Duct Cleaning in Bay City, MI
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Your ducts work eight months out of the year here
Heat runs October through May in Bay County, and every degree of it moves through your ductwork before it reaches a room. That is a long season of air moving through the same runs, carrying dust and whatever else settles in them.
Winter nights here average 18°F, so the furnace is cycling hard through those months, pushing air through the ducts again and again. The county has seen 12 winter storms and 49 damaging wind events over the past ten years, and outages that come with them mean the system shuts down and restarts more than it would otherwise. Each restart stirs up what has settled in the ductwork and sends it back into the house.
- 8 months
- October through May, your furnace pushes air through your ducts
- 3 months
- June through August, your air conditioner does the same
NOAA nClimDiv, 1991–2020 normals
- How often should air ducts be cleaned?
- There's no fixed schedule that fits every house, but a contractor can tell you what your system needs by looking at it. If anyone in the house has allergies, or you've had renovation work that left dust behind, cleaning sooner makes sense. Homes with pets tend to need it more often too. Your furnace here runs from October through May, so whatever is sitting in the ducts has eight months to circulate before the system shuts off for the year.
- Is air duct cleaning worth it?
- It's worth it if you can see dust blowing out of the vents, if a room never seems to stay clean, or if you're dealing with allergies that don't have another clear cause. It won't lower your heating bill and it won't fix a furnace that's struggling to keep up. What it does is clear buildup that's already inside the ducts, not the furnace or the coil, so it solves that one problem rather than acting as a general fix.
- What does air duct cleaning involve?
- A contractor connects a vacuum to the duct system to pull air through it while brushes or air whips knock loose the dust stuck to the inside walls. Every supply and return vent gets cleaned this way, one at a time, along with the main trunk lines. The furnace or air handler usually gets checked too, since dust collects around the blower and coil as well as in the ductwork.