Air duct cleaning in Ocotillo Heights and Cortina

Either side of Ocotillo Road, west of Ellsworth · built Mid 2000s into the 2010s

Fifteen to twenty years of settled dust

These neighborhoods went in during the earlier Queen Creek growth, which puts most of the housing somewhere between fifteen and twenty years old.

That matters because it is roughly the point where an ordinary lived-in system has collected enough to be worth removing. A five-year-old house has construction debris. A fifteen-year-old house has fifteen years of whatever the filter missed, which in this town includes a great deal of fine agricultural and construction dust from outside.

It is also long enough that most of these systems have never been opened. The original owners did not think about it and the second owners assumed somebody had.

The filter question comes first

Before anybody cleans anything, this is worth settling, and we will raise it whether you ask or not.

Your filter is the system's actual defense. A clean filter of the right type catches the majority of what would otherwise end up in the ducts. A filthy one, or one of the cheap flat panel type in a house with pets, lets material straight through.

So if we arrive, clean a full system in Cortina, and the filter is gray and collapsing, we have bought you maybe a year. We will tell you that and tell you what to change, because the alternative is you paying again sooner than you should.

It is also why we will occasionally say a system does not need doing yet. A well-filtered system in a house without pets can go a long time.

What is actually in a system this age

• Fine settled household dust, the bulk of it
• Skin cells and fabric fibers, which is most of what household dust is
• Agricultural dust from worked fields, which is specific to this town
• Pet dander in houses with animals, and it travels further than people expect
• Whatever the filter has been missing for fifteen years
• Occasionally rodent or insect evidence, particularly near roof penetrations

That last one is worth checking for on any system of this age. If we find it, that changes the conversation and we will tell you plainly what it means rather than cleaning around it.

Count them yourself before you ring anybody

This takes about two minutes and it puts you in a considerably better position on every call you make, including ours.

Walk the house and count every opening connected to your heating and cooling. Supply vents are the ones air blows out of, usually in ceilings, one or two per room. Returns are the big ones that suck air in, usually one or two in a hallway or near the thermostat, and they are noticeably larger.

Add them together. That number times $65 is the rate, and 15% comes off that, so it is really $55.25 an opening. Twelve openings is $663.

Any company that will not price off that number, and instead needs to come out and look first, is leaving themselves room to arrive at a different figure once you are committed.

What duct cleaning actually does, and what it does not

This industry has a reputation problem and pretending otherwise would be insulting, so here is the straight version.

What it does: removes accumulated dust, construction debris and whatever else is sitting in the ductwork and getting pushed into your rooms every time the system runs. On a system that has never been cleaned, or one in a house that has been through a build or a remodel, there is genuinely a lot in there.

What it does not do: cure allergies, fix asthma or make anybody healthier in a way that has been demonstrated. The EPA's own position is that duct cleaning has never been shown to prevent health problems, and we are not going to claim otherwise to sell a job.

What it also does not do is substitute for changing your filter. If your filter is filthy, that is the actual problem, and cleaning the ducts without fixing the filter means you will be back here in a year.

How we do it

1. Walk the system. Count the openings with you, look at the filter, look at the returns, and tell you honestly whether this is worth doing. Sometimes it is not.
2. Open access. Registers come off. We get into the runs and the trunk rather than cleaning the first eighteen inches anybody can see from the floor.
3. Agitate the run. A flexible air rod with a whip head fed down the duct, breaking material off the walls of the run where it has settled rather than just moving what is loose.
4. Capture it. Negative pressure on the system the whole time, so what comes off the walls leaves the house instead of relocating to the next room.
5. Registers and grilles. Cleaned properly rather than wiped, because the thing you actually look at every day is the grille.
6. Show you. Before and after down the same run, so you can see what changed rather than take somebody's word for it.

When it is actually worth doing

There is no universal schedule and anyone who gives you one is guessing. What there are is circumstances that genuinely justify it, and most Queen Creek homes hit at least one.

• The house is new, or newly remodeled. Drywall dust and construction debris sit in ductwork installed before the house was finished around it
• Nobody has ever done it and the house is more than ten years old
• You are moving into a place somebody else lived in
• Visible dust blowing out of registers when the system kicks on
• A persistent smell you cannot locate
• Rodent or insect evidence in the system
• Farm and construction dust, which in this town is most of the year

If none of those apply and your filter is being changed on schedule, you may not need this, and we would rather tell you that than take $780.

Questions from Ocotillo Heights and Cortina

Elsewhere in Queen Creek

Harvest and Barney Farms · Encanterra · Hastings Farms and the acreage · Sossaman Estates and Queen Creek Station · Church Farm, Whitewing and The Pecans