Paul F.P. Pogue, associate editor
Interview with Buck Sheppard, president of National Air Duct Cleaners Association (NADCA) and John Schulte, executive director of NADCA
March 19, 2009
What are some misconceptions people have of your business?
Sheppard: For years and years, when duct cleaning first got started, there were a lot of people not going about it the correct way. There weren’t people taking things out of ducts, they were trying to put some things in the duct systems. When a very forward-looking group of men got together in the 1980s and decided to focus on NADCA and start the organization. We came to the realization that the only proper way to clean ducts was to remove the debris and dirt from a system that carries all the air in your house.
For a long time, duct cleaners had less than stellar reputations. But I think we’ve gone a long way towards changing that.
Schulte: I think the biggest misconception in our business is that it’s referred to as the air duct cleaning industry, but we’re actually talking about cleaning the entire HVAC system. Just the name of our industry in general is misleading.
What goes into cleaning the HVAC system?
Sheppard: We clean everything that air passes over from the point where return air goes into the return air ducting, through the furnace, over the heat exchanger, blower motors, air conditioning coils if they are in the system all the way out through all the supply ductwork – through the registers and grills and any outside air that might be introduced. Anything that touches the air, or any component that air passes over is cleaned. That’s what a cleaning is. You’re not just cleaning the ductwork. There’s so much more involved.
With the high-efficiency furnaces you have not just one heat exchanger, but an ancillary heat exchanger. And that’s just residentially.
How has air duct cleaning changed since NADCA started?
Sheppard: Things are very, very different. The equipment is much more high tech. Back when duct cleaning first started, the only way to clean it was contact vacuuming and that didn’t do as complete of a job as it should have because in a lot of places you couldn’t access the ductwork.
But with the advent of modern technology and the advent of our portable gas fired or electric fired collection devices and negative pressure machines and air compressors where you can drive 150-200 psi of air through a system, or use that same air to drive different tools – brushes that rotate, robots, or what we in the industry call “whips,” which are special heads with tentacles that agitate the inside of the duct work – all the way up to our large trucks. A truck can create a lot of high negative pressure. When you’re creating that system, there’s only one path for anything broken loose – and that’s out of the duct system and back to the truck. It used to be a science, but now it’s more of an art.
Schulte: We get a lot of calls from residential consumers who are trying to get their minds around cleaning the system, and what happens is that call different people in the industry and they get different stories about it.
A lot of guys sell the cleaning based on their equipment. And your average consumer is going to have a hard time making a determination as to which equipment is better than the other. So what I do is explain our process of cleaning HVAC systems.
If you step back from duct cleaning for a minute, it’s a similar process to what you see with a vacuum cleaner in your house. Let’s say you’ve got some carpet in your house. You turn on your vacuum cleaner, and you hear that noise that it makes. It’s sucking up the dust and dirt. That’s one part of the process – sucking up and removing the dust and dirt. But beyond that, in most vacuum cleaners there’s some kind of a little wheel or brush under there, designed to loosen up the dirt. Think of that in terms of air duct cleaning.
Obviously, that vacuum cleaner is cleaning a space of maybe 12 inches at a time. But when you’re cleaning a HVAC system, you’re cleaning the ductwork all throughout your house. You’re talking 20 to 30 feet, maybe hundreds of feet of ductwork and HVAC system [at a time]. In order for that to work, our guys use some pretty heavy-duty equipment, either portable or truck mounted.
But they put [the HVAC system] under a vacuum to get everything sucked out. As Buck said, that’s one of the main principles of what we do. We call it source removal – removing the source of contamination.
You put the system under a vacuum, and then the next part of the process is they use some kind of agitation tool, like a brush or whips or compressed air, to make sure the dust and dirt within the system gets loosened up so it can get sucked out.
One of the other main components is to make sure that during the cleaning the dust and dirt doesn’t migrate into the occupied space.
What are questions you commonly get from homeowners?
Sheppard: I get two prevalent questions. Why and how often? Why should you clean it? We can approach that from several different levels.
We clean HVAC systems for three reasons: to increase comfort, to increase energy efficiency, and it’s also an emotional issue for a lot of people.
They say, spring cleaning’s here, we just turned on our AC for the first time, my allergies are acting up. I shy away from health claims about duct cleaning. Duct cleaning will do a lot of things for you. It will clean your duct system. It will help increase your efficiency and make your system last longer. It’ll help it provide the comfort it was designed to provide. But, I don’t make any health claims because none of those have ever been quantified or verified in any medical or scientific study.
