The Pitfalls of Dirty Ducts

There’s no two ways about it — your Sugar Land, Texas, home is the single greatest investment you’ll ever make. That’s why it’s so important to spare no expense when it comes to protecting your most expensive asset. This doesn’t mean you have to make unnecessary expenditures, but it does mean you need to remain vigilant of the needs of your home and how to improve it in every aspect.

However, there are many parts of the home that often get overlooked by homeowners, including the ductwork. By cleaning your air ducts regularly, you can avoid many of the pitfalls associated with these areas. Here are just a few ways dirty ducts can affect your home and how cleaning them can help protect your investment, provide cleaner air, and keep your family healthy.

What’s in My Air Ducts?

Before you funnel hundreds of dollars into duct cleaning, you should familiarize yourself with what’s in your air ducts. In the Sugar Land area, you typically use the air conditioner six to eight months a year and the furnace for two to three months. Because your furnace and air conditioner recirculate the air in your home without drawing from an outside source, dirt and debris eventually build up in the system.

Even high-efficiency air filters aren’t necessarily enough to keep contaminants out of your ducts and home, and if you don’t replace your filter regularly, the problem becomes exacerbated. Therefore, your air ducts need some special attention to remain free of dust and pollutants.

Pitfall #1: Weakened Air Quality

Although naysayers point to a lack of scientific evidence that proves clean air ducts improve indoor air quality, the idea and practice seem easy enough to comprehend. Cleaning excess dust, allergens, and contaminants helps reduce the amount of harmful particulates that enter the home through the HVAC system. What makes this a more crucial problem is that, according to government studies, people spend up to 90 percent of their time indoors. With that amount of time spent inside, even a slight improvement in indoor air quality from clean ducts makes it well worth the investment.

If you’re truly concerned about indoor air quality, a thorough duct cleaning isn’t the only way to breathe easier. You should also remember to change your filter regularly and have it checked by a professional. How often you need to replace it will depend on your filter’s efficiency rating. You should also consider the benefits of a whole-home air cleaner, which helps remove additional particulates from the home, like viruses, bacteria, and mold.

Pitfall #2: A Decrease in Energy Savings

You may not think about it regularly, but your HVAC system is one of the most vital things in your home. It’s responsible for comfort throughout the year, no matter how hot or cold it gets. With that said, you want to keep it running smoothly, but you also don’t need to spend an exorbitant amount of money to do so. The key here becomes prevention.

When you clean your air ducts, you allow air to flow smoothly to all rooms in your home, allowing your HVAC system to operate at maximum efficiency. If left untreated, the buildup of dust and debris reduces efficiency, causing the system to work harder to achieve the same results. The only thing you get out of this is a bigger monthly energy bill, more repair costs, and a shortened lifespan for your HVAC system. With a duct cleaning, you can reduce or nearly eliminate these extra costs.

To maximize the benefits of a duct cleaning, you also need to consider other options. Make sure to get an HVAC tuneup at least once and preferably twice a year. During these examinations, our technicians ensure your system is in proper working order, reducing any problems down the road and helping to get the most out of your heating and cooling. Not only will you prolong your HVAC system’s life, but you’ll feel the results each time you turn on your furnace or air conditioner.

Pitfall #3: Animals Could Be in Your Air Ducts

Rodents are a strange bunch of animals. They don’t mean any inherent harm, but they sure are pesky creatures to deal with, and you’d much rather see them out in the wilderness or in the zoo than in your own home. However, the allure of a cozy home often lures animals into your air ducts. Not only does this pose sanitary problems, but these rodents can also become trapped in the ducts and die, causing putrid smells to emanate throughout the home.

Even household pets have been known to become lost in air ducts, creating the problem of removing them safely. For these reasons, it’s important to pay attention to how animals access your air ducts. To keep them from entering ductwork, you should conduct a visual inspection of the air registers on the inside of your home as well as entry points on the exterior of the home.

Rodents often gain access to the home via the roof or crawl space, and while some of these aren’t easily sealed off, others simply require some caulk or silicone to effectively close them off to wild animals. It’s important to remember that rats and mice can slip through holes that are exceptionally small, so if you’re in doubt as to whether you should fill a hole, err on the side of caution.

Once you’ve closed off these entry points, you should greatly reduce the chance of animals getting inside, but there’s still the chance that animals may have already been roaming around. To remove any decaying carcasses and the health perils associated with it, you should clean your air ducts after sealing the area. That way, you don’t have to worry about any harmful bacteria entering your air and causing health problems for your family.

Duct Cleaning Time

If you’ve decided it’s time for a duct cleaning, let us tell you how the service works. When you contact us, we’ll send a technician out to your home to begin the process. During our Fixed Right-Guaranteed®Residential Duct Cleaning, we don’t merely clean the ducts. Instead, we perform a thorough inspection to ensure that no aspect goes overlooked.

To get started, we take pictures of your ducts so we can show you before and after photos upon completion. Afterward, we clean each air register in the home as well as any grills. If there’s a problem with either or they’re simply outdated, we offer solutions to upgrade your system.

We also seal any gaps between the register and the drywall to ensure there’s no extra buildup of debris. This cleans the entire system out, and from there, we offer extra options to homeowners, such as an odor neutralizer, HVAC blower cleaning and upgrades, a dryer vent cleaning, and high-efficiency filtration upgrades. When we’re done, you’ll have the cleanest ducts since the house was built. That’s our guarantee.

As you can see, air ducts are an integral part of the home that plays a pivotal role in your comfort and health. To maximize both aspects, you need to clean your ducts regularly. That’s when you need to call Davis Air Conditioning & Heating. Our skilled technicians will come out and complete the process so you can get back to your life. Give us a call today at 888-710-5530.

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