2012 Was a HOT year. I haven’t lived in a house that had air conditioning since I lived in Phoenix – 2002. This past summer, it was unbearable. The Camden house has an A/C unit, but in my crawl space inspection I found the air handler had a significant mouse nest in it. We didn’t want to turn on the A/C until the problems were fixed and the ductwork completely cleaned.
So, that’s what we did. I replaced the sheet metal on one end of the air handler. In doing that, I found the condensate drain was mostly clogged with mouse nest stuff, which caused water to back up in the bottom of the air handler and rust it out. I patched all that up and made up a new duct connector. We put in new flexible ductwork as well. The old stuff had mouse holes chewed through it.
We also used duct mastic to seal up as many return lines as possible. The crawl space isn’t the most habitable place (though it is 1000% more so now) and I didn’t want the return lines sucking air from the crawl space. I’m sure it isn’t perfect, but it is better now.
After we got that all repaired, we called some duct cleaners. I shopped around a lot. The problem in the end was most places didn’t serve Camden. We ended up going with a company called Hi Tech Duct Cleaning. It ended up great. In doing research, duct cleaning has a bad rap. There are lots of scams and false advertising out there. Their web site was reassuring to me that they weren’t a scam. That, and talking to the owner of the place on the phone. We were really happy with the results.
It was nice to finally have A/C!
Steve Wilson 