Revised:
December 28th, 2021
We have been focused on our air quality since we bought the house five and a half years ago and trying to improve it. What we've learned through this experience is that a professional outweighs a Groupon deal on any given day.
When we first moved into the house, we were shocked at, to be honest, the dirt that was left behind when the former owners moved out. And we had brought in multiple cleaning agencies as well as having carpets cleaned up were cleaned over the years. The air quality in the home has not improved. We continue to wake up every morning when we're here at home, congested. In comparison, we can go away and go to a family member's home or a hotel for one night and wake up with zero congestion that next morning.
But the day we come back home and wake up, it all starts over again. With our old furnace, before it went out, we had a one inch filter in our furnace and we were replacing that every two to four weeks. And when we had our new HVAC system put in a couple of years ago from Fire & Ice, we had opted to go with a larger Aprilaire filter. The four inch filter with the need to hopefully change it less frequently and get some better airflow. In hindsight, that has not changed much. We have actually been changing that filter about every 30 days, which is what prompted us to reach back out to Fire & Ice and say, "What can we do?"
When I called out, I actually called not even knowing that Fire & Ice did duct cleaning at the time. I called out wondering if there was something else we should do with our furnace. I read online about having the ionizer that you can add in or something that helps with the airflow before it goes back out. And it was suggested from Fire & Ice that maybe we tried their duct cleaning service. At that time, we learned that there are things that Fire & Ice does, that there are other experiences did not. Sealing off air vents. Providing negative pressure throughout the home. There was usually a van of some sort here and a big hose that came through, but definitely nothing that went as far as sealing off vents, sealing off the door of the home, making sure that there was a good way to get the pressure, the gunk. I'm not sure the right word to use there, but the gunk out of the vents.
Something that I will describe, it looked like a little octopus, of arms that was fed through our vents and ductwork that would actually help loosen any of the gunk that was within the duct work. We had not seen anything like that before. We had not had a company come out and bring corner guards with a concern for our home and our walls. That's something we have never experienced with our cleanings before in the past, the companies we've utilized. They were a duct cleaning company. I don't think they had the experience in the HVAC systems as a whole. I have never had one of our previous cleaners come out and even comment to me about the duct work we have in our house that there's any complexity to it, that we have multiple mains or multiple returns and how those correlate to the vents, the duct work system itself, or even reaching what I will call the furthest spaces.
One of the biggest benefits that we hope to gain out of this is a way to not wake up with that congested feeling every day, and that has already improved in just the couple of weeks it's been. Our second benefit is to maybe get a little bit more life out of our air filters and, you know, hope that we can spread that changing out just a little bit more. But just now, getting on to a regular duct cleaning schedule that will be a little more spread out and doing that at the appropriate times and with the right company. And not that every company is bad or that things happen, but make sure you're calling the expert in the job you need done.