Duct cleaning for most people is an emotional issue up until the last couple of years when energy efficiency became top of mind for everybody.
We wash our cars, we wash our clothes, we wash the plates we eat off of, but because it’s out of sight, people don’t think about cleaning the air conveyance system for what they’re breathing.
Every bit of air we breath in our homes … is passing through a duct system.
Duct systems are just like anything else. Over time, they collect dust, hair, dander. It makes good emotional sense to some people … to be on a schedule of some sort, have that stuff cleaned out, have it removed so that it is not being imparted into the air stream that you’re breathing.
Cleaning the HVAC system – the furnaces, the coils really drive the energy efficiency. These coils are designed to deliver a certain efficiency out of the factory. When you install them in a house and start running them, all that dirt and dust that gets by filters – and it will, mainly because people don’t maintain their filters – that accumulates.
As these things get plugged, you’re not getting the heat transfer as efficiently as you used to. So keeping those things clean keeps your energy costs down. And you’re working those things less hard. The harder it has to work, everything starts to wear faster.
How does it affect comfort specifically?
Sheppard: An AC coil is designed to take heat off air, transfer it to Freon, then pump it outside. A typical direct expansion AC coil looks like a radiator in a car. As [the parts of the AC coil] plug with microbial growth or dirt, dust and pet dander, you don’t blow as much air through that coil, therefore you’re not transferring as much heat. You start plugging coils up and drop the delta-t transfer, it goes from 15-18 to 9-12. You’ve just dropped your comfort level by a third and increased your energy cost by a third. Is duct cleaning a panacea? No, but along with a good routine maintenance program, you can drive down those costs.
The EPA says they’ve done studies that don’t conclusively demonstrate whether dirty air ducts contribute to dust levels in homes, and don’t take a stance on whether air ducts should be cleaned.
Have you been in talks with the EPA about this? What’s the current status of things?
Sheppard: That’s their latest publication on air duct cleaning. NADCA helped them with it. I’ve read the study over and over again. The EPA says, and we stand behind this, there’s been no definitive studies as to whether there are health issues. But JADCA, Japanese, have done some studies counting particles before and after a duct cleaning, and they find a significant reduction of particles in the air. Mostly, when I have to deal with the people and this EPA document, it’s on the emotional level. If they read the entire study, they’ll see that the EPA does say that duct cleaning does have some benefits. Where they differ is how often it should be. For some people, it might have to be part of a yearly maintenance program. For others, maybe not.
Part of any good duct cleaner, and especially the NADCA members, is what we do before we ever start cleaning and that’s inspect it. A lot of times I’ll send guys out to inspect systems and they don’t need to be cleaned. I have no problem telling them that they’re not in a position to be cleaned. There’s no need for it.
The EPA document isn’t the best I’ve ever seen, but it’s what we’ve got. We’re not high on their priority list right now. We stay in constant contact with them and we’re trying to help them along to see the wisdom of – I have to use the word routine because that implies almost yearly — but a routine cleaning regiment. That could be every three years, that could be every five years. I have customers in Portland, Ore. with pulmonary disease and oxygen in their house. They’re more than willing to have it done every year because they feel like it helps them.
The EPA never says duct cleaning is bad. They do recommend against applying certain biocides. We agree with that. We feel that until EPA publishes a definitive paper on what you can apply in terms of a biocide or fungicide inside duct work, we recommend our members don’t use them. We go back to source removal – if you take all the source out of contamination, I really don’t see why you would have to put something back into that duct system in order to sterilize it.
Schulte: A lot of our members think of the duct system as another surface in the house. You get people who are emotional about it – “Why should I have to clean my duct work? Why do I care? I don’t have to look at it.”
My response is, do you vacuum your house, do you sweep your floors? Of course, people get indignant at the insinuation that they might not have a clean house and they say, “Of course I do.” So my next question is, “When you do that, do you clean half the living room? Would you vacuum half the floor? When you’re sweeping, do you sweep a lot of dust and dirt under the carpet?” Well, of course not. Nobody would do that. Well, if you want a clean house, duct work is another surface in your house. Except with this surface, you’ve got a fan blowing through there every time the system cycles on.
Is there any research like the one JADCA did going on in the United States right now?
Schulte: We’re not doing any research like JADCA. That study, they presented it last year, they gave us a translated copy. What they showed is, they put up a particle counter in a commercial building, but the same concept applies to residential home. They’d attach this equipment to a vent outside the duct work. Every time the system cycled on, they saw a big spike in the number of particles airborne blown out of the HVAC system. Then they cleaned the HVAC system and measured it again. And once the system was clean, there wasn’t that big spike.
