Clean your vents!

Warning: this post is gross. :p

My wife and I moved into our house about 2 years ago after returning from Ireland, and we’ve had trouble keeping it warm. The house has a cement foundation, and just gets really cold in the winter. We’ve spent a lot of money on electricity in winter for heating and the house is still cold. So, we decided it was time to hire someone to help clean our heating vents in the house, to try to make them more efficient. We hired Better Air Northwest and they came out and cleaned our air ducts and here’s the results:

The house was built 30 years ago, and it was clear that the vents haven’t been cleaned in 30 years.¹ The technician was very professional, and sealed the vents all around the house (after cleaning each one individually), and then sucked everything out. What you see above is all the stuff they sucked out. The technician pointed out that there’s dust, dirt, fiber and such, but also spiders, mite feces, debris and so on. They vacuumed out 5 inches of dirt. :-0

Also, our dryer vent needed to be cleaned too:

The service was surprisingly cheap (less than $300), but already we noticed a huge difference in the house. The heating airflow sounds much stronger now and feels more effective. We don’t have to raise the temperature as high as we did previously either to get the same heat.

But also, when I wake up in the morning, I noticed my sinuses feel a lot better. My throat and nose don’t feel irritated as they did before. We were breathing years of dust and insect droppings and wasting electricity on inefficient heating.

The cleaner also mentioned that we should clean our vents every 3 years. We definitely plan to clean out our vents again in 3 years. Think of this as a warning to others.

¹ To be fair, the previous owners seemed like really nice people and did a great job on the house overall, but probably weren’t aware of the dirt in the vents.