Learn about Fresh Air’s powerful equipment and specialized cleaning tools used to properly clean your air ducts.

 

If you’re concerned about the quality of air in your home, you’ve probably noticed the advertisements for room air purifiers, special furnace filters, plug in air fresheners, and disinfectant sprays that promise to clean up your indoor air. Now while these products may have merit for a specific area, like the bathroom, or condition- a strong cooking odor- most of them miss the real point; they’re addressing the symptom, not the problem. The reason the air in many homes is so dirty is often because the ventilation system is contaminated. The duct work, cold air returns, and trunk lines are not only collecting the debris, but every time the furnace blower comes on, more dirt and dust blow back into your home. So why don’t more homeowners get right to the heart of the problem and keep the air duct system cleaned? Because they don’t see the dirt everyday. We all know when the carpet’s looking bad, or the sidewalk is crumbling, but we don’t actually see the mess in the duct work, so we just don’t think about it. If you want to keep the air in your home clean and healthy, the first step is to remove the years of collected contamination from the air duct system. So let’s answer the question: What’s the best way to accomplish that? Let’s take a moment and see how thorough and professional air duct cleaning is done. At Fresh Air Corp, the job starts with the crew arriving at your home on time. A thick vinyl tarp protects your driveway from grease and oil. Our truck mounted Monster Vac is specifically designed for air duct cleaning because that’s all we do. The large rubber vacuum hoses are an important tool to carry the tremendous vacuum that is vital to a thorough cleaning. The outdoor blue units attach to the truck. Our orange hoses are only used indoors, and protective edge guards are placed at all corners and doorways. The hoses are connected by soft flexible canvas wraps, and a special connecting boot allows us to attach the hose directly to the main trunk lines and cold air plenums. Now the Monster Vac can be started up. Although the vacuum doesn’t actually do the deep cleaning, the huge reverse air flow makes a perfect air highway for the removal of the dirt, dust, and contamination. Now the first stage, or the set up, is complete, and the Fresh Air Corp technician will begin the cleaning of the air duct system. But before we address the next step, I’d like to answer a question that I’m asked regularly: How exactly does a furnace system work?

 

ON-SCREEN TEXT: How does a furnace system work?

 

BARRY MCCOY:
To help us better understand the cleaning of the ventilation and duct system, let’s just take a quick look at how the furnace system operates to heat or cool your home. We’re looking at a typical up-flow furnace unit that is designed with the blower fan in the lower section, bringing the air up through either the heat exchanger or the A coil. Heat exchanger of course raising the temperature of the air to warm you home, the A coil circulating freon to bring the temperature down and give us air conditioning. Once the air leaves the cabinet, it goes into what we term the bonnet, which is connected then to the large trunk line, which then begins to distribute the air toward each of the individual rooms. The air is brought into each room through a round duct run, connected to a register which you would see typically in either the floor or on the wall. Once the air warms or cools the home, it then needs to come back down to continue to circulate throughout the system. That’s accomplished by the cold air return. The cold air return covers in your home would be either in the center hallway, down by the floor area, or on the second floor, up near the ceiling. Brings the air back down into what we call the cold air plenum, the air then drops down through a filter, and the filter can be either a dollar fiber glass unit, all the way up through electronic or electro-static filters, and then back into the blower fan to start the cycle all over again. Ok, now we’ll go back to our cleaning, and see how the next stage occurs. Each register is closed off with a vinyl cover. Both the supply and return systems will be cleaned, and the area just behind the main cold air return often reveals the level of contamination in the house to be cleaned. Each metal conversion boot is hand cleaned, using a mild degreasing agent. At Fresh Air Corp, we actually scrub the inside of your ductwork with a multi-fingered Viper. Soft rubber fingers use pressurized air to clean every last bit of dirt and dust from the ductwork. The vacuum from the Monster Vac pulls the air backward towards the 8 inch hose, the scrubbing fingers of the Viper clean the debris from the walls of the ductwork, and the compressed air passing through each spinning finger drives the debris and dirt down through each run. This process is repeated at every register opening in the home. The result- a clean and sparkling system. Now, the cleaning process we just demonstrated drives the dirt and dust down into the main trunk lines and cold air plenum. We’re demonstrating our process in a home where the furnace is in the basement, so our final cleaning stage will take us there. If your system is on the first floor, a crawl space, or in the attic, we have slightly different tools and procedures. So, let’s finish up. We start by drilling a 1 inch access hole at the far end of the trunk line. The Viper is inserted, and scrubs the walls of the line, while driving the material into the waiting vacuum hose. The extension rods and high pressure air hoses will extend the full length of even extra-long runs. The light grey plastic plug, and a new access panel close everything back up, and seals the system against any loss of airflow or pressure. The final step is the air washing of the blower fan and the heat exchanger, to remove any loose dust that may have accumulated. We don’t recommend unhooking or removing any mechanical parts inside the furnace. Ok! That’s our overview of how Fresh Air Corp professionally cleans your air duct system. But we still have one important topic to cover. It’s unfortunate, but the service industry has a bad name with many homeowners. Whether it’s carpet shampooing, lawn service, exterminating, or air duct cleaning, there seems to always be contractors who will try and cheat or take advantage of the public. In most cases, we simply don’t know how to compare the right way of doing something with the low price, low quality, and sometimes fraudulent product offer. In our next segment, I’ll given you some invaluable information that will allow you to ask the right questions, compare service quality, and make an informed decision about what’s best for your home.

 

ON-SCREEN TEXT: Indoor Air and Your Health. The End.

 

END IA4 Best Way To Clean

 

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