It doesn’t prove a health claim, but within a dirty system, there’s going to be a big spike in particles coming out. Now, what’s the impact of these airborne particles on human health? There’s no studies on that. In my mind, the reason for that is, it’s hard to get someone to sign up to be a guinea pig to be bombarded with bad air quality until I feel a physical effect. It’s also human health, and what’s perfectly acceptable for one person could be problematic for another. People with allergies or asthma are more sensitive to these particles in the environment.
My wife has allergies. Once we got our ducts cleaned, she said, “My allergies aren’t bothering me as much.” Can that be quantified? No, it’s different from person to person. It’s hard to prove a conclusive link between bad indoor air quality and impact on health.
Did you bring JADCA’s research to the EPA’s attention?
Schulte: NADCA has approached the EPA at least twice since that document came out. My predecessor in 2003 or 2004 sent EPA a letter asking them to re-evaluate their article. Bottom line is, it wasn’t changed. I wrote the EPA myself in 2005, 2006 and didn’t get any response. I heard that their IAQ division had been scaled back a bit.
I did hear secondhand, and I don’t know if this is accurate, but what I heard was until NADCA can demonstrate that cleaning your air ducts improves health, they’re not going to change their document.
But if you really look at what the document says, they wrote it to address companies that don’t do a good job. It says, don’t clean your air ducts unless they’re really dirty, have mold or infestation from vermin. Which is consistent with our stance.
Beyond that, the rest of the paper gets into potential problems if you don’t do it correctly and claims that are made by unscrupulous companies. And then it says, if you are going to get your system cleaned, make sure you use someone who has the NADCA standards. Guys in our industry don’t like the tone of the document, but the EPA feels the need to warn the public about unscrupulous companies in the industry.
What are some signs of a bad or crooked duct cleaner?
Sheppard: We make that pretty easy for consumers on our website. We give them a checklist of things to ask your air duct cleaner and things to look at when they’re finished. It follows sort of closely to the checklist in the EPA article.
Watch your duct cleaners and once they’re through, inspect it. Look inside your furnace. Look at the blower section. Look at the fan motor.
One of the big telling signs that I find with most duct cleaners is are they willing to stand there and show you what they did? Let’s face it, when you put one of these systems under that high vacuum and you start agitating dust, there’s really no way to tell exactly what came out.
Is the duct cleaner doing exactly what he told you he’d do? Will he lay out for you a checklist of everything he’s going to do, and when he’s through, will he help you verify it? He needs to explain the different methods and systems he’s using. Sometimes the direct expansion coils require a wet cleaning. You need to know exactly what they’re doing and the methods that they use. The EPA has a checklist and so do we.
Schulte: One thing I do to make it as easy as possible for consumers, there’s a limit to how much your average consumer is willing to learn. You know that when you buy a house you’ve taken on a huge maintenance issue. You’ve got roof issues, a host of things you have to learn about. What I find is that most people, the customers we appreciate, are the ones who are willing to take a little bit of time to get the basics of what they need to do. I ask them how much time they have. Some say, just give me the main points, other say, give me what I need. It’s usually a 15-30 minute phone call. I encourage them, to write on the bill of sale, and while they’re getting proposals and bids, I tell them to make sure they want them to clean the system in accordance with NADCA standards. We have an industry standard. It’s available for free download off of our website. The title is ACR-2006. We’ve been publishing standards since 1992, and we’ve changed them quite a bit, including when we did that research project with EPA.
We tell consumers to write that on their bill of sale, because that’s their contract. From a consumer standpoint, it covers the three main things: do the whole system, use continuous negative pressure, and use some type of agitation tool. For your average residential HVAC cleaning, those are the main things that differentiate a company that’s going to do a good job from one that’s out to make a quick buck. And if that’s on their bill of sale, they have some legal recourse to go back and be protected. They have some basis for expecting something else.
What are some common signs that you might need to get your ducts cleaned?
Sheppard: There’s a lot of things you might notice. Just because a grill’s dirty doesn’t mean your air duct system is dirty. Air blowing over a metal creates a static charge and it attracts dust that’s in the air. If it’s really bad, you might want to have someone come out and take a look at it for you.
We have, the HVAC professionals, in our organization, that go out and service – do actual maintenance on HVAC systems every year. We’ve trained all of our guys to look in the duct system. The easiest way to know if your duct system should be cleaned is to look inside the return. Where I’m at here in Portland, Ore., most of our returns are in the floor, you lift the grill up and stick your head in and look.
