5 Reasons Why Air Duct Cleaning Is A Must

Air ducts are one of the unseen parts of your home that most people overlook, and with good reason: it’s not always obvious when something is wrong with them. This simply drives home the fact that they should be checked on a regular basis.

Many people are unaware that their home’s ductwork plays an important role in their comfort. The HVAC system in your home circulates air through ducts to various rooms. They are in charge of bringing in outside air and distributing it throughout the house.

Over time, dust and other dirt can build up inside these ducts, which makes them less effective. Your family may experience a range of health issues if your ducts are dirty. In addition, they can reduce your system’s efficiency. This means you are spending more money than necessary to keep your home at a comfortable temperature.

Why Is Air Duct Cleaning A Must?

Maintaining your ductwork in good condition is similar to keeping your lawn properly mowed or your house free of even the smallest speck of dirt – all done in the name of keeping your home clean, safe, and comfortable.

Moreover, cleaning your air ducts is an easy and inexpensive technique to improve your home’s air quality. Here are some reasons why you should have your ducts cleaned regularly:

Less Health Problems

Dust and airborne particles can accumulate in the ducts, posing a threat to your family’s health. These particles might hinder the performance of your heating and cooling systems, thereby increasing your energy costs.

Improved Indoor Air Quality

Mold and other impurities that might cause allergies, asthma, and breathing difficulties for you and your family are removed by duct cleaning. Having clean air in the home will enhance everyone’s health and reduce medical costs.

Better System Performance

The condition of your ducts has a direct effect on the efficiency of your system. Cleaner ducts result in improved airflow and increased energy efficiency. Air purification is an excellent way to save money on heating and cooling bills throughout the year.

Increased Heating and Cooling System’s Life

An HVAC system is one of the most important expenditures you can make. And you certainly do not want to overlook anything as vital as this. Clean air ducts will extend the life of your HVAC unit by preventing debris from entering via the vents, which could harm the fan blades or cause them to freeze.

More Problems Can Be Fixed

Even though your system appears to be operating normally, any problems that may exist within it are likely to remain undetected until an expert inspects it. By having your ducts cleaned, you may save money on future energy bills and repair expenses.

How Do I Know If My Air Ducts Need To Be Cleaned?

• Vents in your home are leaking dust: If your ducts have gathered so much dust that it is discharging into your home, they must be cleaned. This is not only unhealthy but also unappealing.
• Something smells funny around your home: If you detect an unusual odor when your air conditioner is running, it may be because the dirt and dust in your ducts have turned moldy. This can lead to respiratory issues for your family, particularly if anyone has allergies or asthma.
• Your family is experiencing allergies or asthma attacks: If you are one of the unfortunate individuals with a dust allergy, you know how painful it can be. All of your sneezing and wheezing indicate that your ducts require cleaning!

Can Air Duct Cleaning Cause Damage?

Duct cleaning is an excellent answer for specific household needs. However, the ideal approach is to do routine maintenance, install the appropriate filter and purification system, and seal ductwork appropriately.

How can you maintain a clean home environment and ensure that my HVAC system is functioning properly? Consult a licensed HVAC specialist with a track record of providing competent service and upholding ethical standards. Duct Pros ensures that all your heating, ventilation, and air conditioning ducts are in good working order, which benefits your health and wallet.

Duct Pros Takes Duct Cleaning To A Whole New Level

One of the worst things about air ducts is how easy it is for them to become dirty, particularly if you have pets or children. Over time, dust, mold, pet dander, and other allergens can accumulate. This buildup can cause asthma, allergies, and other respiratory disorders.

If you haven’t had your ducts cleaned in a while, contact air duct cleaning experts like Duct Pros immediately. Not only will we clean your ducts, but our team will also inspect them for any potential issues, freeing you from any problem or anomaly that may arise in the future.

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3 Ways To Balance Air Ducts And Its Importance

The architect or designer who created the plans for your home did more than just indicate where the walls, doors, and windows should go. He or she also included blueprints outlining the HVAC requirements to bring your home up to code. The layout of the internal air ducts, the size of the registers to be installed in each room, and any other pertinent information regarding your property’s HVAC air balancing calculations. In that section, each room is assigned a CFM number that corresponds to the balancing requirements of the home.

Today, we are going to go over air balancing in depth; including what the CFM number is, and what it exactly refers to. In addition, we will examine why air ducts are important to maintain for a cozy and comfortable home.

What Is Air Balancing?

As stated above, each room in your house was allocated a CFM number when it was conceptually designed on your blueprints. CFM is an abbreviation for cubic feet per minute, and the CFM number represents the number of cubic feet of air that your HVAC needs to circulate in order to keep a consistent temperature throughout your home.

