Consequences Of Not Having Clean Household Air Ducts
If you have a centralized HVAC system in your home, you’ve got an efficient solution to the problem of keeping a home warm in the winter and cool in the summer, without requiring too much extra effort or equipment to get the job done.
Your furnace handles the heating issues, while a condenser installed just outside the home does the duty of keeping things cool. Both of these systems rely on the air ducts running throughout the home to carry and distribute the warm or cool air that has been processed by your HVAC systems.
Unfortunately, many homeowners think that while they have to worry about a breakdown of either the furnace or the air conditioner, the air ducts, just being a series of pipes with no moving parts, will work perfectly, forever.
Dirt, as innocuous as it may seem, can impact the performance of your air ducts, and if that happens, it can affect the money you pay every month for your energy bills, and, more importantly, the health of residents in the home.
Increasing Energy Demands
The physical threat of dirt is very easy to underestimate. By itself, in small amounts, dirt doesn’t seem capable of doing anything other than staining an area.
But over a long enough period, an accumulation of dirt can eventually take root in an air duct system, and if it can make its way closer to the heart of your HVAC system, it can have a big effect.
Dirt is capable of clogging up filters and interfering with the natural air flow of the air ducts themselves. Once that happens, both your AC and your furnace will need to work harder and longer to reach the desired temperature in your home and maintain it. And that means higher bills every month.
Sinus Risks
Unfortunately, money risks can also be accompanied by health risks. Dirt is not made up of just one substance, so anything from human skin flakes to fur, to dander from dogs and cats can make up the dirt that winds up in air ducts.
If the dirt gets lodged there and exposed to the right conditions, the bacteria or mold spores in the dirt can continue to grow and become an infestation. This can cause the same sinus irritations as one might get during pollen season, except that it lasts all the time as the furnace or AC continually reintroduces irritants into the air.
The Asthma Risk
Anyone with an asthmatic condition is put into a certain amount of risk by dirty air ducts. There is a much higher chance that the allergens and other pollutants in the air duct can provoke an asthma attack. This means that the longer a person stays in this area, the higher the risk.
Unfortunately, if this is a residence, that means that an asthmatic person has a much better chance of avoiding an asthma attack if they don’t go home, which is an unacceptable proposition. In these instances, the air ducts need to be cleaned quickly once the problem has been identified.