If it’s accumulated a half an inch three-quarters of an inch or more, that’s one of the best ways I know how to tell. If it’s summer and your air conditioner is running and your coils freeze or your system is acting up, check the filter. See what it looks like. Is the filter in good shape? Is it caved in? Does it fit properly? If it doesn’t fit properly or it’s plugged, you’ll want to look a little farther. Look inside the furnace. There’s a lot of things you can see visually as John and Jane homeowner that can tell you whether you need to ask a professional if it needs cleaned.
Schulte: Another thing consumers can do, sometimes these ducts, sticking your head in might be difficult, usually there’s some area, maybe near the return, you can take the grill off and stick a small digital camera, shine it in and take a picture. Even if they can’t reach too far in there, I think it’s usually pretty obvious. A light amount of dust is normal, but when you get a thick layer of dust, that’s a pretty big indication it needs to be cleaned.
A lot of people have their AC units serviced once or twice a year. When your contract is looking at the system, it’s a good idea for you to look at it yourself, but you can ask that technician, hey, how’s it look, does it look like something I need to get cleaned. They may not be experts on it, but it’s worth a shot.
You can always call [a NADCA member] and ask them to come out and do an inspection. Some do, some don’t. It’s hard for some of these companies to justify sending out a technician, at least at no charge, to do an inspection. They have to pay for the guy to get over there, he’s got to do the inspection, then he’s got to drive wherever he’s going and that adds up quite a bit. Some may charge for it, some may do it for free. It varies from one company to the next.
Sheppard: The EPA document, if you really read the entire document, speaks pretty highly of NADCA, duct cleaning as a whole, emotional [concerns], energy usage and comfort. And more and more, it’s moving into the energy efficiency and comfort realm. There are some studies going on to prove the energy savings from a clean HVAC system and those should be published within the next year, 18 months.
The important thing to remember about duct cleaning is, if your consumer thinks he needs it done, have the inspection done and then if it needs to be cleaned, clean it. Guys who tell you they need it every year – I do very few [of the same] residential homes every year. I do have a couple, but they have some real health issues in the house that have nothing to do with their duct work. They’re trying to maintain as pristine an environment as they can. Always go to the professionals. To be quite honest with you, there’s no better professionals in the United States than a NADCA professional. They’ll tell you the truth, good bad or indifferent. The emotional deal changes from person to person. But when you look at comfort and energy efficiency, you’ll see that duct cleaning and HVAC system cleaning, and maintenance restoration are where this entire HVAC industry is going and your NADCA guys are the guys leading the charge.
What’s the average cost of a duct cleaning?
Schulte: It does vary quite a bit, especially with the economy. It’s a seasonal business as well.
We have a brochure on our website geared toward residential consumers. What we tell them is that for an average sized house, 2,000 square foot, you’ll spend anywhere around 1,000 to have your system cleaned. That’s for one HVAC. And believe it or not, some people have more than one system in their house, in a larger house they may have many systems.
Some of the key factors in terms of figuring out the price depends on where you live. High cost of living means you’ll be closer to that $1,000. If you’re in the Midwest, you might expect to pay somewhere closer to $500. I’ve heard of guys discounting below that, but usually not much below that and on a short-term basis.
Some companies will clean the whole system, some companies will clean half the system. It’s not just price, it’s for that price what is they’re going to do?
A lot of companies will clean the whole system, some of them will clean just the ductwork. We recommend cleaning the whole system. If you’re going to get the energy savings benefit, you need to get the coils cleaned, the blower and the actual unit. That’s a big differentiation between one company and the next.
You can see advertisements out there that claim that the contractor will clean your whole HVAC system for $49.95.
If you do nothing else but to warn people about that, I feel confident in saying that there’s no way a customer is going to get their system clean for that kind of money. If you want to pay a guy that much money, you’re going to get that much worth of work. And quite frankly, the work that they are going to do, that’s exactly the kind of work the EPA article was focusing on.
After they’re finished, they’re probably going to have made the problem worse than if you hadn’t done anything at all.
Guys will go in there, they don’t want to use agitation or they don’t have good equipment so they’ll bang around in your system for 60-90 minutes and they’ll be doing some cleaning work, but when they’re finished, that system is not going to be clean.
While they’re in there banging around loosening up a lot of fine particles — you’re talking about very, very fine dust particles. When you bang on sheet metal, you can imagine that these dust particles are going to become airborne. Well, they’re so fine that they’re going to stay airborne for a long time. As soon as you turn on your system, those particles will get blown right into your house.
When we say worse than if you hadn’t done anything, that’s what we’re talking about.
