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Air Duct Cleaning - It's Not Just About Indoor Air Quality

Air duct cleaning is actually a misnomer.

The air ducts are only one part of the AC system that the air you breathe passes through. The air from your rooms is drawn into the AC system, passes through the blower fan, is drawn across the cooling coils, and only then is forced out through the duct system and back into the rooms.

To improve air quality, complete HVAC system (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) cleaning is required, especially in a humid climate like we have here in Houston Texas.

Why waste money cleaning only the air ducts when the air will still be passing through the dirt, debris, and microbial growth on the coils, blower fan and other parts of the system?

Clean air ducts aid AC system efficiency

Cleaner air is only one benefit of so called "air duct cleaning." An important benefit of a clean AC system (with the high price of electricity today) is that it improves the energy efficiency of your system. The biggest area of concern is the cooling, or evaporator, coils. These are the coils that you don't see, the ones that are up in the attic or wherever the main part of your AC system happens to be. The coils you see outside your house, the condenser coils, are different. The air in your house never passes over these coils.

It's called a split system and works like this. The air in your house is drawn into the AC system and passes over the evaporator coils which have cold refrigerant flowing through them. The air is cooled as it passes over the cold coils, and the excess moisture in the air condenses on the coils much like the moisture in your bathroom condenses on the relatively cold mirror while you are showering. The heat and humidity are removed at the same time, thus "conditioning" the air in your home.

And what about the big unit outside? Well, the heat is absorbed by the refrigerant in the coils and flows through tubing to your outside unit, the condenser. Here the refrigerant is "condensed" by a pump and the heat is, in a sense, squeezed out of the refrigerant and blown into the atmosphere by a large fan. When you hear that fan running on the condenser unit, if you put your hand over the unit, you can feel the heat that was removed from inside your home being blown away.

But why then are the evaporator (inside) coils so important for energy efficiency? The evaporator coils can be several rows deep. As we saw, when the hot humid air passes over the cold coils the moisture is constantly condensing on these coils. The moisture on the coils makes them a perfect medium for picking up the dirt and debris in the air. The moisture and soil on the coils and in the condensate pan, where the water flows to, also provides a perfect condition for microbial growth. As the dirt and debris build up on the several rows of coils, two things happen.

First, the area between the tubing gets clogged with debris and the there is less space for the air to pass through. Your AC has to run longer to get the same amount of air to the cooling coils as it did when they were clean.

Second, the air passing over the coils is now actually coming in contact with the built up dirt, not the coils themselves. Less heat and moisture are being removed from the air because the dirt is actually preventing the air from coming in contact with the "cold" coils. So now your AC has to run even longer, since the air that is getting through the coils isn't being cooled or dehumidified nearly as quickly as it would be coming in contact with clean coils. Your system has to run longer and harder to cool your house, wasting energy and putting additional wear and tear on your AC system.

Don't waste money on incomplete duct cleaning.

So you can see that, especially in humid climates like we have in Houston, air duct cleaning without coil cleaning is not enough to reduce your energy usage and improve your air quality. The amount of moisture condensing on the evaporator coils in our climate makes coil cleaning imperative. Complete HVAC system cleaning is the only way to go if you are considering air duct cleaning. In our opinion, anything less is a waste of money.

 

About the Author

David A. Selter is the President of DRYMORE Company in Houston, Texas, with decades of experience in emergency water damage restoration, water extraction, flood damage repair, and drying services as well as other related services including air duct cleaning and odor control. For immediate water damage repair, water removal, and air duct cleaning, contact DRYMORE at 281-930-0100 or visit http://www.drymore.com.

Is House Air Conditioning A Need To Have?

Property air conditioning provides numerous benefits about working followers or even the classic air conditioning unit that is installed by way of the window. For one issue, residence ac units are centrally managed. In contrast to window restricted units, these property air conditioning models have the ability of cooling the whole residence at a single time, through an air duct program that pumps the air and evenly distributes it during the property. With the window units, they are not only starting to be obselete, but they are restricted in their utilization.

Usually these units only distribute a at ease amount of cooled air about the place in which they are set up. They also burn up far more vitality and in turn lead to increased electrical bills and even presents a danger to circuit breakers. Besides these drawbacks, these units are also extemely cumbersome and major and usually rquires a staff of two or a lot more individuals for set up. The even more danger is acquiring a window opened in which the unit is installed and acquiring it fall out most likely hurting someone severely that may possibly be in its path. Centralized units combats all of these worries with the convenience and effectiveness of its layout.

Next to the bulky obsolete air conditioning models comes standard fans. Several think that these products are greater for cooling and saving vitality but they too existing comparable problems as with the window set up units.

In addition to becoming lighter in bodyweight, these models also existing an problem with circuitry that has the prospective to commence fires, specially when several models are running, as would be the case for houses with a number of areas that will need to be cooled. They may possibly stretch more in their capability to awesome, but these units merely circulate the air already about the house. There is no temperature control or real cooling of the air and this can existing a major dilemma of pollutants and quality of air.

Centralized air conditioning units for the house fight all of these concerns. For one, they demand less energy utilization due to the fact of the effectiveness of air distribution. They also operate on a separate technique than outlets and plugins to guarantee security from fires although they also have the ability to really cool the air with its temperature managed settings. The user can set the temperature to a sought after position and let for the unit to automatically shut on and off depending on the properties temperature. This in by itself gives for significantly less vitality use and much more savings.

Most units also have a created in fan method that can circulate the crisp awesome air built up in the residence for additional savings in opposition to working the cooling mechanism constantly.

There are also health strengths to employing these models, which include the much better air quality that comes with temperature controlled cooling around running fans. House models have set up filtration programs to trap air dust and other polluting particles to give a cleaner a lot more breatheable setting. This helps in opposition to this kind of persistent disorders as asthma, coughing and sneezing and lessens the likelihood of sickness. The air we breathe is critical and property air conditioning units are certain to offer a safer solution.

The skilled staff of Omaha Air Conditioning and Air Conditioning provides quotations and every residential air conditioning service you would like, from restoring various air conditioning difficulties, motor outages, to installing ducts in your household for your leisure.

How effective are in-duct booster fans in increasing warm air flow from a gas furnace?

Here's the situation - I just installed a new high efficiency furnace along with brand new ductwork to heat the upstairs of my 100-year-old house. While I am getting some air flow out of the upstairs registers, it's not enough to heat the upstairs as well as I would like (with the thermostat, which is downstairs, set at 71 F, it's typically 67 F upstairs). I'm wondering if a booster fan in the 12" duct that leads upstairs would solve - or at lessen - this problem. I'm also wondering if by sucking air away from the furnace the booster fan would reduce the external static pressure reading, which, at .85", is too high. (Note that I understand that the fan would - or at least should - increase static pressure in the duct down the line from the fan; it seems that it should also decrease it in the ductwork between the fan and the furnace.)

Hello Chad. I had a very similar problem with an addition to my home from several years ago. I added 1200 foot to the back end of the house and had to run 6 inch flex pipes to the new rooms that were added. The front of the house stayed warm but I had little air pressure and much cooler in the new rooms ( the pipe run to the master bedroom was over 85 feet). I added 3 six inch inline boosters to the three pipes ( 250 CFM) and wired them into the main panel of the furnace. It was just enough to even out the temps from the back to the front of my home. Personally, I do think it was effective. I hope this helps you.

Duct Booster Inline Fan - Monster Gardens