Quality air is essential to a healthy premise, especially in areas with prevalent mold, dust, and other air contaminants. Contaminated air can cause unexpected expenses or lead to expensive and bothersome health problems. It can lead to allergies and scare away property buyers and customers in commercial places.
But still, for your place to have clean and quality air, you need to keep your HVAC unit clean, and a good rule is to clean your air ducts with the help of an experienced furnace and air ducts cleaning experts. And when you find it challenging to get an air duct cleaning expert, you can find them from established furnace cleaning service companies like Willard Power Vac, with furnace professionals known by most as Portland’s reputable duct cleaners. But if you do the job yourself, below are some of the methods you can use and the best among them.
Source Removal
Unlike other air duct cleaning methods, source removal is when you focus on removing dust and debris trapped in your air ducts. The process aims to remove and clean air contaminants without spreading them to the rest of the property. In other words, source removal is a mechanical air ducts cleaning strategy that removes air contaminants stuck or clinging to the interior parts of an HVAC unit’s air ducts.
And for source removal to perfectly clean your air ducts, the method also uses two cleaning elements- mechanical agitation and extraction. Agitation is when you focus on loosening the debris from the walls of the air ducts before cleaning them out.
On the other hand, extraction is when you clean the debris from the air ducts after loosening them via agitation. Extraction focuses on the safe removal of debris via levels acceptable to the industry standards of cleaning air ducts.
Steam Cleaning
Steam cleaning is a strategy for removing soluble contaminants from surfaces using low-pressure steam. Besides using steam cleaning to clean your air ducts, you can still use it for cleaning surfaces before painting or when you want to remove pollutants like oil, grease and dirt stuck and clinging onto surfaces like floors, patios, and decks.
When used to clean air ducts, steam cleaning uses a wand. The wand uses low pressure to deliver high temperature and pressure that agitate and loosen debris and other contaminants on the walls of your air ducts.
Unlike other methods, steam cleaning is the best for the safety of your surroundings. Instead of using harmful chemicals, the process uses water that kills bacteria or other living air contaminants without adversely affecting your environment.
Therefore, steam cleaning is your best option when cleaning your air ducts, but you still want an environmentally friendly cleaning method.
Air Sweep
If you compare all the methods for cleaning air ducts, air sweep, commonly known as power vacuuming, is the most thorough among them. The technique consists of a large power vacuum cleaner to remove the stuck and clinging debris on the air ducts.
When using this method, the cleaning starts by compressing the air and passing it through the ducts to dislodge debris and dirt inside them. As this happens, the air is drawn downstream through the vents out of the HVAV units through vacuuming.
The Truck Mounted Vacuum Cleaning
Unlike the other vacuuming methods, this one uses a truck-mounted and powered through power and temperature releasing shaft from an operating vehicle. The process depends on the amount of air drawn from the mounted truck to release enough pressure that forces the water to agitate and loosen dust and debris from the walls of the air ducts.
As a result, for this method to efficiently clean your air ducts, you require a water volume of between ten thousand to fifteen thousand cubic feet that draws enough air per minute to cause the pressure needed to loosen the contaminants stuck and clinging onto the air ducts.
The method also uses a vacuum hose attached from the truck to the trunk lines of the HVAC unit. This way, as the conditioning system works, the ventilation process helps draw the air into the vacuum hose that brushes the air ducts and removes the stuck and clinging contaminants.
The Best Air Duct Cleaning Method
Regardless of the size of your HVAC unit or the number of contaminants you want to clean, the best air duct cleaning method is one that thoroughly cleans and prevents your ducts from future contamination. As a result, air sweep is the best because it’s the most thorough and is environmentally friendly.