Usually what happens is if a guy says he’s going to charge you $49.95, when he gets there, he’s going to find some reason why it’s more expensive. “Oh, you’ve got mold. You need to do this, this and this and it’s going to cost you a couple thousand dollars.”
And if you balk at that, he’ll say “Well, you seem like a nice person. I’ll give you my military discount or my senior citizen discount.”
These guys use some scare tactics, “Hey, it’s your family’s health, if you don’t mind your kids being exposed to this toxic mold, you go right on ahead.”
But again, we recommend cleaning the whole system, following the NADCA standard and pay a fair price. Or don’t do it. If you can’t afford to do it right, don’t do it at all.
What are the primary causes of dirty air ducts?
Schulte: Dust mites. Basically anything that gets past the filter. You’ll be at the hardware store and you’ll see some $20 filters and another filter for 69 cents. And usually the 69-cent filters are made of blue stringy material, and you can pretty much look through it.
And those filters … our guys call them bowling-ball catchers. It catches big balls of fuzz the size of a bowling ball, but when it comes to smaller particles, they’re just going to blow right through the filter and they’re going to go right into the air conditioning system. But so much dust gets through your system you can’t even imagine.
So it’s dust, dust mites, insect parts. You get insects that die within your duct work, cockroaches for example. They start to decompose within your HVAC system, and apparently those cell fragments are a big source of allergens, a lot of people are allergic to those types of things.
At some point, we all have limits. Some people have higher limits than other. Mold spores are very, very fine particles, a lot of that will get through a filter. Usually it’s not a problem. Mold spores are everywhere. They’re in your HVAC system. When it becomes a problem is when they settle over time, get trapped in dust and just sit there. But, if the moisture content within the air, or there’s high humidity or the system malfunctions and you get water in your system … mold will start to grow. That’s all it takes. And what does the mold eat? Mold eats dust. It eats almost anything. Over time, until you become aware of it, this mold in there, low levels aren’t a problem, but intense amounts of mold, active colonies in your system, then even for people who aren’t ordinarily susceptible to mold problems will see an effect.
Is this a seasonal job?
Schulte: People have them cleaned primarily in the spring and fall as they transition from heating to cooling and then from cooling to heating.
What are some ways to determine how often you should have your air ducts cleaned?
Schulte: In terms of how to tell, have it inspected. Consumers who just want to look at it themselves, it is pretty easy to do. You get a screwdriver, you open up your return vent and look in there.
Most homeowners can make up their own mind at that point. Yeah, it’s going to be dirty, but the best answer I heard from one of our members, he did a focus group and asked, why did you hire us? This is somebody’s who’s paying close to $1,000. The No. 1 answer he got back was with an indignant look from a housewife – “Because it’s dirty!”
Our guys do this every day and they talk to people who haven’t had their systems cleaned in 30 years. Usually, when you get a house like that, it’s pretty nasty. You could easily have an inch or 2 inches of dust built up and the system is basically getting clogged at that point. Sometime guys come across systems that are totally clogged.
When we talk about dust and dirt, we’re talking about something similar to what you would find in a lint filter. If you [neglect it] over time, you could literally get enough dust and dirt in there to totally seal off the duct work. Sometimes these big chunks of that stuff will break off and just clog.
Where can we get some good information on energy efficiency?
Schulte: The best document I’ve found comes from the US DOE [Department of Energy], it dates back quite a few years. The best study, and we’re doing our own $250,000 study right now to quantify the energy savings. There’s nothing right now out there on cleaning the whole system. The best information we have is a study by Pacific Gas and Electric – a public utility out in California. They did a study just to look at the coils, and this document from DOE based on that PGE study, basically said, look, here’s your best opportunities for energy savings, and the third opportunity they list is coil cleaning.
You can reduce the energy consumption for just the compressor by up to 30 percent from cleaning the coils. One of the things I like about this document is a picture of a dirty coil. When you see that picture, you’re going to see what looks like a lint filter that hasn’t been cleaned for a while. The coil is so heavily contaminated with dust and whatever that it’s pretty easy to see the air can’t blow across that coil anymore.
Paul F.P. Pogue, Angie’s List associate editor
Interview with Glenn Fellman, executive director, Indoor Air Quality Association (formerly the executive director of National Air Duct Cleaners Association)
March 23, 2009
What kind of research is there about duct cleaning and indoor air quality?
When it comes to indoor air quality and duct cleaning, there isn’t any definitive study that says, if you have your air duct cleaned, the amount of fine dust in your home will be reduced by “x” percentage. There is no scientific data along those lines. There is, however, tons and tons of anecdotal evidence and common sense evidence that this is a smart thing to do.
