Duct Cleaning in Martinsburg, WV
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Seven months of heat pushes a lot of air through those ducts
Your furnace runs October through April here, close to seven months of the year. Every one of those months, the same ducts carry warm air to every room in the house, and dust, pet hair, and whatever else settles in the house gets pulled in and pushed back out with it. That's a long stretch of buildup with no break.
Berkeley County has seen its share of winter storms and power outages, 20 winter storms and 90 damaging wind events over the last ten years. When the power drops and the furnace stops, then kicks back on, it pushes another round of whatever settled in the ducts while the system sat idle. Dirty ducts don't just carry dust around the house. They make the furnace work harder to push air through them, and that shows up as rooms that heat unevenly or a system that runs longer than it should.
- 7 months
- October through April, 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?
- Most homes do fine having this checked every few years, not on a fixed yearly schedule. If anyone in the house has allergies, if pets are shedding into the return vents, or if the house just went through a renovation that kicked up drywall dust, do it sooner. Homes here run the heat from October through April, so the system moves air through those ducts for most of the year, which gives dust more time to settle in.
- Is air duct cleaning worth it?
- It is worth it when there is a real reason behind it, not just as a habit on a schedule. If you can see dust kicking out of the vents, if a room never seems to get warm even with the heat running, or if the ducts were exposed during construction work, cleaning solves something. If none of that applies, the gain from cleaning ducts that already look fine is small.
- What does air duct cleaning involve?
- A contractor connects a vacuum system to the ductwork and uses brushes or air tools to knock dust and debris loose from inside the duct walls, then pulls it out through the vacuum. Every supply and return vent gets covered, along with the main trunk lines. The furnace or air handler often gets a look too, since dust builds up around the blower and coil the same way it does in the ducts.