Duct Cleaning in Racine, WI
Tell us about your home, and a licensed contractor who covers Racine County will get in touch.
Tell us about the job
It takes about a minute.
Eight months of heating leaves its mark on your ducts
Your furnace runs October through May here, eight months a year. That is eight months of air moving through the same ductwork, carrying dust and whatever else gets pulled in with it. Most of that settles inside the duct walls instead of blowing back out into the room.
Racine County has seen 23 winter storms and 48 damaging wind events over the past ten years, and storms like that knock out power. When a furnace stops and restarts instead of running straight through the night, the air moving through it is not any cleaner. With a season's worth of buildup already sitting in the ducts, that dust gets pushed right back into the rooms you are trying to heat.
- 8 months
- October through May, your furnace pushes air through your ducts
- 3 months
- June through August, your air conditioner does the same
NOAA nClimDiv, 1991–2020 normals
- How often should air ducts be cleaned?
- There's no fixed schedule that fits every house. Most homes do fine having it looked at every few years, but you should move that up if anyone in the house has allergies, you've just finished a renovation, or you've had a pest problem in the attic or crawlspace. Homes here run the furnace October through May, eight months of the year, so ducts are moving air most of the year and can pull in more dust than they would somewhere with a shorter heating season.
- Is air duct cleaning worth it?
- It depends on what you're hoping to fix. It won't lower your heating bill and it won't fix a furnace that's struggling, and there's no proof it cuts down on illness in the house. Where it actually helps is dust, so if you're wiping down surfaces constantly or you can see buildup at the vent covers, cleaning the ducts will cut down on what's circulating. It's also worth doing after a renovation or any work that left debris in the system.
- What does air duct cleaning involve?
- A contractor uses a vacuum system to pull dust and debris out of the ductwork, working through the vents or through access points cut into the trunk lines. Brushes or air whips loosen buildup stuck to the duct walls before it gets vacuumed out. The furnace or air handler gets cleaned too, since it's part of the same air path, and the filter should be checked or replaced once the job is done.