Please read this before you start flipping through the yellow pages calling to find what companies have the cheapest prices.
There are a lot of duct cleaning companies out there competing for business, and they all vary in prices and their techniques. However beware of scams. There are some companies out there that don’t actually do any duct cleaning at all but they advertise ridiculously low prices.
Their techniques of duct cleaning consist of sticking a “glorified shop vac hose” down the vent a couple of feet and then cleaning the registers. But if you were to look in the vent a little ways with a mirror or small camera, you would still see dust lining the walls and probably some cobwebs or construction debris only 3 or 4 feet down in.
These type of companies don’t clean out the plenum at the furnace or the trunk lines either. They say that they are going to use top of the line equipment with big technical names, and all they do is clean the areas that are plainly visible when you lift up the register.
These type of companies will advertise something like, “We will clean any house for $100.00!” But people who buy it are just getting what they payed for. They just Blow and Go, advertising that they are a lot quicker than any other company. Remember the pricing depends on the size of the house, the location of the furnace, and whether or not there’s a crawl space. So anyone saying that they will do any house for the same ridiculously low price is probably going to do a horrible job.
Also if you look at the fine print on those advertisements there’s usually a catch. So the customer will be expecting that low price when its all done but the bill turns out to be a lot more than they had quoted the customer at first. They say that there were more vents than the usual house, or they had to use special chemicals, or something along those lines so its going to cost more than the average house.
Remember to ask each company you call about their procedure, and what exactly they clean. Some companies have small cameras that they feed down the vent to show you what’s in there and when they are finished they will show you what the vent looks like. That way you can see a before and after, then you know for sure that you haven’t been scammed and they did a good job.
So make sure that you do your research before hiring a company to clean your ducts. You can get good deals out there but also if you go cheap usually you get what you payed for, so look out for the scams.