If previous owners had animals etc, the return ducks
are the problem.

The house I purchased NEVER had the ducts cleaned before. (50 years)
When I swtiched from oil to gas heating replacing the original furnace
I had the duct profesionally cleaned.

WOW, there was LOTS of crud on the return ducts.
(each room in my house has a return duct and a heating duct)
The heating registers werent too bad, mainly because the crappy
old filtering systems did do somewhat of a good job in its years
of use. The intakes though had dog hair, baseball cards, monopoly
money... All fun things in them.

For the 250.00 I spent I feel I got my moneys worth out of them.
They were there for 4 hours cleaning out the system.
Now that they systems been cleaned, I would LOVE to get some sort
of filters to trap crap from getting into the intake registers...

Can this be a DIY job???? Humm maybe. Thats if you can get into the
ductwork easily with a decent brush or something. To get the stuff
sucked
out of the system they cut a hole by the furnace ducts and attached a
bigass hose from a truck to my furnace. Can you create that kind of
suction needed??? Maybe but not with a standard shopvac.


wrote:
I would like to clean the ducts in my house (1966 ranch; 1400 sq ft
main level - floor registers, 1200 sq ft basement - ceiling registers;
Denver metro.) Nothing _terribly_ wrong with the air flow, but a couple
of the registers are producing mediocre air flow, so I just want to
make sure and do some duct cleaning.
I should add that this is not an issue of anyone in the house suffering
from allergies or anything like that. Just trying to improve the air
flow to make the whole heating/cooling system more efficient.

I've read several threads on this discussion group, and it sound like I
should avoid duct cleaning services, which usually are not worth the
price they are charging. So I'm thinking of getting a shop vac and
cleaning the ducts myself - just push in the shop vac hose as deep as I
can and try to vacuum all the junk.

I'm pretty new to this, so is there a specific shop-vas
type/model/brand that you would recommend for this type of job?
Note: the narrowest vent openings are 1 3/8 - 1.5 in.

I'll appreciate any helpful pointers.
No flames/sarcasm, please

Cheers,
Bubba