The Before and After photos of having your air ducts cleaned.

About this time every year my mailbox starts filling up with ads for “air duct cleaning” services that come into your home and actually vacuum out all the accumulated dust and debris (and even mold) that builds up the metal ducts of any sort of forced air heating or air conditioner system. These companies usually pull up to your house in vans that have tremendous vacuum cleaning units in them. I’ve watched them as they run large hoses (more like giant tubes) into a home and basically suck out all the dust and debris from the vents of a home. Some actually scrub the insides of the ducts, but mold isn’t a big problem in my part of the country, so most of the ones around me seem to offer just the vacuuming service.

These services typically cost a few hundred dollars up to a few thousand dollars based on the size of your home and the different levels of cleaning service you choose. I live in a home that is over forty years old and I know first hand that the ducts are fairly dusty and dirty. Every year or so I take off the vents of the return registers and go in with a simple home vacuum, sucking out all the dust I can get to. But just sucking the dust from the 1% of the actual ductwork I can get to doesn’t really make me feel too confident about the cleanliness of the 99% I can’t get to.

The people who think it’s important argue that all the dust and debris is being blown into your home and into your lungs every day. The people who don’t believe that the process works bring up the point that whether that most of that dust is in your home anyway (how else would it get into your air ducts) and you really don’t breathe it in because, hey, the dust is in the vents and clearly not blowing around too much. I had a feeling the truth was probably somewhere in between, but couldn’t pin anything down until I stumbled across an article by the EPA entitled Should You Have the Air Ducts in Your Home Cleaned?

It’s an absolutely excellent (but rather long) document and it covered just about every question I had about this whole process. It’s interesting to note that no studies have actually shown definitively that cleaning your air ducts really made the air in your home any cleaner.

Here’s a quick summary of all my research about air duct cleaning:

You DO want to consider having your air ducts cleaned if you have any of the following:

• Any sort of significant construction in your home involving dust, fiberglass or other airborne particles. These can cause breathing problems and these can end up in your air duct system only to be blown out later.
• Any sort of visible mold growth or any sort of positive testing for mold in the air ducts. Professionals can run air tests, or you can get a kit to collect a sample and send it to a lab.
• Any sort of blockage (full or partial) in your air ducts due to debris.
• Any sort of evidence of animal activity (droppings, nesting) in your air ducts. Eww…

If you don’t have any of those problems, then you can probably forgo the expensive professional air duct cleaning and simple do a little vacuuming inside the returns yourself. Before you do anything you might want to have your duct system inspected and tuned up by a professional every couple of years just to make sure everything is still working as it should and you can catch any small problems before they get bigger. And always, always, always change the filter on your furnace at the recommended intervals. Some furnace filters only last a few months, some last half a year.

Update: I actually did have my air ducts cleaned at my wife’s insistence. See my full air duct cleaning review here.

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