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

It’s not fun to think about, but often times dust isn’t the only thing that is in your duct system. You may hear animal noises coming from air ducts and notice you have freeloading guests. You can attempt to lure the creatures out but they may not leave their babies if they are nesting. Call Finch Air Conditioning & Heating for a thorough duct cleaning and we will assure your duct system is free of all these unwelcome house guests, such as:

Creepy-Crawlies

Not much is worse than working to kill a spider and watching it run into your air vent. It’s out of reach now and all you can do is lay in your room and imagine the thing laying all those spider eggs. You may even believe you hear a couple scampering around your duct system. No worries. Finch Air Conditioning & Heating will come see you and give you a complete duct cleaning and make sure that spider and any of her creepy-crawly friends are good and gone. Babies, too.

Rodents

When raccoons, mice, and other furry visitors find themselves in your duct system, normally through gaps in the duct work and cracks in the foundation or home exterior, it causes multiple issues. First, squirrels, mice, or raccoons can leave droppings behind and can ruin anything they get into, including holiday decorations or old baby clothes you’re keeping in your attic. Second, animals tend to chew, which can leave you with exposed wiring. That combined with the twigs and dried grass they’re likely carrying in to build a nest, and that creates quite the fire danger in your attic, behind your walls, and in your duct system. A thorough duct cleaning can eliminate rodent droppings or nests, but you may also need to call an expert wildlife removal company to remove the mice, squirrels, or other wildlife and possibly an electrician if there has been any damage to wiring.

Birds

Birds typically look for safe and warm places to nest, like your air vents. Nests mean babies, which means they are feeding babies, and that means BUGS. If you discover birds in your vents, you’ll probably end up with six-legged and eight-legged critters in your home. But that’s not the worst part. Birds assemble nests in your vents, and given the large amount of materials they use to construct said nest, it can result in completely clogging a vent, obstructing any airflow. As with rodents, a full duct cleaning from Finch Air Conditioning & Heating can get rid of any droppings, feathers, or other likely illness-carrying leave-behinds. You might also need a professional wildlife removal company to actually remove the birds from air vents or attics.

Mice in Air Ducts

If you’ve got mice in your air ducts, you should take steps to quickly remove them. Mice chew through electrical wires and leave feces like all rodents, but they also grow their population quickly. And when they run around in the ducts, treating it like the road system of your house, they usually pass away inside. This creates an unsanitary situation, and you may notice it due to the smell.

You probably suspect mice due to the noise you hear – lots of scratching and scrabbling in metal. Or you could actually see one making an escape through the vents in your walls. You could even confirm their passage by inspecting the ducts for mice droppings. Either way, if you think there’s mice you have some choices. You could trap them yourself, by placing traps inside each vent and checking them in the morning. Or you might decide to contract a specialist.

If you have verified that the mice are gone, you will need to have your ducts thoroughly cleaned by an HVAC company. If mice have been there, they will have left droppings in your ducts. Mice leavings are toxic, and if you don’t remove them from your ducts they can make your household sick. Finch Air Conditioning & Heating offers duct cleaning services that will remove most debris from your home’s airways.

Call Finch Air Conditioning & Heating now for a thorough duct cleaning to help make sure the air you and your loved ones are breathing is healthy and pest-free.