As with anything, if you want something to work efficiently, it must be clean. Your outside air conditioning condenser needs attention just like the interior air duct system does. For a quick simple solution….and a way NOT TO SPEND MONEY…get the garden hose and occasionally wash off the dirt, grass clippings, etc. from the outside unit. Because when it builds up with dirt and debris, the efficiency is not there.
 

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With the hot summer we are having, you are most likely to be operating your air conditioning system more than not. But why is it not cool in the house? Chances are that your air filter is very dirty, if not plugged, therefore inhibiting proper air flow.

Replace your air filter or if you can’t, then call us and we will send a technician over to help with your problem.

City Duct Cleaning (416) 293-1800

Here are some ways to help reduce the amount of dust during a home renovation.

• seal off the supply and return air/intake registers or install filter media in each air vent 
• keep your work area clean 
• close doors to rooms which are not in use 
• don’t operate the heating and cooling system until after thoroughly cleaning up the dust 
• use the highest efficiency air filter 
• if an air duct cleaning is required then call City Duct Cleaning

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• Permanent – This filter is designed to last a lifetime. You should never have to replace it.
• High Efficiency – Designed to “eat” 95% of the dust and debris in your system.
• Washable – Easy to maintain. Wash or vacuum. Feel free to put this filter in your dishwasher to clean it. It can be cleaned 100′s of times without damaging any of the media inside.
• Resistance – Your HVAC system is able to draw air through this filter much easier than a disposable filter.
• Cost –This filter will easily pay for itself over and over. It will save you time and money. Never buy another filter.
• Sizes – They come in all standard sizes and can be custom made as well.

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There are plenty of do it yourself articles available on the internet about how to clean your own gas furnace but I do not believe that any of these articles are really providing anyone with very useful or prudent information. Anyone who cleans or inspects a gas furnace in Ontario has to be a licensed gas technician, and for good reason. Most duct cleaners are not licensed gas technicians, nor are most homeowners. If you’ve gotten some half-information about how to clean your own gas furnace, then how do you know if you didn’t miss something unsafe about your furnace that a licensed technician would have noticed straight away?

Some people could be lulled into a false sense of security thinking that they have cleaned their furnace and now they’re good for another year. But this is really not the case, especially when you don’t really know what you’re looking for.

We’ve posted some information on our site before about keeping your furnace area clear of combustibles and making sure that your furnace is able to get the required amount of air, as well as some other things to watch out for, and that’s about as much information that I think there should be available to the average homeowner anyway.

Those are all easy, common-sense safety items. I would never try to tell someone how to clean their own gas furnace, even if it was going to save them a little bit of money today.

Take this example… If you wanted to save yourself some money, would you search on the internet for some information and then change the brakes on your car? Some people could do it, but it would not be recommended. Some things are best left to a qualified professional.

A gas furnace cleaning and inspection is available with any duct cleaning job that we do at City Duct Cleaning, but we will always send a licensed gas technician to do at least that part of the job.

For optimum performance from your HVAC system, you will need to adjust your air duct system slightly at the beginning of the heating season, and then again at the start of the cooling season.

The reason for this is because warm air naturally rises, which makes it harder for your system to cool your second floor in the summer.

In the summer you should have all of the air vents on the 2nd floor wide open. This also includes any dampers in the pipes that are serving those vents.

On the main floor, the air vents should be about half-way closed, which in turn would force more air to go to the remaining vents which serve the upstairs.

Basement vents including the return air vent(s) should be temporarily closed or sealed. During the cooling season, your basement will be noticeably cooler anyway, so we want to push as much of your cooled air upstairs as possible.

And as always, be sure that there are no obstructions around air vents and especially any cold air return vents or grills.

Also be sure to close the damper in the bypass tube of any duct-mounted humidifier.

For the heating season, it is then necessary to go through the home and make some quick adjustments to the system at the start of this season.

Open the basement vents and be sure that any dampers are open as well. The vents on the main floor should be fully opened, and the vents serving the upstairs should be about half-way closed, with the exception of any specific rooms that seem to be hard to heat.

The reason you would want the basement vents to be open now is because since heat rises, the heat in the basement will warm the floor above it. And the same applies to the air coming out of the main floor vents.

You can fine-tune this procedure even further to help solve problems with cold rooms in the home. If you partially close any one damper in the system, that will cause more air to blow out somewhere else.

If you find that certain rooms are difficult to heat or cool, then those rooms are more than likely on your second floor, or possibly above a garage or some other unheated area. Keeping the door open to that room will help the airflow, especially if there is no return air directly in that room. Sometimes it is not so convenient to always keep the door to a specific room open, but this alone can sometimes solve the problem of reduced airflow.
 
Keeping your air filter clean is crucial for the operation of your furnace, to help maximize energy savings and for your own personal comfort. A dirty air filter will not allow the proper amount of air to flow through your HVAC system and especially through your ducts.

Making these simple adjustments twice per year takes about five minutes to do each time. Adjusting your air volume dampers and air vents is something that we can easily do for free while we are in your home cleaning your air duct system.

There are hundreds of clothes dryer fires every year which causes death, injuries and millions of dollars in destruction.

How many people toss a load of wash in the dryer and then go to work or simply go to bed? Watch this story and you probably won’t want to ever do that again.

What causes dryer fires? Experts say its a combination of heat and lint. Not just the lint you can see on your lint trap but the lint you can’t see in the dryer’s exhaust.

It’s a combination of heat and blockage of proper venting. If there’s a buildup of lint in areas that you may not be aware of, such as inside your dryer exhaust venting or piping, you may have a combustible that’s needed to start that fire.

What can you do to protect yourself from dryer fires?