According to the print, you will not observe any temperature differences in your home when the CFM is met. If the CFM requirements are met, the system will work more efficiently. If your CFM is being met, there will be no “hot” or “cold” patches in your home, just a pleasant, uniform temperature.

If your unit was properly sized to satisfy all CFM per room standards when your home was initially constructed and the new HVAC was installed, you should not have any balancing issues

What Causes Airflow To Be Unbalanced?

If everything is functioning properly, it is a wonderful thing. If your airflow is uneven, you will observe the following symptoms:

• High Energy Bills. If your air ducts are failing to maintain a consistent temperature throughout your home, they may be operating more frequently to compensate. This excessive consumption will result in high monthly energy bills.
• Hot or Cold Areas. An uneven HVAC will have difficulty keeping your home’s temperature stable. During the winter months, certain rooms will be colder than others, and during the summer, some will be hotter.
• Insufficient Air Flow. The registers in the most distant rooms from your air ducts may have little or no airflow. This produces an unstable air situation.

Depending on how your property was constructed, certain rooms may have more than one exterior wall enclosing them. For instance, a corner room with two exterior walls could be located on the second story, above the garage. If this space is not properly insulated to compensate for all exterior walls and the floor, your system will never be able to accurately balance the airflow. This area will also need particular requirements per air ducts to provide adequate airflow at the register. If any or all of these factors are not handled, the air in your home will be imbalanced.

How To Increase Airflow To One Room?

Below are five ways to increase airflow in your home:

1. Check the vents and registers.
2. Turn on ceiling fans.
3. Schedule HVAC maintenance.
4. Consider air conditioning duct cleaning.
5. Invest in a ventilator.

How To Know If You Have Any Air Issues?

If anything you’ve read thus far in this article sounds like what’s happening with your air ducts, you should have a professional HVAC company do air balance testing in your house.

During this test, the professional will obtain precise airflow measurements at all registers, return vents, and any other detectable locations. Then, based on the results, the expert will describe the steps necessary to get a completely balanced air system in your home. The registers, exhaust fans, grill, and fresh air must all be in harmony for your system to perform at its most efficient level. Even a single ‘out-of-balance’ factor can result in high energy costs and a malfunctioning HVAC system.

Importance Of Air Balancing

You are likely aware that balancing air is an essential component of your house’s HVAC and that a properly balanced home will be more comfortable and less expensive to operate than one with an imbalanced system that runs 50% of the time.

Your HVAC team should be able to implement the suggested solutions for your air ducts, and that is what we will explore next.

Improve Home’s Air Balance Issues With Professional Help

Occasionally, uneven air flow can be fixed by adding more vents to the affected room. This may solve the air balance problem in the room, but it does not address the problem within the system. For instance, if you have air difficulties in one of three rooms and you address them by introducing additional air to the room, the HVAC will have to work overtime to meet the home’s temperature requirements.

There are a number of factors that might affect your airflow, so there are also a number of solutions that must be implemented in unison to obtain an air-balanced home. Things like:

1. Address the insulation package for each out-of-balance room and make adjustments as necessary. To achieve the ideal air in rooms with numerous exterior walls and floors, it may be necessary to add substantial insulation.
2. Examine the windows in the rooms that lack air. You may need to replace the windows in the rooms with the biggest problems. The original builder of your home should have addressed the insulating quality of your windows, and better windows should have been added where necessary to meet the room’s CFM needs.
3. Instead of just installing vents to boost airflow in a room, consider the size of the ducts and the location of the room with respect to the HVAC unit. Occasionally, reducing the size of air ducts is sufficient to boost airflow to the affected room.

Hopefully, you now have a better understanding of air balance and its importance. If you feel your home is having difficulties, please contact the Duct Pros staff immediately. We are experienced with air-balancing solutions required to overcome it. When you are ready for a professional HVAC team, call or visit our website to learn how simple it is to balance the air in your home!

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What Would You Consider A High Use And A Low Use System

For example, in Florida, a lot of my industry experience has been in Florida. And over there, you have your AC running year-round, right? Maybe you can cut it off once or twice a day. Here, for example, I live maybe 1000ft higher than where we are right now, and so I rarely use my AC. I circulate my air, right? So if homeowners decide to have some upgraded filtration where they want to go ahead and circulate their air, whether they're using heat or cooling throughout the day, normally it's just the movement of air throughout your home and the condition of your ducts that will tell you how often you should get it cleaned. Having a yearly maintenance on your unit and having a professional be able to see what's going on inside your unit and also in areas of your duct system is important for you to know, hey, you're probably going to want to do it every two years. You have three dogs, you have four kids. You're probably going to want to do this a little more often, but three to five years is usually a good rule of thumb. https://bit.ly/3SHJPqc
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5 Benefits Of A Duct Seal For Your Residential Property

Believe it or not, most residential HVAC systems are incredibly inefficient. From unprotected duct connections to foil tape failure at the plenums, there are a variety of escape routes for your expensive, paid-for conditioned air.

