Air Duct Cleaning & Dryer Vent Cleaning in Corte Madera, CA

Corte Madera runs from the marsh flats by the bay up into the hillside streets, and on the flat side the water table sits close to the surface. Crawl spaces down there stay damp well into spring. Ductwork living in a damp crawl space is also ductwork living somewhere rodents want to be, which is the part homeowners usually discover by smell rather than by looking.

That matters because vermin in the ducts is one of only three conditions the EPA actually lists as a reason to clean a system. The others are substantial visible mold and ducts loaded heavily enough that debris comes out of the vents. If none of the three describes your house, we will say so. There is no reason to sell an annual cleaning to somebody who does not need one.

Up on Christmas Tree Hill the houses are older and smaller, some with wall or floor furnaces and no real duct system at all, and there the work is usually the dryer line instead. Call today for a free quote on HVAC system cleaning in Corte Madera.

Getting Rodents Out and Keeping Them Out

Cleaning a duct system that rodents have been living in is the second half of the job, not the first. If the entry point is still open, they come back, and you will have paid for a cleaning that lasted a season. So the sequence matters. Find how they are getting in, which in a Corte Madera crawl space is usually a gap at a foundation vent, a torn screen, or an opening where a pipe or line passes through. Close those. Then remove the nesting material and droppings out of the ductwork under negative pressure, and replace any insulated section that has been contaminated rather than trying to clean it. We do the duct side. Sealing the crawl space itself often belongs to a pest contractor, and we would rather tell you that and coordinate than pretend the whole thing is ours. Damp crawl spaces up in Mill Valley attract exactly the same tenants.

What Sanitizers and Foggers Actually Do

A fair number of duct cleaning outfits finish by fogging a chemical through the system and calling it sanitized. It is worth knowing what that is. The EPA's own position is that most products applied inside ductwork are not registered for that use, and that applying a biocide to bare sheet metal, let alone to porous insulation, has not been shown to do what the marketing says. It does not substitute for physically removing the contamination, which is the entire point of source removal. There are situations where a treatment is reasonable, usually after a confirmed problem has already been physically removed and the surfaces are bare and dry. What we will not do is fog a system that has not been properly cleaned and hand you an invoice that says sanitized. If someone offers that as the whole service rather than as a finishing step, you are being sold a smell rather than a result.