What's Crawling Around in Your Home's Air Ducts?

You don’t want to think about it, but occasionally dust isn’t all that is in your duct system. You might have heard animal noises coming from air ducts and notice you have freeloading visitors. You can try and lure the critters out but if they’re nesting they may not leave their babies. Call Church Services for a thorough duct cleaning and we will assure your duct system is free of all these uninvited house guests, such as:

Creepy-Crawlies

Nothing is worse than aiming to kill a spider and watching it run into an air vent. You can’t get to it now and all you can do is lie in bed and imagine it laying all those spider eggs. You may even believe you hear a couple scuttling around your duct system. Don’t worry. Church Services will come see you and give you a complete duct cleaning and make sure that spider and any of her bug friends are evicted. The offspring, too.

Rodents

When rodents make their way into your duct system, normally through holes in the duct work and fractures in the foundation or home exterior, it causes several issues. First, rodents can leave droppings behind and can destroy anything they come across, including holiday decorations or old baby clothes you’re keeping in your attic. Second, rodents tend to chew, which can leave you with exposed wiring. That combined with the dried grass and leaves they’re likely taking in to build a nest, and that creates quite the fire hazard in your attic, behind your walls, and in your duct system. A professional duct cleaning can eliminate rodent droppings or nests, but you may also need to call an expert wildlife removal company to remove the rodents and maybe an electrician if there was any wire damage.

Birds

Birds normally get into safe and dry places to nestand your air vents are perfect. Nests mean eggs, which means they are finding food for babies, and that means BUGS. If you have birds in your vents, you’ll presumably end up with creepy-crawlies in your home. But that’s not the worst part. Birds construct nests in your vents, and given the vast amount of stuff they use to assemble said nest, it can end up completely clogging a vent, stopping any airflow. As with rodents, a professional duct cleaning from Church Services can remove any droppings, feathers, or other potential illness-carrying leave-behinds. You might also need animal control to actually remove the birds from the vents or attics.

Mice in Air Ducts

If you’ve got mice in your home’s ducts, you should take steps to remove them. Mice chew through wires and leave feces like most rodents, but they also add to their population quickly. And when they run around in the ducts, treating it like the highway of your home, they may die in the ducts. This creates unhealthy living conditions, and you may notice an unsavory odor.

You might think of mice because of the noise you hear – lots of scratching and scrabbling inside walls. Or you might actually see one making an escape into the heating vents in your home. You might even confirm their presence by inspecting the ducts for mice leavings. Either way, if you think there’s mice you have some choices. You may trap them yourself, by setting traps inside each vent and checking them in the morning. Or you can hire a professional exterminator.

After you’ve determined that the mice are removed, you should have your ductwork thoroughly cleaned by an HVAC company. If mice have been there, they will have left feces in your ducts. Mice leavings are toxic, and if you ignore them in your ducts they can make you sick. Church Services offers duct cleaning services that will eliminate most debris from your home’s airways.

Call Church Services today for a thorough duct cleaning to help make sure the air you and your loved ones are breathing is healthy and pest-free.