Duct Cleaning in Des Moines, IA
Tell us about your home, and a licensed contractor who covers Polk County will get in touch.
Tell us about the job
It takes about a minute.
Eight months of heat pushes a lot of air through your ducts
Your furnace runs October through May here, eight months of the year. On the cold nights, the kind that average 16°F in December through February, it cycles on and off for hours at a stretch, and every cycle pushes air through the same ductwork. Dust and whatever settles in the return sits there and gets stirred up and recirculated the whole time the system runs.
Polk County has seen 21 winter storms and 191 damaging wind events over the past ten years. Storms like that mean power interruptions, and 15% of Iowa households went at least 24 hours without power in 2024. When a system sits off during an outage and comes back on, whatever was sitting in the ducts gets pushed through the house again the moment the blower restarts.
- 8 months
- October through May, your furnace pushes air through your ducts
- 3 months
- June through August, your air conditioner does the same
NOAA nClimDiv, 1991–2020 normals
- How often should air ducts be cleaned?
- There is no fixed number of years that works for every house. Look at what is actually going on inside your ducts. If anyone in the house has allergies, you have pets that shed, or you just finished a remodel, that is a reason to have them checked sooner rather than later. Pull a vent cover and look inside. Dust buildup or dirty registers when you wipe them are the sign it is time, not a date on the calendar.
- Is air duct cleaning worth it?
- It is worth it when there is a real reason for it, not on a fixed schedule for its own sake. Signs it is worth doing now include dust that resettles soon after you clean the house, a musty smell when the furnace or AC kicks on, or visible debris around the vents. It will not lower your heating bill or fix a furnace that is running poorly. If your ducts look clean and nobody in the house is bothered by dust or odor, you can wait.
- What does air duct cleaning involve?
- A contractor connects a vacuum system to your ductwork and uses agitation tools, brushes or compressed air, to knock loose dust and debris from the inside of the duct walls, then pulls it all out through the vacuum. They will also clean the supply and return vents, and check the blower compartment near the furnace since dust collects there too. A thorough job covers every duct run in the house, not just the ones you can see from the main floor.