Question 1

My house is a 1930s bungalow with a crawlspace and ducts that were clearly added later. Can those even be cleaned?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and that's a big share of the work here. A lot of Burbank bungalows were built with wall or floor heaters and got ductwork retrofitted into the crawlspace or attic decades later. Those runs are often flex or older rigid trunks squeezed into tight spaces, so we clean them from the registers and the plenum rather than cutting a lot of new access. The one thing we check first is joint condition, since on the oldest retrofits we still find original cloth-tape sealed joints that have gone brittle. If a connection is barely holding, we'll tell you before we put negative pressure on it, because agitating a duct that's already failing can separate it.

Question 2

Why does my house get dusty again so fast after cleaning?

Accepted Answer

Burbank sits on the valley floor with freeway and airport-adjacent particulate, and the cooling season runs long, so your system is pulling air a lot of months out of the year. The bigger factor in older homes here is the return. Many of these houses have a single narrow hallway return grille that was undersized the day it was installed. That means high velocity at one point and a filter that loads up quickly. Cleaning the ducts removes what's settled inside them, but if the return is starved and the filter is cheap or loose in its frame, dust keeps getting pulled past it. We'll point out what we see at the return while we're there.

Question 3

What usually turns out to be the actual problem in older Burbank homes?

Accepted Answer

A few things come up repeatedly. Decades of settled dust in crawlspace trunks that have never been opened: these systems are old enough that it accumulates in layers rather than as loose debris. Failed or deteriorating cloth-tape joints at the plenum and takeoffs, which pull crawlspace or attic air into the supply. Undersized returns that make the whole system work harder than it should. Duct cleaning addresses the first one directly and lets us see the other two clearly, but it doesn't fix them on its own, and we'd rather say that up front than let you expect it.

Question 4

Can you come out same day?

Accepted Answer

Sometimes, depending on the day and where the crew already is. Burbank jobs are a little harder to slot in on short notice than newer-construction neighborhoods because crawlspace access takes time to set up and we don't want to rush an older system. Media District apartments and condos are usually quicker since the runs are shorter and more accessible, but we may need building access arranged ahead of time. Call and we'll tell you honestly whether today is realistic or whether the next morning works better.

Question 5

What makes the price higher or lower on a house like mine?

Accepted Answer

Access drives most of it in this city. A raised-foundation home where the crawlspace is open and the trunk is reachable costs less to do properly than one where the retrofit was threaded through a low or obstructed crawl, or where ducts were run into a converted attic with limited headroom. Older homes also tend to have more individual runs added piecemeal over the years, and each one adds time. Postwar homes with a more straightforward layout generally land lower than the 1920s and 1930s retrofits. Apartments in the Media District are usually the simplest. We look at the system before we commit to a number, because guessing from the street doesn't work on housing stock this varied.

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