Leaks in ducts are bad. You want to maximize the use of the air you’re paying to heat or cool, but leaks make it difficult, if not impossible, to do so. At Duct Pro Contractors, we always seal the deal and go the extra mile to rid your ducts out of any imperfections and flaws. Homeowners love the results, and we enjoy assisting in their fulfillment.

There are multiple advantages to a duct seal, but we have condensed them into five easy-to-remember benefits.

Benefits Of Air Duct Sealing

Below are the five benefits of the duct air sealing process:

Improved Airflow And Comfort

That may sound like two benefits, but there is only one. Leaky ductwork might prevent conditioned air from reaching the intended areas of your home. On a cold night, a leaking supply duct could result in too little warm air entering your bedroom. This air seeps out of the ducts instead of going where it is needed.

The outcome? It becomes too cold for you to sleep soundly. Even with a nice blanket or duvet, it would be chilly, to doze off comfortably.

With a duct seal, more conditioned and regulated air can reach its intended destinations. You have more airflow where it’s needed, and your system doesn’t have to work twice as hard.

Lower Electricity Bills

Well-sealed ducts keep more air inside the house where it belongs. The more conditioned air you retain within, the less your HVAC system will have to work to maintain your comfort. In the end, you’ll pay less for the same (or even better!) degree of comfort you enjoyed before the air duct sealing.

If you believe that placing less stress on your system will extend its lifespan, you are correct! By sealing air ducts, there is a significant chance you will extend the life of your heating or cooling system.

Fresher And Healthier Air

Ductwork leaks will draw contaminated air into your HVAC system and house. If your air handler or blower is located in the attic, a leaky return will spread attic air throughout your living space. If the unit is in your crawlspace, it is likely that you are breathing crawlspace air – dank, musky, and stuffy.

Similarly, leaky supply ducts have a detrimental effect on air quality. Since the leaky ducts reduce the airflow to specific rooms, the pressure in some rooms will be negative. This circumstance enhances outdoor air infiltration. Over time, you may end up breathing in higher concentrations of dust, dirt, pollen, and other air contaminants, all while experiencing discomfort from the lack of ventilation.

Sealing the ducts prevents both circumstances, allowing you to keep the air in your home healthy and clean.

Cleaner Evaporator Coil

So, we’ve established that leaky return ducts introduce air from the crawlspace or attic into the system. The dust, dirt, and other particles in the air might collect on the evaporator coil of your system.

Essentially, there is a possibility of microbial growth on the coil. It smells awful, and it is most likely unhealthy to breathe.

Although a good air filter can prevent many of these particles from reaching the coil, not all filters are sufficient for catching them. And if the filter is not correctly positioned within the return ductwork, a significant amount of air may bypass it and reach the coil. This is a prevalent issue caused by subpar HVAC design. This is why leaky ducts frequently result in filthy coils despite the use of an air filter.

Obviously, you will need to have the evaporator coil cleaned by a professional HVAC technician. However, the duct seal prevents dirt from accumulating on the coil in the first place.

Fix Other Ductwork Problems

The trouble with ductwork issues is that it varies a lot from household to household, and most of them are hidden in plain sight. In addition to duct leaks, the following concerns may plague your HVAC system:

• Ducts that are sagging, bent, broken, or disconnected
• Poorly built ducts that move insufficient air
• Return or supply plenums that are too small
• Poorly insulated or non-insulated ducts that absorb excessive heat in the summer and lose excessive heat in the winter

When you engage a professional to inspect your ducts, they should discover areas of air leakage and alert you to additional issues that affect your comfort and energy usage. A poorly constructed, inadequate, and uninsulated duct system, for instance, can cause a multitude of HVAC and comfort-related issues! Depending on the severity of the damage, the system may not even be worth sealing.

It would be equivalent to adding memory to a computer purchased in 1995 that can only operate on… Windows 95. It is plain absurd.

Ultimately, you should pursue ductwork enhancements that effectively resolve your issues. Typically, existing ducts are sealed to accomplish this. However, there may be further issues to address first.

H2 – Sealing Air Ducts? Let The Pros Handle It

At Duct Pros, we strive to reduce duct leakage to an absolute minimum with high-quality duct seal solutions.

