When cleaning most parts of your Fort Worth house, your usual cleaning instruments do the job just fine. Keeping a broom, vacuum, and cleaning chemicals handy does wonders for most of your home.
It does not do much for your HVAC system, though. You’ll need more specific and specialized tools to properly clean air ducts. Here’s a quick overview of some of the necessary tools and their purpose.
Gloves, Goggles, And Masks
Before touching anything in an HVAC system, a Fort Worth cleaner needs the proper safety gear. Very nasty things accumulate in most air ducts that you don’t want on your clothes, hands, or lungs. The cleaner should protect all of the orifices on their face to ingest as little dust as possible. This kind of cleaning can cause health problems if you’re not careful.
Power Drill Or Screwdriver
To access the HVAC system, you need to open the vents using a screwdriver or drill. This should allow you to reach most of the ducts. Unfortunately, other parts may still be unreachable, even after opening everything up. A Fort Worth duct cleaning professional could temporarily remove sections of the ducts and then repair them at the end of cleaning to fully access your HVAC system.
Vent Covers
The supply vents must be covered while cleaning is taking place. Not only does this help with the negative pressure (discussed below), but it also prevents dust from spreading around your home.
Vent covers can be simple paper towels or more secure foam coverings. You need something very stable over the supply registers for negative air pressure.
Brush Or Air Nozzle
You’ll need something to “agitate” the dirt and loosen it up. This can be anything from a paintbrush to a specialized air-blowing nozzle. Just as long as it can kick the dust up from the insides of the air duct, it’ll work.
Whatever is used needs to have some reach. There’s a lot of air duct to touch, after all.
Negative Pressure Machine
You’ll need a powerful vacuum to clean your Fort Worth home’s air ducts. A regular vacuum cleaner won’t work nearly as well. Specifically, you should use a vacuum that’s able to create negative pressure.
After sealing off all the registers in the rest of the system, a powerful vacuum should be able to achieve negative pressure. Negative pressure makes particles airborne, allowing them to be sucked out better. Without suction, these free-moving particles can lower air-quality.
Microfiber Cloth
If you have a brush, a microfiber cloth isn’t strictly necessary. But it can help remove all of the dust in the system. Microfiber cloths contain a mild electric charge that they use to pick up dust particles wherever they touch, making them very effective tools whenever you need to clean up dust.
Disinfectants
Finally, a good Fort Worth duct cleaner needs to disinfect the newly cleaned vents. Germs must be killed on the chemical level. A solid antibacterial chemical can help a lot.
As you can imagine, this can be dangerous if the wrong chemicals are used. Only someone who knows how to clean air ducts should attempt to spread disinfectant in an air duct.