What air duct cleaning involves
A negative air machine gets hooked to the trunk line so the whole system is under suction, then every branch is agitated with a rotating brush or an air whip and everything loosened travels out through the machine rather than into the house. Registers and boots come off and get cleaned separately.
The blower compartment, the coil face and the return are the parts that matter most and the parts most often skipped. If a quote does not say what happens to those, it is a register cleaning with a longer name.
When it is worth doing, and when it is not
Three situations genuinely call for it, and we will say so plainly if none of them apply to you.
- Visible debris, construction dust or insulation blowing out of the registers
- Anything living, or that has lived, in the ductwork
- Visible mold growth on the duct surfaces or around the coil
What it is not is a treatment for allergies or asthma. Cleaning ducts removes what is in the ducts. Anyone selling it as a health intervention is overselling, and the honest version of this trade turns down more jobs than it books.
After construction, a remodel, or a new build
This is the clearest case. Drywall dust is fine enough to travel the full system and settles everywhere the air goes, and a remodel with the HVAC running puts months of it into the ductwork in a fortnight.
New construction has the same problem for a different reason. Ducts sit open on a job site for weeks, and what falls into them stays there until somebody takes it out.
A house you have just bought
Worth doing once, at the start, for reasons that have nothing to do with air quality. You do not know whether the last owner smoked, kept pets, or ever had the system looked at, and a camera down the trunk answers all three in ten minutes.
If it comes back clean, that is a useful thing to know and it costs you the visit rather than the cleaning.
Dust in the house, and what a clean actually changes
Most household dust comes from inside the house rather than out of the vents: skin, fabric, carpet, whatever comes through the door on shoes. If your ducts are clean and your filter is doing its job, cleaning them again will not change what lands on the coffee table.
Where it does change things is a system that has never been touched, a filter slot that leaks around the frame, or a return pulling from a dusty attic or garage. Those are findings, and they are worth more than the cleaning.
Why the valley is harder on a system
Fine desert dust gets in through every gap a system has, and out here systems run hard for months at a stretch. Add a house with a return in the garage, or ductwork in an unconditioned attic, and there is a steady supply of the thing you are paying to remove.
The practical answer is usually sealing and a better filter, not cleaning on a schedule. We will say which one your system needs.
Dryer vents and air ducts on one visit
They are separate systems and separate work, and one trip can cover both. If the reason you started looking was clothes taking two cycles to dry, that is the dryer vent rather than the air ducts.
Dryer vent cleaning is the other half of what we do, and booking the two together is cheaper than booking them apart.
Duct cleaning, air vent cleaning, and what people mean by them
Air duct cleaning, duct cleaning and air vent cleaning are the same job under three names, and people usually arrive at one of them by accident. The system has supply ducts carrying conditioned air out to the rooms, return ducts pulling it back, and a register at every opening. Cleaning it properly means all of that plus the air handler, which is where most of what people can see actually lives.
Vent cleaning is the one that goes two ways. Half the people who say it mean this, and half mean the dryer. If clothes need two cycles, it is the dryer vent and no amount of duct work will change it.
How to tell a real duct cleaning from a vacuum at the register
The cheap version of this service is a shop vacuum held at each opening for a couple of minutes. It removes the dust you could already see and leaves the system it came from untouched, and it goes on the invoice under the same name as the real thing.
Four questions separate them. Does the work include the air handler and the coil, or only the ducts? Is the system put under negative pressure while the lines are agitated, so what comes loose has somewhere to go? Are the returns done as well as the supplies? And do you get to see the inside before and after, rather than a pile of dust on a sheet?
Ask any company those four. The answers, not the price, are what the gap between two quotes usually turns out to be.
What it costs and how long it takes
The price is quoted before the work starts, once you say how many air handlers the house has and roughly how many vents. Those two numbers decide almost all of it. A single-system house is a morning, and a house with two systems takes most of a day.
No trip charge, and no per-vent creep discovered halfway through. If the visit turns up something the price did not cover, you hear it before it happens.
Where we work
Las Vegas, Henderson, North Las Vegas, Summerlin, Spring Valley, Enterprise, Paradise and Boulder City. Call before mid-afternoon and same-day is usually possible.
Henderson has its own page: dryer vent and air duct cleaning in Henderson.