Call us if you want to improve your home’s comfort, air quality, and energy efficiency. We will listen to your issues and evaluate your duct system in order to decide the optimal course of action. Schedule an appointment today!

 

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How Often Should Homeowners Get An Air Duct Cleaning

Three to five years is a good rule of thumb in the industry. Obviously, that depends on the use of your home and the use of your HVAC or air conditioning system. Sometimes in different regions, people use both systems way less than in other regions, and obviously that changes the lifespan and in between how often you should get that air system cleaned and sanitized. https://bit.ly/3V3wYQV
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Tips On Balancing The Air Flow In Your Home

This is the time of year when you begin to notice some issues with your home comfort system.

You’ve activated the heating system, and certain areas of the house are noticeably cooler than others, meaning you need to balance the air flow in your home. You anticipate that your entire home will be pleasant. However, with time, the HVAC system is influenced by:

• Aging
• Air filters
• Dirty ducts

5 Tips For Air Balance

You are not required to upgrade your furnace immediately. There are a few things you can do when you come home tonight to improve the temperature throughout your home.

Adjust The Air Vents

Look for all of your air vents throughout your home, high and low. Most homeowners have a habit of placing furniture wherever they want in a room, even if it means obstructing a vent. This could be due to carelessness or a lack of awareness.

However, blocking the vent can alter how air circulates over a huge room. Even a buildup of cat hair and dust can substantially alter your vent’s air flow. Therefore, reposition your furniture and remove any debris from the registers.

Additionally, you can channel air to specific locations by partially sealing vents. Partially closed vents allow less air to escape, and the air will reroute itself along the path of least resistance — to whatever place you leave the vents fully open.

Always Keep The Fan On

You can set the fan on your HVAC system’s thermostat to auto or on. In automatic mode, the fan will turn off after the required temperature has been reached. When the fan is set to “on,” it will run constantly regardless of the temperature in the room.

The benefit of the latter method is that air is constantly circulating throughout your home, reducing the likelihood of experiencing hot or cold air flow.

Have Your Air Ducts Checked And Cleaned

Leaks and holes in your ductwork impede the distribution of air throughout your home. The most straightforward solution is to check, clean, and insulate your ductwork. First, using a paintbrush, apply duct sealant to the holes and gaps. Then, once everything’s ready, wrap the ducts with fiberglass insulation. Finally, be ready to seal them with foil tape.

Maintain Air Filters

Air filters remove dust and pollutants from the air, distributing clean air throughout the home. However, they require routine maintenance; otherwise, they may become clogged. A home with dirty filters will have poor airflow and hot and cold regions.

For improved air purification, clean your filters every two weeks and replace them every three to four months.

Constantly inspecting AC filters might be a pain. Utilize a smart thermostat or smart AC controller that provides alerts to monitor the cleanliness of a space.

Install Window Covering

In the summer, direct sunlight entering a room through a window can drastically affect its temperature. Additionally, 30% of heat energy is lost through windows throughout the winter. This strains your HVAC system, which therefore alters the air balance in your home.

Utilize drapes, blinds, or curtains to reduce heat loss and gain. Additionally, you can put window film insulation for glare and ultraviolet protection.

Consult The Professionals For An Accurate Air Balancing Report

Ultimately, contacting a professional will always be the more comprehensive approach. An HVAC expert will take numerous measures and run tests to establish what’s causing the air imbalance in your home. The results of these tests will be used to compile an air balancing report detailing the performance of your system.

Manometers are used by professionals to measure air pressure and locate obstructions. Hygrometers are used to measure humidity levels and determine whether a location feels suffocatingly humid.

After obtaining all of the results, HVAC professionals may change the dampers and fan speed, as well as replace the supply lines with larger or smaller ductwork. They may even install dampers if you haven’t already had them installed, so you can have just the perfect amount of air flow in your home.

Contact Duct Pros today to inquire about their duct services or schedule an appointment with them so they can check your residential property immediately.

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Have you ever had to rework problems from homeowner’s kind of taking this on themselves?

Even inadequately trained technicians -- we see it all the time when homeowners unfortunately get the wrong company out and they can end up doing some damage to their duct system by utilizing the wrong tools, and are not utilizing them correctly. This can really come down to detached vents, which at the end of the day will cost a lot of efficiency for your unit when you're leaking some air from a disconnected duct from inadequately trained technicians. But in turn, when homeowners try to get it done themselves, it's usually over at the direct entry way from the output of your vents on your registers. So, we don't come across it that much when it's a homeowner trying to do it, but definitely when we have inadequately trained technicians out there. https://bit.ly/3SKVLaC
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