air duct cleaning

[sam gm]

Well, I just got into airduct cleaning cause I would get some requests once in a while and been wanting to offer that service for a while now. I bought the ram air and tried it on numerous rental properties, which I thought isnt really worth it, and then got a duct wizard by merlins and pretty nice unit that seems to work really well. I did my motherinlaws house first cause its about 18 years old with fiberglass ducting and she never had them cleaned. come to find out her air ducts were pretty clean. Then I did a realtor friends house today and his house is 8 years old ( air ducts never been cleaned) and they were pretty clean but I wnt ahead and cleaned all the supply ducts, furnace and the return, The return was about the dirtiest thing, and also found a supply duct that had come apart at one of the joints so I fixed that.
My question to you guys is alot of the jobs like that and do companies walk from those not so dirty jobs often. I do have a boroscope camera and checked the job before and after.
One thing is though I have a dust downer to wet the dust as its coming in and I cant really tell how much dust I am actually capturing. the little stuff seems to be going through the filter strainer.
I want to clean some dirty a$$ ducts. I like the challanges.

 

[rhino1]

You won't find alot of "dirt" in the supply side of the unit, usually just dust. Floor vents will be crammed full of all kinds of junk in many homes. The returns are where you will get to see the most stuff, and they are the most fun to clean.

Alot of the contaminants are very fine dust particles...like drywall dust. When builders build a home, the workers will simply throw scrap pieces of drywall, grout, wires, whatever into the ducts. Then the clean up crew will sweep more dust and trash into the floor vents rather than using a dustpan, causing an air quality issue before the home is even occupied.

Those homes that are solidly caked with hair and unknown goop make good pictures, but take a long time to clean thoroughly.

 

[Jim Williams]

Once you start getting into some 35 year old homes and older you will see some really nasty ducts. I lived in an old house about 20 years ago and it literally made me sick with sinus infections that were so bad I could hardly function. It happened that I got into duct cleaning as an add on to my chimney cleaning business and when I cleaned my ducts I couldn't believe the crap that was caked on the walls of the trunk line.