Air Duct Cleaning in Cupertino, CA

Frequently Asked Questions

1. My house backs up toward the foothills and everything is dusty by July — is that coming through the ducts?

   Some of it, yes. Homes on the west side of Cupertino sit right where oak pollen, dry grass seed and hillside dust blow down in late spring and summer. A return that pulls from a hallway or a leaky attic plenum will move that load through the whole system. It shows up as grit on supply registers and a film on furniture that comes back a few days after you dust. Cleaning the trunk lines, branches and the return side removes what has settled. Keeping it out afterward is mostly about filter fit and sealing the return. We'll tell you which of the two is actually your problem instead of selling you both.

2. Our house is an original 1960s ranch on a slab. Where are the ducts and does that change the job?

   On the slab-built ranch and two-story tract homes here, the ductwork is overhead in the attic, not under the floor. That's good news: we can reach almost everything without opening walls. The older runs are sheet metal trunks with takeoffs, and most of these houses have had sections swapped to flex over the decades. Sheet metal cleans well and tolerates brushing. The later flex is more delicate, so it gets handled differently. If an old flex run has collapsed or torn above the insulation we'll show you a photo rather than clean around a section that needs replacing.

3. We did a full rebuild on the lot with multiple zones. Is that a bigger job?

   Usually, yes, and it's the main thing that moves the number in Cupertino. The large rebuilds from the 1990s onward on original lots often carry two or three zoned systems with long flex runs out to far bedrooms, plus more registers than an original ranch of the same footprint. Cost tracks system count, register count and how much of the run is long flex, not square footage on paper. A single-system older ranch is at the lower end of what we do. A three-zone rebuild with thirty-plus registers is a different day's work. We'd rather walk the attic first and give you a real figure than guess from an address.

4. How soon can someone come out?

   Typically within a few days for normal scheduling. Two things compress that window in this area: the first warm stretch when everyone switches to cooling at once, and smoke episodes from west-side fires, which hit Cupertino harder than cities further out in the valley. When smoke has been in the air for several days our calendar fills fast. If you've had the house closed up and the system running, call sooner rather than waiting for the air to clear.

5. Can you do it same day if we just closed on a house?

   Sometimes. Same-day depends on what's left in the route and how big the system turns out to be. A single-system ranch we can often fit in. A multi-zone rebuild with long runs usually needs its own slot. Worth mentioning if you're buying: on the older tract homes here we frequently find attic flex that was added piecemeal, with kinks or disconnected takeoffs feeding insulation instead of a bedroom. If that's what's going on, cleaning won't fix it, and you'll want to know before you spend money.