I tell people this is the heart and circulatory system of your house. The heat pump is your heart, the ducts are your veins. If your HVAC or duct is gunked up with dust or mold, the core mechanical system of your house that delivers the air you breathe, isn’t going to be functioning effectively.
There’s a lot of misconceptions about duct cleaning. The first point is the name. If people say, I’m just having my ducts cleaned, I tell them to save the money. It’s the mechanical equipment, all the stuff in the big metal box, that’s the thing that really needs to be cleaned. That’s where you’re going to see the biggest energy savings, that’s where you’re going to be seeing lots of mold, and that should be cleaned once a year. That can be cleaned by your heating and cooling contractor.
Your duct work could go a good five years between cleanings, assuming you’re using a good filter. If you’re using cheap throwaway filters form the supermarket, you’ll probably be needing to clean them more often.
What are your thoughts on the EPA’s brochure about duct cleaning?
There’s text in that brochure that came right out of NADCA. It’s out of date, it needs to be updated, consumers need to keep that in mind. That document reflects the state of the industry at the time, and it’s still true today. There’s no scientifically based conclusion you can draw that says, if you have your ducts cleaned, it’s a positive thing because it’ll improve your health. Now you will find studies that say, if you have your coils cleaned you’ll be more energy-efficient, and that’s true. I think the EPA document is a little more conservative than I would be, but overall, it’s not a bad document.
The most notable studies have come out of American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), and they did work with some labs where they tested the efficiency of dirty coils and compared it to the efficiency of cleaner coils. They learned it takes a lot less energy to run a system and keep a dwelling at a certain temperature when a system was clean rather than when it was dirty. That’s been well documented.
If your system is dirty, especially the coils, if you clean them it will run more efficiently, and more importantly, it will last longer. It’s like keeping a car well-oiled and well maintained. You could extend the life of your unit considerably by having it serviced once a year. If you can get an extra three or four life years out of your system, you should do it. That’s a $15,000 replacement right there.
Part of the new stimulus package gives homeowners a $1,500 rebate if they install high-efficiency furnaces and heating/cooling systems in their home. I know there’s a lot of contractors telling people with older systems, instead of having a repair, why not get a new high efficiency unit, you’ll save energy and get a rebate.
You can only deduct $1,500 for any home improvement that includes energy-efficiency,
What are some things people should look out for when hiring a duct cleaner?
A very common one is that they should shop it based on price. I get these things in the mail all the time – everyone does – that advertise $195 whole-house duct cleaning. It’s not going to happen. You’re not going to get a good duct cleaning for $200. Never.
The average system is going to require two workers, maybe three, a lot of expensive equipment and it going to take them at least five or six hours. If you’re paying your workers a reasonable wage and you’ve got this big expensive piece of equipment on the ground and a truck and everything that goes behind it, you can’t run a business and provide that kind of service for $200 and make any money.
When people sign up for these $200 whole-house duct cleaning things, one of two things happens: Either they get a really, really, terrible cleaning job – they come in there and they’re out. They brush the ducts down, they leave a bunch of junk behind and they call it a day. Or, more likely, the crew arrives in the house and they start jacking up the price.
They say, well, the $200 was for 15 vents. Now we have 30 vents in your house and each additional vent is $10. That’s 15 more vents, now we’re up $150. And that didn’t include cleaning the coils and if we clean the coils, that’s an extra $75. And that didn’t include any sanitizing and you’ve got mold. So if we sanitize now we’re up to – and they just do that. They jack it up. It is bait and switch. I tell consumers, if you’ve got a modestly sized house, 2,500 square feet or larger, don’t expect to pay less than $500. You’re probably going to pay between $500 and $1,000. If you’ve got a dual-zone system, you’re going to pay more, maybe twice as much because it’s two jobs. It’s not an inexpensive proposition.
What kind of anecdotal evidence have you heard about duct cleaning and air quality?
When I was with the NADCA, I talked to consumers every single day about duct cleaning, and I kept hearing, “I had my ducts cleaned and I feel better. Or, my daughter is asthmatic, and since we had the ducts cleaned, she has fewer asthma attacks.”
It just makes sense. Look under your refrigerator – what’ sunder there? A bunch of dust. You haven’t cleaned it in a year or two. Your duct work is the same way. All the air you breath in your house flows through the duct work.
Dust is going to deposit when the system is off, when you turn it on, the bolt of air will pick up the loose dust and carry it out into the air stream. It’s anecdotal, but it’s also common sense. If you’ve got a tube filled with dust, and you blow air through it, dusty air is going to come through the other end. I tell people that duct cleaning is just part of the solution to improving your air quality.