First, look for the warning signs. Does it take higher temperatures to dry your clothes or multiple drying cycles? Both indicate lint blockage. Clean the lint screen before and after every load of clothes, and clean the dryer exhaust duct and vent periodically.

We recommend that a professional cleaning be done at least every two years, but we do have many customers who have us clean their’s annually. The frequency of cleaning needed would be determined by your particular dryer installation and the amount of use that your clothes dryer normally gets. Everyone who has ever had a dryer duct fire in their home has this service done at least once per year.

More tips to reduce the risk of a dryer duct fire include replacing your plastic flexible dryer venting with rigid or metal material. Also periodically clean behind the dryer where lint can build up.

If you are in the Toronto area and require a dryer duct cleaning or wish to have your dryer exhaust duct replaced or just inspected, then give us a call. This service is noticeably more cheaper or cost-effective when it is combined with our complete home air duct cleaning service.

The Labor Day weekend is the unofficial end to the summer for many, and since we’ve also been having almost fall-like weather these past few days, I think it might be prudent to run this post once again.

Getting Your Heating System Ready For The Fall offers some helpful advice, and the only other thing I might add now that another year has gone by is when we get to the part where your furnace fan comes on, make sure that you actually feel the air blowing from the vents. Heat will rise and some warmth will come out of them if the furnace is on. Even if the fan is not. So make sure you have good air blowing out.

If your air flow is not good enough then you might want to consider having your air ducts cleaned. And if you are interested in upgrading your air filter to something better, there are many options available. We can hook you up with just about any type of air filter there is. We supply and install them all. From 1″ exterior furnace filter racks to electronic air cleaners to whole house HEPA systems. We do it all and we can offer some good free advice as well. Just call if you need us.

Electronic air cleaners are very common in the Toronto area. These units produce up to 15,000 volts of electicity to “zap” any dust particles that pass through the cells, and it is quite common to hear an arcing sound for a second or two any time the air cleaner “zaps” another dust particle.

These units normally come in sets of two cells, and have two prefilters as well. Electronic air cleaners need to be cleaned on a regular basis, and the frequency of cleaning is slightly different for each house. The rule of thumb is that you should remove and clean both the cells and prefilters at least once every three months, and more often if you are seeing that your cells are getting dirty more quickly. The air cleaner cells when new, look shiny and silver, but over time the collector plates in the cells become black. That happens because every time the air cleaner zaps a dust particle, that particle is turned into carbon, which collects on the plates of the cell. So over time, the cells get black even when the air filter has been properly cleaned and maintained.

As the cells collect more and more carbon, the cells lose efficiency. The only way to bring the condition of your air cleaner cells to brand new again and get it back to its ultimate efficiency is to have the cells acid-bathed from time to time.

The manufacturer recommends that your electronic air cleaner cells be acid-bathed at least every three years, and it seems like very few people are aware of this fact.

At City Duct Cleaning, we provide an air cleaner maintenance plan where we will visit your home, remove the cells (they are cleaned off-site), and then deliver them back to your home when they are ready. And when they do come back, they have been cleaned so thoroughly that they look like brand new again. When we remove the cells from your furnace, we also install a temporary air filter that stays there until we return, usually in about 10 days.

When we clean any air duct system, we always clean whatever air filter is there, and this also applies to electronic air cleaners. With our duct cleaning equipment on site, we use compressed air to clean all four items and this does a very nice job of removing all the dust.

There are a few ways that air cleaner cells can be cleaned by the homeowner. The easiest way is to take them outside, spray them with some type of cleaner such as Mr. Clean, etc., and then rinse them off thoroughly with a garden hose. Do both the cells and both the prefilters.

Some people place the cells into their dishwasher, and this also cleans the cells quite thoroughly too. Even with regular cleaning, air cleaner cells still do require a periodic acid bath.

If you have not yet had your air cleaner cells cleaned in this manner, then call us for a free estimate.

Is cleaning your own gas furnace worth the risk? Every gas-burning appliance should be cleaned and inspected by a licensed gas technician at least once per year.

With newer high-efficiency gas furnaces, it seems to have become common practice for many homeowners to stretch their yearly furnace inspection to once every two years now, and that is mostly due to two reasons.

Newer gas furnaces burn much cleaner and efficiently these days, especially as compared to the standard conventional gas furnaces that were common in the 70′s and 80′s. The second-most common reason for putting off regular maintenance is due to economic reasons.

There are still some homeowners who insist on cleaning their own furnaces, and we strongly advise against this practice for obvious reasons. A cleaning and inspection includes the gas technician checking certain safety controls and looking for safety issues.

A good technician can take in so much information about your furnace in just a few quick minutes, and if a homeowner were watching the technician doing this service you wouldn’t even realize that he just checked over a dozen things just by looking at your furnace and its configuration. So the process of cleaning the furnace itself then looks fairly simple.

Here are some pictures of what happened to one homeowner in the Toronto Area recently who decided to clean his own furnace because he wanted to save the cost of hiring an experienced technician to do the job.

The furnace was so badly burned that no one was able to determine exactly what he did to cause this fire.

But the mess was very extensive. The plastic insulation on all the wires in the furnace burned, and the smoke was sucked into the fan compartment. The smoke was then promptly distributed throughout the entire house via the air duct system. This highly toxic black smoke caused over $100,000 damage to the home, and when his insurance company found out that the homeowner caused this fire himself, they refused to pay.

The lesson to be learned is that people should not mess with any gas appliance. Always read your furnace manual to understand what the user can and cannot do to maintain the system.

Furnace Maintenance Tips

There are, however, a few very simple things that you can do to help ensure the safe operation of your furnace. First and foremost, is forget about do-it-yourself furnace maintenance unless you are a licensed and highly trained gas technician.

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