In 1973 when I was only 13 years old, he would sometimes drop me off at one of his commercial contracts and leave me there with an extension ladder and several boxes of new air filters. I've spent the better part of many days just changing air filters in rooftop units and vacuuming dirty evaporator coils with a small vacuum. He'd usually pay me $50 for the day, which was alot of money for me at the time.

As soon as I turned 16, I got my drivers license and promptly took over the maintenance part of his business. He only did commercial jobs, so I got used to going up and down ladders at a fairly early age. At the age of 17, I was working on my Refrigeration apprenticeship and already had the equivalent of 2 1/2 periods of the five required periods of 2,700 hours each.

My duct cleaning career started back in 1979 in Vancouver at the age of 19. This was when I first got involved in residential work and it was something that I quickly mastered. Duct cleaning was a dirty job but it was something that I really enjoyed.

In my first few years of cleaning ductwork, I had literally crawled through miles and miles of ductwork with an air hose. I was working 14-18 hour days doing this and sometimes I wasn't sure if it was day or night.

By then, I had lots of experience at completely taking apart rooftop HVAC units, cleaning all the various parts and re-installing them, and also held a part-time job of replacing heat exchangers in commercial rooftop units. That was all very good and useful experience.

Vancouver was nice, but since everyone always seems to come back to Toronto, I did too. After a few days I started working at a duct cleaning company, one of only five that were in the Toronto area.

I took an evening course and aquired my Ontario Gas Fitters license, and that was followed up by a series of evening courses at George Brown. High efficiency gas furnaces were something new at that time, so I found that course to be quite amazing and helpful. The electrical course for HVAC controls was also very useful, as were several others.

After that I started a heating company and was moonlighting by cleaning gas furnaces in the evenings while I still held my duct cleaning position. It didn't take long before I was installing gas furnaces and central air conditioners and doing service calls also. I learned alot about the HVAC business in this time and also installed dozens of air duct systems and took an air balancing course too.

While I was at that duct cleaning company I met my current business partner, John. We were driving to Orillia one night to do a duct cleaning job there and that's when we finally decided to start up our own duct cleaning company. This was back in February, 1986.

We chose the name City Duct Cleaning because we both liked the name, and at that time there was no internet either. The Yellow Pages listed companies in alphabetical order, so it worked out well.

We've enjoyed providing our customers with a quality, honest service and have reaped huge benefits because of it. We have seen several other duct cleaning companies come and go in the Toronto area since we've been in business. They weren't in it to provide a good service like we were, but were in it just to take as much from people as they could. No wonder they didn't last!

At this time we are enjoying a very high rate of repeat customers, and have won several prestigious awards in the field of Air Duct Cleaning.