When Does Your Home Need Duct Cleaning?

Duct cleaning isn’t something you need very often. Every few years is all it takes to keep it clean if you take good care of it and your ducts are properly filtered. With all the dust in your vent being hidden away where you can’t see it, though, how do you tell when it needs cleaning? Well, there are a couple ways to tell that something is going on in your vents that needs to be taken care of. Here are 5 signs that tell you something’s up.

1. Your Home Has Just Undergone Remodeling

Construction work is really messy. If you’ve just remodeled your home, or if it’s newly built, there’s a good chance you’ll need to have your air ducts cleaned. While many construction crews will cover the vents when they work, they don’t always do so. If they’ve pulled off vent covers, then covering the vent probably didn’t keep the dust out. In some cases, accidents happen, such as when construction tools, equipment, and even a slab of broken concrete found their way into the air ducts during a remodeling job. It’s usually a good idea to have your ducts checked out after major construction happens in your home, just to be sure.

2. Your Home Is Constantly Dusty

Dust naturally builds up over time, but a simple weekly cleaning should be enough to keep it under control.  If you find yourself cleaning up every week, but every time you do, there’s just a ton of dust built up on everything, then something isn’t right. It’s possible that there’s dust built up in your air ducts and it’s being spread throughout your house by your HVAC system. If you suspect this is the case, take a look at the vents around your house and see if they’re noticeably dusty. If they are, then it’s likely that your air ducts need cleaning.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio

3. You’re Coughing More Often

One of the big problems of dust is that it irritates your throat. You’ll cough a lot more if your house gets dusty. If you have allergies, this is an even worse problem for you. Again, it should be easy to keep that under control with regular cleaning. If, however, you find yourself coughing more often than normal, sore throats become common, or you need to use higher doses of allergy medication than you used to, then the problem might be in the ducts. Allergens, like pollen and pet dander, are just as likely to get in your ducts when there’s a problem.

A good duct cleaning will remove those cough-causers and leave you with fresh air in your home. While we’re cleaning, our camera can look through your duct system and see if your ducts have been breached somewhere, letting allergens in that shouldn’t be there. This will help you solve the problem going forward.

4. Increased Heating/Cooling Costs

One of the less visible ways dirty ducts can hurt you is in energy costs. Your HVAC system is a fine-tuned machine and, like all machines, it has a problem with friction. Friction not only wears out mechanical parts, it also interferes with their ability to function properly. Some friction is impossible to avoid, but if there’s a lot of dust in your vents, then you can bet it’s getting into your HVAC system as well. That dust will create more friction, forcing your system to work harder to keep your home warm or cool. If this is a problem, you’ll see rising costs over time and even need to replace your HVAC system sooner than you should.

As a part of our duct cleaning services, we can get the dust out of your HVAC as well as your air ducts, which will help keep energy costs down.

5. Weird Odors That Won’t Go Away

Moving air won’t just carry dust and allergens. It also carries bad smells. Have you been noticing a bad smell in your house that you can’t find the source? Does the smell seem to come from multiple rooms at once? Well, the source of the smell might just be something in the ducts themselves. We’ve found plenty of horrible smells in ducts we’ve cleaned. This is an especially serious problem, because even older air duct systems should be built to keep things that create bad smells out. If animals are crawling into your ducts, it’s likely that something’s damaged your air ducts somewhere.

Our camera system can search your ducts for any cracks or breaks that might be letting in things. Our sanitization service, which comes free with the basic duct cleaning, will also help kill the bacteria that might be making the smell linger, as well as putting you at risk of getting sick.

Let Us Help You Out

These are the most common problems our customers report and all of them are something we can help you with. When Easy Breezy sends someone to clean your ducts, we let you watch the process. You get to see the dust as we pull it out and get a look at the inside of your ducts. If there’s a problem that needs to be fixed, we’ll find it, and you’ll know!

And now that we also offer carpet cleaning services, that’s just one more way to keep the air fresh in your home. With spring cleaning coming up (it’s finally stopped snowing! I hope!), now’s the perfect time to give us a call. We’ll help you get that hidden dust out so you can breathe easy in your own home!