Air Duct Cleaning & Dryer Vent Cleaning in San Rafael, CA

Most of our San Rafael work is in the older neighborhoods. Gerstle Park, Sun Valley and the streets off Fourth Street are largely homes built over a crawl space, the open dirt area under the floor where the heating ducts run. Rats and mice get into that space, and the soft insulated ducting used in a lot of these houses sags over the years into low spots where dust settles and stays put. If you are finding grit back on the furniture a day after dusting, or you catch a smell the first time the heat comes on in the fall, the space under the house is where to look first.

One San Rafael specific is worth knowing before you book anything. Joseph Eichler built roughly nine hundred homes in Terra Linda between 1955 and 1965, and the heat in those houses runs through pipes inside the concrete floor. There are no ducts in an original Eichler to clean. If someone quotes you a duct cleaning on a Terra Linda Eichler over the phone without asking a single question, that tells you something about them.

Plenty of those homes have converted since, usually to wall-mounted units or a compact ducted system run through the attic. Those do need service, and they take different equipment than a standard duct system. Call today for a free quote on residential air duct cleaning or dryer vent cleaning in San Rafael.

Working Under a San Rafael House

A crawl space job is slower than an attic job and it is worth knowing why before you compare two quotes. In a house off Gerstle Park the ducts run through a dirt space with maybe thirty inches of headroom, and every piece of equipment has to be dragged in through an access hatch that was sized for a person, not for a hose reel. Some of that ducting will be soft insulated flex that has sagged into low spots, and a sagging run has to be supported back up or the same dust settles in the same place within a year. We take photographs down there, because most homeowners have never seen their own crawl space and a description does not land the way an image does. Attic systems, common in newer construction up toward Novato, are a different and generally faster job. Neither one is priced off a per-vent number.

How Often a System Actually Needs This

There is no schedule this work is supposed to run on, whatever anyone tells you. The EPA does not recommend annual duct cleaning and does not set an interval at all. What it lists instead are three conditions worth cleaning for: substantial visible mold growth inside the system, vermin actually living in the ductwork, and ducts loaded heavily enough with dust and debris that particles are visibly coming out of the vents. If none of those describe your house, a cleaning is optional and we will say so. What does move the needle in San Rafael is the crawl space, because the rodent condition turns up here more than the other two combined. A house that has had rats under the floor is a different situation from a house that has simply not had this done in a decade. We tell you which one you have got, and sometimes the answer is that you do not need us this year.