The air ducts in your HVAC system require regular cleaning and maintenance to prevent disease-causing bacteria, mold, mildew, and pollen from contaminating your home. Given that your air ducts reach all parts of your home, you should make it a top priority to always clean and maintain them. Therefore, as the homeowner, you need to be familiar with HVAC maintenance companies’ proper cleaning methods when cleaning your air ducts. This understanding will help you ensure that you’re getting the right service and further enables you to keep your HVAC system operating at high efficiency.
Although there are two different methods, the gist is the same – loosen and remove debris from the air ducts, clean them out and disinfect the air pathways. Although the process is simple, plenty of homeowners ignore the responsibility of calling in for regular air duct maintenance. Furthermore, with time, you’ll notice that your HVAC system performs poorly due to the buildup of dust and dirt. To prevent this, let’s look at how simple and easy these cleaning methods are and how they can help keep your HVAC system clean and efficient.
Proper Cleaning Methods for Air Duct Cleaning
There are three crucial steps in proper air duct cleaning. These proceduresensurethat your home does not end up re-contaminated with dirt and bacteria after the HVAC service workers turn your AC back on again. Therefore, your HVAC maintenance company must follow through with these steps thoroughly. Furthermore, you as the homeowner must know what happens in each stage.
- Loosening Dirt and Grime – Here, the HVAC professionals will use a method to break or loosen dirt and grime stuck in your air ducts. One way of accomplishing this is using a standard brushing tool to poke, agitate and loosen the dirt.
- Cleaning the Dirt and Removing Contaminants – During this step of air duct cleaning, the HVAC maintenance professionals will use either a brush and other power tools or negative pressure (or vacuum) to remove all dirt from your air ducts.
- Micro-bacterial Spray – After removing all dirt and grime, the HVAC team will spray a disinfectant to kill any remaining microorganisms and leave a pleasant smell within your air ducts.
By following these steps, air duct cleaning specialists ensure that no dirt or grime remains within your HVAC system and will not re-contaminate your home with bacteria and mold.
Removing Dirt and Grime Properly from Your Air Ducts
There are two methods popular among the best HVAC companies to clean and remove the dirt from your air ducts. They are –
- Rotary Brush Cleaner – Using a rotary brush tool, the team will clean out loosened dirt and dust particles. Here, it’s essential to ensure all air registers and pathways are clean before cleaning out the air ducts. Once the air pathways are clean, the cleaning team will insert the rotating brush into the air ducts and clean out all debris. Finally, they’ll spray with a micro-bacterial mist to kill all bacteria and leave behind a pleasant smell.
- Negative Pressure or Vacuum – Here, the cleaning team relies on a negative pressure to extract and remove dirt from your air ducts. After sucking the dirt out of the air ducts, the cleaners will spray an anti-bacterial mist to prevent re-contamination.
Accessing Air Ducts throughVentilation and Registers
The HVAC maintenance team will look for grills, vents, diffusers, and service openings to get into your air ducts. However, if there are no access points, they’ll have to create one. Therefore, you need the best HVAC maintenance team to work on your HVAC system, as they have to make new access points and reseal them once the cleaning process is complete. The sealing method is an advanced HVAC maintenance task, and so requires an experienced team.
The HVAC team will use the following materials throughout the cleaning process –
- Sanitizers
- Disinfectants
- Deodorizers
- Antimicrobial Chemicals
All of these substances kill germs, bacteria, and other microorganisms. Further, it prevents them from re-contaminating our home once you turn your HVAC system back on.
Other HVAC Maintenance tips Related to Air Duct Cleaning
It’s important to understand that cleaning out your air duct is not enough. You need to clean out the rest of your HVAC system as well. These additional components to clean include –
- Drain Pans – You need to clean out your drain pans to prevent mold and mildew growth. If you let it sit around for a long time, you’ll end up with mold growth in your air ducts.
- Grills and Registers – Clean out your grills and registers before you start cleaning your air ducts.
- Blower Motor – The blower motors end up passing a lot of air through them, and it’s prevalent for it to end up dirty. And so, you need to make sure the service team cleans out your blower motors as well when cleaning your air ducts.
- Air Filters – Change your air filters regularly and swap them out with newer, better ones that offer improved filtration without impeding airflow.Dirty air filters spread dirt and bacteria around your home and restrict regular HVAC airflow, thereby bringing down the efficiency.
Conclusion
As you can see, air duct cleaning is quite simple, quick, and easy. Therefore, to prevent contamination in your home and to keep your family members safe from breathing problems, hire HVAC maintenance services to clean your air ducts regularly. Furthermore, make sure you hire the best professionals in your area, as sometimes they will need to create new access points to reach the air ducts and subsequently reseal them. And so, you should leave this step to the best maintenance service you can find.
