Meet the Team

Santa Barbara air is hard on duct systems in ways most people don't think about until something smells wrong. Salt-laden onshore air corrodes exterior condensers and sheet metal. Summer fog and high ambient humidity hang around for months, then sundowner events push dry inland heat through the same house in a single afternoon. Coast live oak, sycamore, eucalyptus, acacia, olive and winter grasses drop pollen in waves. The foothills carry chaparral, oak and grassland fuel, so wildfire smoke episodes of the Thomas, Jesusita and Cave type are part of life here, along with the post-fire ash and debris-flow dust that settles afterward. Add the older stucco homes with unconditioned vented attics and raised-foundation crawlspaces, where duct runs sit in dusty, humid, rodent-accessible space, and you get the calls we take most: smoke and ash after a fire, musty smells at the registers, visible dust blowing out of supply vents, and rodent evidence in the crawlspace. Coastal humidity also condenses on cold supply trunks in uninsulated attics, which feeds microbial growth at the boots and plenums. That one we see year-round.

Here's what shows up at your house. A truck-mounted vacuum stays outside and pulls the whole system under negative pressure through a connection at the main trunk. We seal every register and return so the suction has somewhere to go. Then we work each run with rotary brushes and compressed-air whips, pushing debris back toward the vacuum instead of into your living room. Boots, plenums and the blower compartment get cleaned by hand, because that's where the buildup sits. We work on Carrier, Trane, Lennox, Goodman, Rheem and American Standard equipment, gas furnaces, heat pumps and straight AC. If we open things up and find the real problem is a loaded filter or leaking joints in the attic, we say so and point you toward air filter replacement or duct sealing instead. Dirty evaporator coils cause a lot of the weak-airflow complaints we get, and coil cleaning handles that without touching the ducts.

We also tell people when their ducts are fine. Plenty of systems here don't need cleaning yet. Mild year-round temperatures mean equipment cycles lightly but runs long seasons with little full shutdown, so the filter is usually the thing that got neglected, not the ductwork. We'll show you photos from inside the trunk and let you decide. On cost, the things that move the number on this job are the count of supply and return runs, whether the ducts are flex in a hot attic or sheet metal under a raised foundation, how tight the crawlspace access is, whether there's rodent contamination or fire ash that needs extra containment, and whether the system is one zone or several. A two-bedroom bungalow with eight runs and a clean attic is a different day than a rambling Riviera house with a crawlspace you have to belly-crawl through.