Assuming you have good filters, how is dust getting into the ducts in the first place?
There’s two places you find filters: Most is at the furnace. The reason to put the filter there was to prevent dust from gunking up the mechanical components of the unit. It’s not there to keep your air clean. It’s there to keep the system running well. Those systems are there to remove the rocks and marbles out of the air, but not the fine particulate.
If you’ve got a filter with 80 percent efficiency, which is very small, what about the last 20 percent? There are very few filters that are going to be of such significant filtration efficiency that they can catch it all.
In others, there’s a filter just before it blows in the room. And in those systems, it catches the dirt just before it gets into the room. But you don’t see that air filtered on the supply side. The side that brings the air into the room.
How big a difference does duct cleaning make to the actual duct cleanliness?
It can be quite sizeable. I get to see lots of pictures of before-and after duct cleaning. Look at your filter. One side is white, the other side is gray with dirt and dust that it’s caught. It’s the same way in the duct work. From that perspective, it’s like anything else, if you knew you had a big accumulation of dust somewhere in your house, you’d say, ew, gross, I want to clean it. But it’s out of sight and out of mind, and people don’t realize it’s there until they see it blowing out of the system. Or if they look down in the register and say, ooh, look at all that stuff down there.
If you’re not sure, it’s not real complicated, if you have floor registers just take a flashlight and a mirror on a stick and you can look and see for yourself how dusty the ducts are.
The only way you’re going to know is by having it inspected. At the same time you’re having your annual inspection on your equipment, have the tech do a cleanliness inspection. In a home with allergies or several animals, I’d say, have that done every other year. If there’s no pets, no allergies, no smokers, they may be on the five to 10 year plan.
It’s about cleanliness in the home. If you don’t vacuum your carpet except for once or twice a month, you’re going to have dirtier ducts. People who are good housekeepers and keep a clean house are going to need to have their ducts cleaned less often than people who don’t.
Another common problem that comes up is, how do I find out who’s a good duct cleaner? I might get lucky and find some recommendation on Angie’s List. I should look for their license. Wrong. There’s no state licensing for duct cleaning. What there is, is about half the states in the country, a little more, have AC contractor’s licenses, so I tell people to first seek a duct cleaner who’s also a licensed AC contractor. They know best how to open up a system and monkey around with it. Most AC techs have gone through an associate’s degree program and learn the mechanics of AC. In the states that do require a license to do mechanical contracting or AC contracting work, the laws say to cut a hole in the ductwork, you have to have that license. You can’t clean an air duct without cutting holes. They’re going to cut them open and patch them up.
Air leakage is a big problem in homes. If you’re going to have someone cutting big holes in your ductwork, you want that person to be licensed and knowledgeable. If Angie’s List or the BBB can’t help, look for that licensing. Also look for voluntary certification like the NADCA. NADCA only certifies people, not companies. If you’re using someone, you’ll want to say, hey, I want a certified NADCA worker at my house. If you’re sending out a crew of two guys and neither are certified, it doesn’t do me much good.
NADCA’s position is a lot more proactive than EPA. Their position is that duct work needs to be cleaned more often. They’ve recently been pushing the service from the energy efficiency point of view.
Call ACCA, acca.org, who set the American national standard for duct cleaning, they’re an ANSI member, they set an ANSI-approved standard. NADCA also has a standard. It’s not ANSI, but it’s been around longer. If you know much about the ANSI process, you have to invite all the stakeholders to the table, it takes a longer time, you end up with a standard that’s got everybody’s input.
When people say, which standard should I have my contractor follow, I say, have them follow both, but in my mind, ACCA trumps the NADCA standard because it’s the American national standard. In my opinion, if there’s two standards and one isn’t, I’m going with the ANSI standard every time.
Angie’s List is an awesome resource, and I talk to a lot of consumers about mold remediation, and they often tell me that they found someone good on Angie’s List.
Paul F.P. Pogue, Angie’s List associate editor
Interview with Tim Rogers, Dublin, Ohio (Angie’s List Columbus member)
April 3, 2009
Tell me about your experience with the duct cleaning company.
We bought a 10-year-old home and the people that lived here had three dogs. Just before we moved in, I had to replace the carpet. I went back and forth about having the ducts cleaned. This was before I was part of Angie’s List. I read an ad in the paper and decided to go ahead and do it because of the dogs.
