If you share your Johnston home with a dog or two, you already know where the fur goes: everywhere. That includes the return vents. Return air grilles pull air from your rooms back to the furnace, and they pull hair and dust along with it. Some gets caught by the furnace filter. A lot of it settles in the return ducts before it ever reaches the filter.
Top Notch Chimney Sweep & Services is family owned and operated and has been working in Central Iowa since 2002. Our technicians are certified in air duct cleaning, and pet households make up a big share of the duct work we do in Johnston.
Why Pet Hair Ends Up in the Ductwork
Pet hair is light, it clumps, and it sticks to dusty surfaces. Once a little builds up inside a return duct, more catches on it. Over time you can get mats of hair and dust along the bottom of the duct and around the turns. Floor registers collect their share too, especially in rooms where pets like to sleep.
That buildup doesn’t just sit there. Every time the system runs, air moves across it and some of that dust can get stirred back into circulation. Cats that like to sit on floor registers in winter add their share right at the opening.
Allergies and Sensitive Households
We aren’t doctors, and we won’t promise that cleaning your ducts will cure anything. What we can say is simple: if someone in your home is bothered by dust and pet dander, it makes sense to remove the dust and hair that has piled up inside the system that moves air through every room. Our main air duct cleaning page covers indoor air and dust buildup in more detail.
How We Clean a Pet Household’s Ducts
We start by examining your heating and cooling system and noting where the heaviest buildup is likely to be. Then we connect a powerful HEPA vacuum so everything we loosen gets pulled out of the system. Using specialized brushes, we work through the returns and the supply runs to break hair and dust free from the duct walls. We’ll also point out any holes or defects that are letting in dust or wasting conditioned air.
Tips between cleanings
- Change the furnace filter on schedule, and more often when your pets are shedding heavily
- Vacuum the return grilles and floor registers when you vacuum the floors
- Keep pet beds a few feet away from return vents if you can
- Brush dogs outside during heavy shedding season so less hair makes it to the floor in the first place
Don’t Forget the Dryer Vent
Pet hair on clothes and bedding ends up as lint, and lint ends up in the dryer vent. A clogged vent makes the dryer run longer and hotter and is a known fire risk. We can clean it on the same visit with our Johnston dryer vent cleaning service. And if you burn wood in the winter, our certified sweeps offer chimney sweeping too.
Learn more about everything we do locally on our Johnston service area page.
Book your Johnston air duct cleaning by calling (515) 249-6337, or schedule online.
