Have you been thinking about getting your air ducts clean? But you’re not sure if it’s a good idea or if you really need to do it at all. Well, today we’re going to be talking about the pros and cons of getting your air ducts cleaned and if you watch till the end of the video I’m going to give you some great ideas you can use to make sure that if you do decide to get your air ducts cleaned, you’re going to have the best result possible.
Is Air Duct Cleaning Necessary?
My friend Joe turned to me the other day. He said, “Mark, I’ve got a question for you I’ve seen a lot about air duct cleaning. I wonder if this is something that we should do in our home”. You know what that is such a great question because you know what a lot of people don’t know about air duct cleaning.
A lot of people, maybe, they’ll see a post on Facebook and maybe they’ll get a postcard in the mail but besides that, they really don’t have any experience or any firsthand knowledge with air duct cleaning. They’re not sure if it’s something they actually use.
What Do Air Duct Cleaning Companies Say?
So to start why don’t we look at what the air duct cleaning companies actually say. So, I looked at a few different websites for different air duct cleaning companies and they all pretty much said the same thing. First of all, they said that air duct cleaning would improve your health. They said that it can reduce unpleasant odors. It can reduce mold spores in your home and it is also said that it can make your HVAC system run more efficiently.
What Does the EPA Say about Air Duct Cleaning?
Now what’s interesting about these claims is that I then went to the EPA’s website. As you know the EPA is the environmental protection agency and here’s what the EPA had to say.
They said that duct cleaning has never been shown to actually prevent health problems. Furthermore, studies don’t demonstrate that dust levels in your home actually increase because of dirty air ducts. That’s because any dust that does get into your air ducts really tends to stick to the inside of the air duct. But frankly, there’s not a lot of dust, in my opinion, that actually gets into the ducts.
You know a lot of these people who are advertising on Facebook for their air duct cleaning services, they’ll show you an air duct that is choked with dust, and then they’ll show it really clean. But, to have an air duct that is so choked with dust, is pretty rare. As long as you’re going and keeping your air filter maintained in your furnace, you really shouldn’t have that much dust in your air ducts.
Should you Get Your Air Ducts Cleaned?
So, how do you know if you should actually get your air ducts cleaned? Well, the first thing you can do is you can actually do your own visual inspection. You can go and take off the vent covers, and the registers around your home. Use a flashlight, take a look and see does it look like it’s really dusty? Is there anything in there that will cause you to think this is not as clean as it could be? If that’s the case you might want to get your air ducts cleaned.
Now if you see that you have visible mold growth inside your ducts, at that point you might want to consider getting your ducts cleaned. You may see something that looks like mold but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s actually molded. The only way to tell if it’s really mold is to take a sample and send it to a laboratory to be tested. It’s pretty inexpensive to do that but the only way you can definitively know for sure is to get that sample tested at a lab. If it does turn out to be mold at that point it might be a good idea to get your ducts cleaned.
If you see rodents or insects or any evidence of either one of those in your ducts it might be a good idea to call a professional air duct cleaning company to get it cleaned. One that, I think, is pretty common sense is, if you turn on your furnace or your central layer and you see dust blowing through your vents at that point you might have a dust problem. You’ll definitely want to get a company in to take a look at that.
Choosing a Reputable Air Duct Cleaning Company
Now if you decide to get your ducts cleaned, how do you know that you’re choosing a reputable company? Well, first of all, be careful with anyone you find on Facebook. I’ve seen a lot of posts on Facebook and you can actually search this, just search for “air duct cleaning scam” and you can find a number of posts that are very similar in their verbiage and very similar pictures. It’s like they all copy from one another. There’s no mention of a company name and they usually say something like, “Hey, we’re in the area doing an air duct cleaning and we need three more jobs to give the discount or make it worth it.”
Or whatever, be very careful of those people you’ll see that those people typically are coming from accounts that are pretty new. You are most likely to be scammed if you’re going with a company like that. One thing you can do is, you can reach out to the National Air Duct Cleaners Association (NADCA) and they can put you in touch with some air duct cleaners who are reputable and who are known to them.
Another thing you can do is ask whatever company you meet with, ask them for references and ask them if you can speak to people who they’ve cleaned in the past and see what they felt about their services. You can also reach out to the better business bureau or to any consumer affairs division of your local city or county governments.
Now one thing I found interesting on the EPA’s website was that they said you should steer clear of any company that makes sweeping claims about the health benefits of having your air ducts cleaned. You should also steer clear of companies who say that you need to have your air ducts cleaned routinely as part of the regular maintenance of your HVAC system.
First of all, remember I said before there have been no studies done that show that air duct cleaning will improve your health, and really you don’t need to have routine air duct cleaning in your home. If you do need to have it done at all, it should be every few years.
Closing Thoughts
So, If you follow these tips and determine for yourself whether you need to get your air ducts cleaned in the first place. Then do your homework, and make sure you’re picking the right company. You’re gonna have no problem and you’re gonna continue to have years of enjoyment of your home.