They had this ad in the paper, an $85 special. So I had them come to the house. It was like waiting for Time Warner cable, you sit and wait for three hours. They got here and they started dragging in this big hose, it was like having your carpet cleaned. As they started to get ready, this guy pulls out some paperwork and says to me, “Well, $85 only covers three vents.” It also covered cleaning the furnace itself.
There were two guys and I felt, well if they’ve got their stuff in the door here, we’ve got a moving truck that’s arriving here in the next couple days and I want to get this done. We’re staying in a hotel and I just said, “Well, all right, let’s do it.”
They just literally ran from vent to vent. It was just amazing to me. These two guys were hustling to get the job done and get out.
At the time, we were new to the area, we didn’t know anybody so this was the first time I was hit with not getting any recommendations. Actually, this is what brought me to Angie’s List is this incident here.
The work they did was just, one guy’s unscrewing the air returns – very easy, the ones in the floor, of course, they just lift right up. They just ran a hose down there. One of the things they claim is they’re disinfecting it. When we got downstairs, they had this little old spray bottle and sprayed a little into the air vent, which of course will go through house and make it smell a little different. But, the house didn’t smell bad to begin with. I said to them, “If that’s what you’re going to do, just spray a little bit because I don’t want to be inhaling that for the next three months.”
Did they use any tools on the job besides the hose?
The tools that they used, they just put this long hose in and … it just kind of twirled. Supposedly it’s beating the dust around and they vacuum it out. But, when everything was said and done, especially when they got to the heater I was really disappointed because all this guy did was pull the front of the furnace off and just spayed a can of air, which I could have done. It’s kind of like the can of air you use to clean your computer out. When we got done, the bill was $480. I’m usually very tough and would get into an argument, but I was just like, “The heck with it, I’ve been taken here.” So I wrote them out a check for $480, and there was no difference. One of the air return vents, which was down low near the wall, and it must have been where one of the dogs had spent a lot of time there. I actually did see them pull a lot of hair out of there. But [that was about it.]
What did you know about duct cleaning before this experience?
I had a friend warn me about this. He remodels homes and he told me that he sees where that he sees where they come in and drill a hole down into the basement and stick some tube up there to vacuum it out. He’s usually pulling them down after this is done, because he has to redo all the work down there to put a drop ceiling in and he says it’s just full of dirt. He just laughs at what these guys get away with. I should have listened to him and I didn’t. I ended up paying for it — $480. If it wasn’t $480 it was $430. I actually posted it on Angie’s List. It was a lot of money, considering [it was] an $85 special.
That’s the only bad report I had to post on Angie’s List and that’s because I didn’t get their name from Angie’s List as far as I’m concerned. When I did sign up for Angie’s List, I did find them. When I put their phone number in [to an Angie’s List search] it matched up with this other company and then I found other bad ratings.
My friend who’s been remodeling for more than 30 years just says all these homes that have supposedly had this work done, he feels it’s one of the biggest ripoffs out there. I feel the same way from my experience.
What were your thoughts on the cleaning itself?
It was just a like vacuum that ran from a truck so I figured it had some really good suction. That device they put in there was like a little round ball on the end and when they got downstairs where they could pull the end off of one of the air returns, they put this thing in and it kind of beats it up inside. You could hear it banging. Supposedly it’s supposed to be loosening up all the dirt.
I didn’t notice any difference after the filters. I change the filters every two or three months. Nothing ever changed after that or before that. It didn’t seem any different after they were done.
By the time I gave them the check they had left our front entrance inside the house a mess. I asked them to clean it up. They were just in such a hurry to get out of here. That was a bad experience. The y were here 90 minutes at the most. When I got back inside and went upstairs the cold air return vent was hanging down. I had to get on a chair and put this vent back up. Then, some of the floor vents…they hadn’t put them back in place. So, I really feel like I was taken for a ride there.
We’ve had no bad experiences going on Angie’s List. It’s just that one I didn’t get to check before getting on Angie’s List.
Any thoughts on duct cleaning after all this?
I’ll never do it again. I don’t want to say that things were worse, but they certainly weren’t any better. Raising all that dust, when I think of it, doesn’t seem really sensible to me. As far as their reach with that hose, I could have taken the vents off and done it myself.
I envisioned a lot more for the $85 especially when we were done it was $430. They’re not even certified to work on a furnace. If you’re going to take a can of air and blow some dust off, I don’t really think we’re doing a fantastic job of cleanup or tuneup. It would be better to hire a professional who does that exclusively.
It’s like I just rolled down the window and threw 20-dollar bills out the window. Lesson learned, and thankfully now there’s Angie’s List, I always turn to it.