A Little About Us

A job starts with the truck-mounted vacuum. We run the hose through a door or window to the air handler, cut an access point in the supply and return trunks, and hook the unit up so the whole system is under negative pressure before a single brush goes in. Then we seal off every register in the house. That part matters more than people expect, because if the registers are open, the vacuum pulls room air instead of pulling debris out of the branch runs. Once the system is sealed and the vacuum is running, the crew works room by room with rotating brushes and compressed-air whips, pushing material from the far end of each run back toward the trunk and into the collection unit. The blower wheel, the plenum, and the return drop get hand-cleaned. We close and seal the access points, pull the register covers back on, and run the system to check airflow. We work on Carrier, Trane, Lennox, Goodman, Rheem, and American Standard equipment, and the approach stays the same across all of them.

Central Florida's load on duct systems is humidity first, dust second. Dew points sit in the mid-70s for months, so any gap in attic duct insulation or a loose collar at the plenum means condensation forming on cold metal and wet fiberglass liner, the precursor to mold and the musty smell homeowners notice in July. That smell is the call we get most. Second is airflow: oak and bahia pollen in February through April, plus construction dust from constant new development and sand tracked in off sandy soils, loads filters fast, and a clogged filter starves the return. Slab construction puts every run overhead in a hot attic, so duct leakage pulls superheated, humid attic air into the airstream. Hurricane and tropical storm water intrusion is a recurring attic issue, and wet insulation above a supply run shows up later as odor. Systems here accumulate more in three years than a northern system does in seven. We tell people 3-5 year intervals are realistic, shorter for homes with pets, recent remodels, or a history of oversized AC that short-cycles and never dehumidifies.

Sometimes the ducts are fine. If we open the trunk and the liner is clean, we say so and leave. More often the real problem sits somewhere adjacent: a filter that was never the right size for the return, which is a air filter replacement conversation, or leaking connections at the boots and plenum pulling attic air in, which is duct sealing work. A musty smell with clean ducts usually traces back to the evaporator coil and the drain pan, and coil cleaning fixes it. On cost, the things that move the number on a duct cleaning here are the count of supply runs, whether the system is one zone or two, how accessible the air handler is in the attic, and whether any of the liner is wet and needs more than vacuuming. We walk the attic and look before we tell you anything.