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

It’s not fun to think about, but sometimes dust isn’t exclusively what is in your duct system. You might have heard animal noises coming from air ducts and realize you have freeloading visitors. You can pull out all the stops to lure the critters out but if they’re nesting they may not leave their babies. Call Atmostemp Service Experts for a comprehensive duct cleaning and we will confirm your duct system is clear of all these unwanted house guests, including:

Creepy-Crawlies

There are few things worse than working to kill a spider and watching is escape into your air vent. You can’t get to it now and all you can do is lay in your room and imagine the spider laying all those spider babies. You may even swear you hear a couple scuttling around your duct system. Don’t worry. Atmostemp Service Experts will come to your home and give you a complete duct cleaning and assure that spider and any of her yucky friends are good and gone. Babies, too.

Rodents

When rodents make their way into your duct system, usually through openings in the duct work and cracks in the foundation or home exterior, it causes several issues. First, squirrels, mice, or raccoons can leave droppings behind and can destroy anything they get into, including seasonal decorations or old toys you’re saving in your attic. Second, those little guys tend to chew, which can result in exposed wiring. That mixed with the twigs and dried grass they’re likely bringing in to create a nest, and now you have quite the fire danger in your attic, behind your walls, and in your duct system. A complete duct cleaning can eliminate rodent droppings or nests, but you could also need to call animal control to remove the rodents and maybe an electrician if there was any damage to the wiring.

Birds

Birds normally look for safe and sheltered places to nestand your air vents are perfect. Nests mean babies, which means they are finding food for babies, and that means BUGS. If you find birds in your vents, you’ll likely end up with creepy-crawlies in your home. But that’s not the end of it. Birds construct nests in your vents, and given the large amount of stuff they use to construct said nest, it can end up completely clogging a vent, preventing any airflow. As with rodents, a thorough duct cleaning from Atmostemp Service Experts can get rid of any droppings, feathers, or other likely illness-carrying leave-behinds. You may also need animal control to actually remove the birds from the vents or attics.

Mice in Air Ducts

If you’ve got mice in the air ducts, you should take steps to quickly remove them. Mice nibble on wires and leave droppings like most rodents, but they also multiply quickly. And when they run around in the ducts, treating it like the highway of your home, they eventually pass away inside. This creates unhealthy living conditions, and you may notice an unsavory odor.

You may think of mice due to the noise you hear – some scratching and scrabbling in ductwork. Or you might actually notice one making an escape through the air vents in your walls. You might even confirm their status by inspecting the ducts for mice leavings. Either way, if you think there’s mice you have a couple options. You may trap them yourself, by setting traps on the interior of each duct and checking them every morning. Or you could pay for a specialist.

Once you’ve verified that the mice are exterminated, you should have your ductwork thoroughly cleaned by an HVAC company. If mice have been living in the walls, they will have left mice refuse in your ducts. Mice feces are toxic, and if you don’t remove them from your ducts they can make you and your family sick. Atmostemp Service Experts offers duct cleaning services that will clean out most debris from your home’s ventilation system.

Call Atmostemp Service Experts soon for a full duct cleaning to help assure the air you and your loved ones are breathing is healthy and pest-free.