This one was in a high-rise on Sage Road, right in the Uptown/Galleria stretch of Houston (77056). The unit had fiberboard ducts — the gray fiberglass board kind, not sheet metal — and they hadn’t been touched in years. You could see it the second we pulled a register: dust packed into the board and debris settled along the bottom of the runs.
What we found
Fiberboard (a lot of folks call it duct board) builds up differently than metal. The surface is porous, so dust grabs onto it and stays put. On this job the supply runs were coated and there was loose debris sitting in the trunk line. Nothing unusual for a unit that’s gone a long time between cleanings, but plenty enough to drag down the air quality and make the system work harder than it needs to.
How we cleaned it
Duct board can’t be scrubbed like metal. Push too hard with a stiff brush and you tear up the fiberglass surface, which causes more problems than it fixes. So we ran HEPA negative air on the system, pulled everything toward the collection unit, and used soft-bristle and air-driven tools that lift the dust without chewing up the board. Every run, every boot, the return. Then we sanitized.
The result
The before-and-after says it better than we can. Same ducts, before we started and after we wrapped. If you’ve got fiberboard in your home or building and you’re not sure when it was last cleaned, this is what a proper job looks like.
We handle duct board all over Houston — here’s more on our fiberboard air duct cleaning and how we approach it.