Duct Cleaning in Wausau, WI
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Nine months of heat pushes a lot of dust through your ducts
Your furnace runs September through May here, nine months of the year. That is nine months of air moving through the same ductwork, carrying dust, pet hair, and whatever else settles in a house, over and over. On nights that average 9 degrees, the furnace is not cycling gently either. It runs hard and often, and every cycle pushes more of that buildup into the trunk lines and branches.
Most homes in Marathon County are single-family houses people own rather than rent, which usually means the same ductwork has been in place for years, collecting whatever each heating season leaves behind. Dust sitting in the ducts does not stay put. It gets pulled back into the air the furnace is heating and pushed out into every room of the house.
- 9 months
- September through May, your furnace pushes air through your ducts
- 2 months
- July 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, so a contractor will look at the ducts themselves rather than go by a number. If anyone in the house has allergies, or you just finished a remodel that kicked up drywall dust, that's a reason to have them checked sooner. Ducts that run nine months a year with the furnace, like they do here, collect more dust than ones that sit idle most of the year, so it's worth looking at the return vents for buildup between cleanings.
- Is air duct cleaning worth it?
- It's worth it if you can see dust kicking out of the vents, if a room never seems to get warm even with the furnace running, or if someone in the house has unexplained congestion that clears up when they're not home. Dirty ducts don't make a furnace run less efficiently in any way that shows up on a bill, but they do carry that dust and dander into every room the air reaches. A contractor can look at the return and supply runs and tell you whether there's actual buildup or just surface dust.
- What does air duct cleaning involve?
- A contractor connects a vacuum to the duct system and uses brushes or air tools to knock dust loose from the inside of the supply and return runs, then pulls it out through the vacuum before it can resettle. The furnace and any dampers get checked as part of the job since they're part of the same air path. The filter gets replaced too, since a clean duct system pulling air through an old filter doesn't accomplish much.