Who You Are Calling

Aliso Viejo sits in the South Orange County coastal-foothill belt: Aliso Viejo, Irvine, Mission Viejo, Laguna Niguel and surrounds. The air here does specific things to ductwork. Rain stops for six to eight months, so dust never gets washed out. Santa Ana offshore winds push decomposed-granite dust and chaparral and coastal sage particulate into every attic vent. Spring brings pollen off eucalyptus, olive, ash, sycamore and the pepper and acacia planted all through the 1970s-90s tracts. Wildfire smoke arrives most years. Closer to the coast, the marine layer pulls moisture into return paths. Because the climate is mild, systems cycle on and off instead of running hard, so whatever settles in the ducts stays there.

Two housing generations cover most of our calls. Pre-1980 tracts in Tustin, Mission Viejo, Lake Forest and older Newport and Laguna have rigid sheet-metal trunk-and-branch in attics, or crawlspace runs on raised-foundation coastal and historic homes. The 1985-2006 master-planned communities, Aliso Viejo, Ladera Ranch, Rancho Santa Margarita, Foothill Ranch, newer Irvine villages, are almost all R-4.2/R-6 flexible duct in vented attics, and late-summer attic temperatures over 130°F are hard on flex jackets and mastic. We work on Carrier, Trane, Lennox, Goodman, Rheem and American Standard equipment. A crew shows up with a truck-mounted vacuum, pulls the registers, seals off every opening so the system stays under negative pressure, then runs rotary brushes and air whips through each branch back to the trunk and plenum. Sheet metal takes brushes well. Flex gets a gentler tool so the inner liner doesn't tear. We photograph before and after so you can see what came out.

Plenty of the time we tell people to wait. If your ducts are three years old and the return filter has been changed on schedule, cleaning them is not going to do much, and we'd rather say so. Often the real issue is somewhere else: a filter slot that leaks around the frame, which is a conversation about air filter replacement; attic flex with failing mastic at the boots pulling 130-degree air into the supply, which is duct sealing; or an evaporator loaded with pollen and dust so the airflow is down before it ever reaches the ducts, which is coil cleaning. As for what a cleaning runs, the honest answer is that it tracks the system: how many supply runs you have, whether it's one zone or two, how reachable the attic or crawlspace is, and whether the runs are sheet metal or flex. A single-system condo in Aliso Viejo and a two-system house with a tight crawlspace in older Laguna are not the same job, and we'd rather walk it first than guess over the phone.