Supply & Return Duct Cleaning in Alamo Heights
Targeted source removal for the runs that actually need it.
01Alamo Heights — the housing record
What Alamo Heights actually has behind its walls.
Before anyone quotes a duct job here, this is the stock they are quoting against. It is public Census data, and it is different in every city we cover.
- Housing units
- 3,581
- Built pre-1980
- 67%
- Built 2000s
- 10%
- Built since 2010
- 6%
- Gas heat
- 44%
- Electric heat
- 51%
- Single-family
- 64%
U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates (2023), tables B25034, B25040 and B25024. Percentages are rounded and describe the city, not your house.
What that means for ducts
Retrofit-era ductwork
About 67% of Alamo Heights's homes went up before 1980, which is before central air was designed into a house rather than added to it. Duct runs in that stock were threaded through attics and crawl spaces after the fact, often more than once, and the flex in them has had decades of Texas attic heat. Expect route surprises, expect joints that have worked loose, and expect a system nobody has opened.
That is a reading of the city’s stock, not a diagnosis of your home. Which of it applies to you is exactly what the camera settles — and why we would rather run one than quote from a postcode.
02Working in Alamo Heights
The part that changes from street to street.
Most of what stands inside the Alamo Heights city limits predates the era when central air was designed into a house rather than added to it. On these 78209 streets, Spanish Colonial, Tudor revival and 1920s bungalow stock, the ductwork was threaded in later: through attics that were never meant to be conditioned, through pier-and-beam crawl spaces, around plaster walls that left no room for a chase. What you have is a retrofit, sometimes the second or third one, and no two houses on the same block took the same path. So we map the system before we clean it. Heating here is split roughly down the middle between gas furnaces and electric equipment, which means neighbors can have genuinely different dust and humidity behavior. And the live oak canopy that makes these streets what they are loads returns hard from late December through March. Sometimes the honest answer is better filtration, not a cleaning.
The Argyle
- Olmos Park line ·
- Terrell Hills ·
- Lower Alamo Heights ·
- Cambridge
County
Bexar County
Same standard in Alamo Heights as everywhere else.
Source removal to the NADCA ACR standard, a written quote before anything is touched, and camera photographs of your own runs before and after. We are not going to re-argue that on every city page — it is set out once, in full, on the service page.
- Camera confirmation of which runs need work before you approve anything
- Negative-pressure source removal on the affected trunks and branches
- After photos of every cleaned run
- A written note of the runs verified clean and left alone
- From
- $199
- On site
- 2–3 hours
- Scope
- 4 lines
Prices shown are starting estimates and may change with the condition, access, and scope we find on site. Only a written quote from an on-site visit is a price we commit to.
03Supply & Return Duct Cleaning — in this stock
Cleaning a system that was added, not designed in.
In pre-1980 stock the runs were threaded through the house after the fact — around plaster, through crawl spaces, across attics that were never meant to be conditioned. Two consequences for a cleaning: the route is rarely what the plans suggest, so the system gets mapped on camera before anything is agitated; and joints that have been flexing through forty Texas summers can let go under negative pressure. We would rather find that with a camera and quote the repair than discover it with a vacuum running.
How do you know cleaning part of the system is enough?
The camera decides, not a hunch. We scope the whole system first; if debris is concentrated in the returns or specific branches, we clean those and document the rest as verified clean.
Why are return ducts dirtier than supply ducts?
Because they run upstream of the filter. Returns pull raw room air — dust, pet hair, fibers, pollen tracked in on shoes — straight into the ductwork before anything filters it.
04Book in Alamo Heights
Three fields, and a person calls you back.
Tell us the ZIP and we will tell you what your system likely needs — including, sometimes, that it needs nothing yet. Nothing is charged until you have approved a written quote.
05Questions
Asked in Alamo Heights, answered straight.
How do you know cleaning part of the system is enough?
The camera decides, not a hunch. We scope the whole system first; if debris is concentrated in the returns or specific branches, we clean those and document the rest as verified clean. If footage shows buildup everywhere, we'll say a full cleaning is the honest recommendation — with the photos to prove it.
Why are return ducts dirtier than supply ducts?
Because they run upstream of the filter. Returns pull raw room air — dust, pet hair, fibers, pollen tracked in on shoes — straight into the ductwork before anything filters it. Supplies only see air the filter has already scrubbed. That asymmetry is why return-side cleaning is often the smartest partial job.
Our Alamo Heights house sits on pier-and-beam. Do ducts under the floor need different attention than attic runs?
Yes. Crawl-space trunks live in unconditioned, humid air, and older under-floor insulation absorbs moisture instead of shedding it. We look for sagging supports, rodent entry at the perimeter and torn liner before quoting anything. In a lot of these 78209 houses the finding turns out to be a repair rather than a cleaning.
Will duct cleaning help with the live oak pollen that coats everything here each spring?
Only partly, and we would rather you knew that up front. Oak pollen mostly enters through doors, windows and envelope leaks, then gets recirculated. Cleaning removes what has already settled inside the system; it does not stop next week's load. A properly sized, well-sealed return filter does considerably more for you.
The house dates to the 1930s and the ducts have never been cleaned. Is that a problem by itself?
Age alone is not a reason. EPA has never shown that routine cleaning prevents illness. What we actually find in Alamo Heights retrofits is more often mechanical: a run disconnected above a plaster ceiling, a crushed elbow, a boot that lost its seal decades ago. That is worth fixing on its own merits.
Supply & Return Duct Cleaning nearby
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