Air Duct Cleaning Equipment

If you are interested in servicing air ducts in your house, you might be interested in knowing the types of equipment professional air duct cleaning companies will use.  The tools can be broken down into inspection tools, negative pressure vacuum tools and cleaning tools.

1. Inspection Tools

Before an air vent cleaning service begins cleaning, it must inspect your ducts to see what shape they are in.  Most companies have a variety of tools they use to do this.  One of the most old-fashioned is a mirror and a flashlight.  The flashlight is shone down a duct, and the mirror is used so that the technician can see what the flashlight reveals.  There is an interesting tool resembling a periscope to allow the technician to look around square corners (i.e., corners that form right angles.)  It has a mirror, a light source and an eyepiece.  A remote control closed circuit television system is an interesting tool, consisting of a small Mars Rover look-alike with a camera on it that can travel through all areas of the duct work and broadcast back to a television outside the ducts what it sees.  This tool is especially useful for the homeowner, since you can see what the technician sees both before and after the cleaning. 

2.  Negative Pressure Vacuum Cleaners

Negative pressure vacuum cleaners are the work horse of the cleaning.  These power vacuums, which can be mounted on a truck or be portable, create suction pulling the dust and debris out of your ducts into a sealed container.  Without these, the dust and debris stirred up by the cleaners would mostly end up inside your house, where they could quickly be pulled back into the ducts once the HVAC system was turned back on.

3.  Cleaning Tools

The cleaning tools are what physically scrapes or loosens the dust and debris away from the duct sides to loosen it enough for the vacuum cleaner to pull it outside of the house.  Brushes, both manual and powered, are a popular tool for most companies.  Best air duct cleaning practices require that the brush bristles be of a certain softness to avoid damaging either fiberglass or metal ducts.  Some of these tools use pressurized air provided by an air compressor. 
That’s it – three categories of tools and a whole lot of human effort, skill and knowledge will equal one completely cleaned set of air ducts!