Duct Cleaning in San Antonio, TX

There is no fixed schedule, and anyone who quotes you one every year is selling. Ducts need cleaning when they are dirty, and the honest way to know is to look. In San Antonio the things that load ducts faster than average are a leaky attic duct system pulling in dust and insulation, pets, a remodel, heavy oak or cedar pollen seasons with a weak filter, and a rodent problem in the attic. For a well-sealed system with a decent filter changed on time, many years can pass without a need. Our approach is a camera inspection first, and a cleaning quote only if the inspection justifies one.

Only a little on its own. Mountain cedar pollen is fine enough to pass through a basic filter, and the pollen that is in your ducts is far less than what comes in through doors, windows and on clothes every day from December through February. Cleaning removes what has accumulated, which helps if the ducts are heavily loaded, but the bigger wins are a higher-efficiency filter or whole-house filtration, sealing the ducts so they stop pulling in attic air, and running the system fan to keep air moving through that filter. We often pair a duct cleaning with a filtration upgrade for exactly this reason. The options are on our San Antonio indoor air quality page.

Because in this city they are hard to separate. A large share of the San Antonio duct systems we inspect have leaks at the joints, crushed sections behind attic storage, or a run that has pulled off its boot entirely. A leaky duct pulls hot, dusty attic air into the system every time the blower runs, which is how the ducts got dirty in the first place. Cleaning them without sealing them means the dust is back in a couple of seasons, and you are still paying to cool the attic. Sealing also has a comfort payoff: the rooms at the end of the longest runs finally get the air they were supposed to. Details are on our duct sealing page.

Not when it is done under negative pressure, which is the only way we do it. A large vacuum is connected to the duct system so that everything loosened inside the ducts travels toward the collector rather than out of the registers. Technicians cover floors along their path, remove and clean the register covers, and put them back. You will want to move furniture away from registers and returns before we arrive and keep pets in another room. When we leave, the system is reassembled, a new filter is in place, and the only visible change should be that the registers are cleaner than they have been in years.