Air duct work in Fair Oaks Ranch, TX

On the ground in Fair Oaks Ranch

Every housing unit in Fair Oaks Ranch is a detached house and almost none of it is old, so nobody here has decades of accumulation to remove. What these houses have instead is scale. A large plan on a large lot usually carries two systems and sometimes three, with trunk lines crossing an attic longer than most houses are wide and a set of zone dampers standing between the plenum and the rooms. That changes the economics of this work, and it is worth saying directly: a company pricing by the vent will produce a very large number for a house like this, and most of that number buys the cleaning of branch runs that were never the problem. The dampers are more often the problem. A zone motor that has stalled part way open, or a bypass damper feeding supply air straight back to the return, produces exactly the symptoms people attribute to dirty ducts, which is one wing that never reaches setpoint and equipment that runs far longer than it should. Natural gas barely reaches this community, which strikes the flue off the checklist entirely and leaves the coil above each air handler as the one surface that stays continuously wet.