About Us

Some duct systems are past cleaning. We tell people that on site, before anything gets unloaded. Fiberglass ductboard from the 1960s that has gone soft and shed its facing will not come back; brushing it makes the problem worse. Flex duct with torn inner liner, crushed runs behind an attic kneewall, or under-slab metal that has rusted through and taken on soil will not clean up either, and we are not going to charge you to find that out slowly. In those cases we say so, show you what we are looking at, and you can decide about replacement without us in the middle of it. The same honesty runs the other direction. If your ducts were cleaned three years ago, nobody in the house has allergies, and there has been no remodel, we will tell you to wait. We would rather lose the job than sell you one you do not need.

Most of what we see in San Jose traces back to two things. Wildfire smoke seasons since 2017 have pushed fine ash into attic duct systems across the Bay Area, and smoke-event ash plus construction dust from constant Silicon Valley remodeling are the two biggest loading sources. On top of that, Santa Clara Valley and the San Francisco Peninsula share a dry-summer Mediterranean climate: a five-to-six-month cooling season with little rain, so airborne soil dust, grass and tree pollen circulate continuously and get pulled into return grilles. Winters are mild and damp. Furnaces run intermittently rather than hard, but attic ducts sit in humid, unconditioned air and cold-surface condensation forms where uninsulated metal passes through attics or crawlspaces. That is where we find the damp, caked deposits that a shop vac will never touch. Housing here splits roughly three ways for duct purposes: pre-1940 homes retrofitted onto original gravity or added systems with crawlspace runs; the dominant 1950s-70s tract era using rigid galvanized sheet metal or early fiberglass ductboard with under-slab perimeter runs; and post-1990 construction using R-6/R-8 flex duct in attics. Each one gets handled differently. Under-slab runs in an Willow Glen ranch are a slower, more careful job than attic flex in a newer Evergreen build.

On site, the crew runs a truck-mounted vacuum with the collection unit staying outside and a single large hose brought to the air handler. We seal every register and return with film so the whole system pulls negative, then work run by run with rotating brushes and compressed-air whips sized to the duct, so debris travels toward the vacuum instead of into your living room. Blower compartment, coil face, and plenum get attention too, since the cleanest ducts in the world feed through whatever is sitting on the coil. We work on Carrier, Trane, Lennox, Goodman, Rheem, and American Standard equipment. Typical service interval here is 3-5 years, shorter for homes with pets, allergy sufferers, under-slab duct, or recent renovation. On cost: the number moves with how many supply runs and returns you have, whether the system is accessible attic flex or under-slab metal that needs more time per run, and whether we find damp buildup or just dry dust. Two-system homes are two jobs. If we open things up and find the real issue is leaking joints or a loaded coil rather than dirty duct, we will point you toward duct sealing or coil cleaning instead, and a cheap air filter replacement on a regular schedule keeps a lot of this from coming back.