Air Duct Cleaning in Houston, TX

Cleaning alone usually isn't the answer for submerged ductwork. In the bayou-adjacent parts of town, the damage is almost always at the low points: floor boots, return chases built into wall cavities, and the bottom of the plenum. Fiberglass duct board and flex liner that sat in water hold it in the insulation long after the surface looks dry, and no amount of brushing or vacuuming pulls that back out. What we do is open things up and tell you honestly which sections are cleanable and which are compromised. Often the trunk is fine and it's the boots and a few runs that need to come out. Be skeptical of anyone who quotes a flood house a straight cleaning without looking at the boots first.

Usually yes, but it changes how the job runs. Those older pier-and-beam houses in the Heights, Montrose and Third Ward got their ducts added decades after the house was built, so the system is squeezed into whatever space was left: short knee-wall attics, tight crawl areas, sheet metal trunks run at odd angles. We often have to work from inside the house through registers more than from the attic side, and add access points where there's no other way to reach a trunk. The thing to watch for in these homes is brittle, aging internal liner in the original metal. If it's flaking, aggressive cleaning makes it worse, and we'll say so rather than scour it.

In Houston that's often normal rather than a sign something's broken. Between traffic particulate in the denser neighborhoods, constant teardown-and-rebuild construction dust on whole blocks at a time, and the Saharan dust episodes that roll through in June and July, filters here load up faster than most places. Duct cleaning doesn't stop any of that. What it does is clear out what has already settled in the trunks and runs so the system isn't recirculating a reservoir of it. If your filter is loading fast and you also see dust fanning out around the supply registers, that's the combination worth having looked at.

The housing stock here spans a century, and that's what moves the number more than anything. A 1950s-70s Oak Forest or Sharpstown ranch on slab with the air handler in the attic and a straightforward supply layout is a predictable job. A two-story on the outer edge of town with long flex runs to upstairs rooms takes longer because of the footage and the number of registers. A retrofit system in an older bungalow can take longer still if access has to be created. Flood-affected ductwork is its own situation and is assessed differently, since part of that conversation is about replacement, not cleaning. We walk the system before giving you a number, not from the square footage over the phone.