a mixture of carpet fibers and dust.
the cleaning was expensive- about $500 for a 1 story 850sf apartment. they essentially hook a huge vacuum up to one end of the duct work and then send a brush with pressurized air down the other to clean them out. they had to cut access holes into both the supply and return mains to allow for their connections. they took before and after pictures and junk like that. personally i felt like they were pretty clean. but it sort of like asking the dentist if you need a teeth cleaning, of course they are going to say yes, its how they make money.
given sensitivities of the tenant i had instructed the cleaners that they were working for me and were not to answer a bunch of questions from the tenant. of course they ignored this request which really pissed me off. it also demonstrated to me that these guys probably don’t really know anything about what they are cleaning up. the tenant told me when he asked the cleaners what they thought the material was that he had found on the filter they said it was probably old insulation from a since-replaced coal fired furnace.
the place was built in the 60’s. there is no way in hell it had a coal fired furnace.
returns would make sense and don’t really matter… inches in the ducts from the furnace shouldn’t happen, it’s a sealed system with a filter. most duct cleaning is a scam and people who have it done always say it helped because they don’t want to feel taken.
slo ride is right. I have three quotes ranging from 400-500 for my house. Same procedure. Its pricey.
Im buying a mirco guard filter for right now and after my house projects are done, ill pay a pro to come clean the ducts. Right now its not worth it when I can “clean” them my self with the brush from HD, drill and my shop vac.
We had a groupon awhile back for a $60-ish cleaning. They hooked a vacuum up to the furnace intake, and then shopped vac’d all the vents in the apartment we were in. They also had an air pressure hose to blast dust around, presumably so it would get sucked down to the furnace and vacuumed up. They also tried to upsell me ALL SORTS of crazy shit.
Once I saw what they did I was like “oh, I totally could have just done this myself…”
These duct cleaning companies rank right up there with quicklube places trying to sell me fuel system cleaners and oil flushes on my basically new car.
Vacuum out what you can reach at the return and exhaust grates and ignore the rest.
I can’t say I’ve ever heard anything positive about having your vents cleaned, there was a Dateline special on how these guys were ripping off people (same episode as the locksmith fraud). When I mentioned it my grandfather and father said NO. Long story short i dropped one of the large pieces of duct work and the vents looked totally fine.
I replace my air filter 2x a year.
I recently bought a house in Lockport where the previous owner had dogs and or cats who pissed all over the carpets downstairs. Because of that I was able to negotiate the price way down and used the savings to buy all new carpet, new appliances and repainted every room before we moved in. Anyways we wanted to have the ducts professionally cleaned because we found pet hair on the walls above the HVAC vents indicating it was in the ducts. So I hired RGM Heating and Cooling to clean the ducts and conduct preventative maintenance on the furnace, gas fireplace and both hot water heaters. Two guys spent 8 hours at my house drilling about 50 holes in my duct work to blow and vacuum dirt along with a rotary bristle tool. They showed me the results when they were done which consisted of mostly construction debris and pet hair. It was expensive, about $900, but that included other services.
Their duct cleaning was very thorough but the clean up was non existent. As I said we had not moved in yet but had our entire family’s belongings in the basement waiting for the carpet to get installed. I asked the owner several times if he wanted me to move my stuff out of his way. He declined the offer and said he would move what he needed to. Not being familiar with the process at the time I didn’t know they would be drilling 50 holes in the ducts then blasting debris and metal shavings all over my belongings. They made no attempt to move or cover up anything. I was left with blankets, clothes, toys, unwrapped Christmas presents, pillows, basically anything that was exposed all covered in metal shavings and the shit that I didn’t want in my ducts. A month later, after a thorough cleaning of the basement floor and every single item brought up from the basement, we are still finding metal shavings in our new carpet and in our belongings. So that was a wonderful bonus. I’m currently fighting with the company to get a discount on the bill.
Most new houses have that aluminum coated flex duct work.
How would they drill into that?
I would be pissed if they drilled holes into my sheetmetal duct work also.
Seems like nonsense to me, take the grills off, and get a dryer lint brush and see what you can get with that and a shop vac. Consider it done.
Take the door off the furnace and clean around there, make sure the exhaust is clean also.
I buy a case of 12 filters on amazon for 40 bucks, and change it once a month. Most people use filters that are too restrictive for their ductwork, so I use the fiberglass style ones.
^^ ordered. thanks. These will finish out the winter
best place for filters is amazon warehouse deals (returns, and dinged corners etc)