Air Duct Cleaning in San Rafael — Same-Day Appointments Available

Most homes here do fine on a five to eight year cycle. What shortens it is the local pattern: heat runs October through May, the cooling season is short but real, and the system sits idle for months before it pushes settled crawlspace and attic dust through the house on the first cold morning or the first 90-degree October afternoon. If you've had a remodel, a crawlspace that floods in the wet winter months, or a new pet, move it up.

We seal off the supply and return registers, hook a negative-air machine to the trunk line, then work each run with rotating brushes and compressed air so debris travels toward the vacuum instead of into your rooms. A typical San Rafael single-story ranch in Terra Linda takes two to four hours; a Victorian or Craftsman in Gerstle Park or Dominican with retrofitted forced air over an old gravity furnace layout can run longer because the trunks are buried in a crawlspace or basement and access is tight. We check the blower and coil while we're in there and tell you what we see.

Count of supply runs is the biggest driver, followed by how hard the ductwork is to reach. Flat-roof Eichler-influenced plans with under-slab or crawl runs and pan returns take more setup than an open attic. Older downtown homes with sheet metal trunks and asbestos-tape joints at the seams need careful handling and sometimes a different approach at those seams, which adds time. We look at the system in person, give you a free estimate, and you approve a fixed number before we open anything.

It's a separate line item, not folded into the duct work. Plenty of customers add it while we're already on site since the equipment is in the truck and it only takes a short while. Worth doing if your dryer takes two cycles to finish a load or the laundry room feels humid.

We stop and show you. Growth usually turns up on flex runs in unconditioned space or near a coil with a drainage problem, and in Marin that often traces back to wet-winter humidity in a shallow crawlspace. Cleaning alone won't fix it if moisture keeps feeding it, so we treat what we can reach, flag the source, and tell you straight if the duct needs replacing instead. If testing is warranted we'll say so rather than guess.

No. Same-day work is billed exactly like an appointment set a week out. We keep slots open across San Rafael and the northern valleys because people usually call when the heat kicks on in October and the house smells like dust. Call early and we'll tell you honestly whether today is realistic.