What's Crawling Around in Your Home's Air Ducts?
It’s unpleasant to consider, but occasionally dust isn’t exclusively what is in your duct system. You might have heard animal noises coming from air ducts and notice you have unwanted guests. You can pull out all the stops to lure the creatures out but they may be nesting and refuse to leave their babies. Call Service Experts Heating & Air Conditioning for a complete duct cleaning and we will ensure your duct system is free of all these uninvited house guests, for instance:
Bugs and Insects
Not much is worse than aiming to kill a spider and seeing it run into an air vent. You can’t get to it now and all you can do is lay in bed and imagine it laying all those spider babies. You may even swear you hear a few scrambling around your duct system. No worries. Service Experts Heating & Air Conditioning will come see you and give you a thorough duct cleaning and ensure that spider and any of her creepy-crawly friends are out of there. Eggs, too.
Rodents
When raccoons, mice, and other furry visitors find themselves in your duct system, commonly through gaps in the duct work and cracks in the foundation or home exterior, it causes multiple issues. First, squirrels, mice, or raccoons can leave droppings behind and can ruin anything they get into, including holiday decorations or baby toys you’re storing in your attic. Second, animals tend to chew, which can cause exposed wiring. That combined with the twigs and dried grass they’re likely taking in to manufacture a nest, and now you have quite the fire hazard in your attic, duct system, and behind your walls. A full duct cleaning can get rid of rodent droppings or nests, but you may also need to call animal control to remove the mice, squirrels, or other wildlife and possibly an electrician if there was any wire damage.
Birds
Birds usually get into safe and warm places to nest, like your air vents. Nests mean baby birds, which means they are feeding babies, and that means BUGS. If you discover birds in your vents, you’ll likely end up with six-legged and eight-legged critters in your home. But that’s not all. Birds construct nests in your vents, and given the vast amount of leaves and grass they use to create said nest, it can wind up totally clogging a vent, obstructing any airflow. As with our furry friends, a full duct cleaning from Service Experts Heating & Air Conditioning can eliminate any droppings, feathers, or other possible illness-carrying leave-behinds. You might also need an expert animal removal company to actually remove the birds from air vents or attics.
Mice in Air Ducts
If you have mice in your air ducts, you should take steps to quickly remove them. Mice nibble on wiring and leave droppings like most rodents, but they also add to their population quickly. And when they run around in the ducts, treating it like the road system of your house, they eventually pass away inside. This creates unhealthy living conditions, and you may notice an unsavory odor.
You probably think of mice because of the sounds you hear – some scratching and scrabbling in sheet metal. Or you may actually spot one making an escape into the air vents in your home. You may even confirm their passage by inspecting the ducts for mice droppings. Either way, if you think there’s mice you have a couple options. You could trap them yourself, by setting traps on the interior of each vent and checking them each morning. Or you can pay for a professional exterminator.
After you’ve verified that the mice are removed, you will need to have your ductwork thoroughly cleaned by an HVAC company. If mice have been living in the walls, they will have left feces in your ducts. Mice leavings are toxic, and if you ignore them in your ducts they can make you and your family sick. Service Experts Heating & Air Conditioning offers duct cleaning services that will clean out most debris from your home’s air ducts.
Call Service Experts Heating & Air Conditioning today for a complete duct cleaning to help make sure the air your family is breathing is healthy and pest-free.
