Duct board systems don’t complain. There’s no rattle, no obvious smell at first. The buildup just accumulates year after year until somebody opens the system up and takes a look. That’s what happened at this home in Oak Park Trails, an established Katy neighborhood in the 77450 ZIP, where dust had started collecting around the registers faster than usual.
The before photos tell the story better than we can. The duct board plenum, the return boxes, and the flex duct runs all showed the same thing: a thick layer of debris coating every surface the air passes over on its way to the rooms.
The crew opened the ceiling access at the plenum and worked the whole system with rotary brushes under negative-pressure HEPA vacuum. Supply side, return side, and every flex run in between.
Once the brushing was done, the crew cleaned and sealed the main plenum box, sealed the connections to stop air leaks, and ran an antimicrobial and fungal treatment through the supply and return sides, followed by deodorizing and a protective coating. The whole job carries a twelve-month warranty.
While the ductwork was being brushed, every register cover in the house came off the wall for a wash at the truck. It’s a step that gets skipped a lot in this business, and it shows. Clean ducts behind a grimy grille defeats the point.
Here’s the same system after. The duct board is back to its original gray fiber surface, the flex interiors are clear end to end, and the covers went back up looking close to new.
This job is a good example of why duct board systems in particular benefit from periodic cleaning. The fiber surface holds onto debris more than sheet metal does. If you’re in Oak Park Trails, elsewhere in Katy, or anywhere in west Houston and your registers are showing dust streaks, our air duct cleaning crews are out this way every week. We’ve been doing this since 2002, and the before-and-after photos never stop being satisfying.