Duct Cleaning in Alamogordo, NM
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Step 1 of 3: Equipment
Seven months of heating pushes a lot of dust through your ducts
Your furnace runs October through April here, seven months a year. On winter nights that average 28°F, it is cycling on and off for hours at a stretch, and every cycle pushes air through the same ductwork. Whatever is already sitting in there, dust, drywall grit, pet hair, gets stirred up and carried into the rooms you live in.
Otero County has seen 32 winter storms and 83 damaging wind events over the past ten years. Wind like that works dust and debris into attics and crawlspaces where ducts often run, and some of it ends up pulled into the system your furnace is drawing from all winter.
- 7 months
- October through April, your furnace pushes air through your ducts
- 4 months
- June through September, your air conditioner does the same
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NOAA nClimDiv, 1991–2020 normals
- How often should air ducts be cleaned?
- There's no fixed schedule that fits every house. Homes with pets, a smoker, or someone with allergies tend to need it more often than others. If you see dust coming out of the vents when the blower kicks on, or dust settles again just days after a cleaning, that's a sign to move it up. A contractor can look at your ducts and tell you what makes sense for your house.
- Is air duct cleaning worth it?
- It depends on what's actually going on in your ducts, not on some schedule everyone should follow. If they're visibly dusty, have had rodents or insects in them, or there's mold you can see or smell, cleaning is worth doing. You're heating this house seven months a year, October through April, so if the ducts are dirty, that's a long stretch of pulling dust back into every room. If nothing looks wrong and no one in the house has allergy or breathing trouble, it may not do much for you right now.
- What does air duct cleaning involve?
- A contractor uses tools to loosen the dust and debris built up inside the ductwork, then pulls it out with a powerful vacuum before it can resettle. This covers the supply and return ducts and the grilles and registers, and usually the coil and blower housing too, since debris collects there as well. The system is put under negative pressure during the job so what gets knocked loose doesn't just blow out into the rooms of the house.