Who You Are Calling

Dallas housing runs the full spread, and the duct work reflects it. Postwar ranch houses in Lake Highlands and Casa Linda with ducts in crawlspaces or low attics. Eighties and nineties builds in Far North Dallas and Plano with flex run long distances through the attic, stapled up, sagging in the middle after three decades. Newer construction with tighter envelopes and shorter runs but return chases framed into the wall cavity instead of ducted. Clay soil movement shifts slabs and pier-and-beam framing, breaking duct-to-boot and plenum connections and pulling 150°F attic air into the supply side. On an older house we spend time finding every boot and checking whether the connection is still intact. On a newer one the problem is usually one bad section, not the whole system.

The crew pulls up with a truck-mounted vacuum, runs hose to the air handler, and puts the entire system under negative pressure before anything gets agitated. Every register and return gets sealed off so the debris has one way out. Then we work the runs with rotating brushes and compressed-air whips, trunk lines first, branches after, and clean the plenum and blower compartment by hand. We photograph before and after at the same access points so you are not taking our word for it. We work on Carrier, Trane, Lennox, Goodman, Rheem and American Standard equipment, and on the mixed setups you find when a house has had two or three changeouts over forty years. Most of what we pull out around here is predictable: spring oak, ash, cedar elm and Bermuda grass pollen, mountain cedar that drifts in from the Hill Country December through February, ragweed in fall, and the fine grit that late summer dry spells and prairie clay push through attic penetrations and leaky return chases.

Plenty of the calls we take do not need a cleaning. If your filter has been changed on schedule and the runs look clean at the boot, we will tell you that and talk about what is actually causing the symptom. Sometimes it is filtration that is undersized or bypassing at the frame. Sometimes it is leakage at a separated connection, which is also why some homes get dusty again two months after a cleaning. Sometimes the airflow problem is a loaded evaporator and the ducts are fine, in which case coil cleaning is the fix. On cost, the drivers here are system count, how many runs and returns you have, whether the attic is walkable or we are belly-crawling over blown insulation at 130 degrees, how accessible the plenum is, and how much of the flex has to be repaired or replaced rather than cleaned. A one-system ranch with eight runs and a floored attic is a different day than a two-system two-story with twenty-two runs and a sealed-off return chase. We walk the house and look at the actual ductwork before we say anything about the number.