Air Duct & Dryer Vent Cleaning questions from Fort Bend County homeowners

Often it is growth on the coil or in a damp low spot of a run, and in a county where afternoon humidity sits near the EPA's 60 percent ceiling that is common. The camera settles it. If it shows growth, the coil gets cleaned, the run gets cleaned and resealed, and an EPA-registered antimicrobial labeled for HVAC use goes on afterward at $99 to $149. If it shows dust, the cleaning alone usually ends the smell and nobody sells you the sanitizer.

Original flex that has spent 30 years in a Gulf Coast attic. It sags between its straps, the dust collects in each low spot and stays damp, and the collars have usually pulled loose at the plenum. The cleaning puts the whole system under negative pressure, works every run with brushes and air, reseals the collars with mastic and moves the insulation back over any bare stretch. Replacement comes up only when a liner has split, and the photos show that before anyone talks price.

Because the vent runs up through the attic and out a roof cap, usually 25 to 40 feet with several elbows, right at the 35-foot limit in the code. A run like that packs with lint inside a year, which is why towels take two cycles and the dryer top gets hot. It is cleaned once a year, from the dryer to the cap, with the cap lifted and the airflow measured on both sides of the job.

$395 to $495 for a single-system home, everything from the return grilles to the supply registers, resealing included. $250 for a second system the same day. $129 for the dryer vent alone, $475 to $575 for both. A camera inspection first is $79, credited toward cleaning. The quote is built from the square footage and the number of systems, and the invoice matches it.

One cleaning, after the builder is gone. More than nine in ten Fulshear homes were built since 2000, and a new system runs through weeks of drywall sanding and texture spray before closing. That dust sits in the flex until it is pulled out under negative pressure, and until then it blows out as a white film on the registers. Jordan Ranch, Cross Creek West and the newest Sienna sections are where most of those calls come from.

Yes. About one in eight of Fort Bend County's roughly 330,000 housing units is in a multifamily building, but the share is close to half in Stafford, three in ten inside Richmond's city limits and one in five in Rosenberg, and the apartment communities there and along US 59 commonly have long or shared dryer vent runs. An annual cleaning with photo documentation is what property managers and their insurers typically ask for. Each vent is photographed before and after, the per-unit price comes from the vent count and the run lengths, and the manager gets a dated report for the file.

Texas adopts the International Residential Code statewide, and the edition varies by city in Fort Bend County: Sugar Land is on the 2024 codes, Missouri City and Katy on the 2021 edition, Rosenberg on 2018, and Richmond adopted the 2024 package in 2026. Every edition since 2018 caps a dryer exhaust duct at 35 feet, deducting 5 feet for every tight mitered 90-degree elbow and under 2 feet for a smooth long-radius one, and requires smooth metal duct with no screws protruding more than an eighth of an inch into the airflow, a backdraft damper at the termination, and no screen on it. The work is the same in every city: rigid metal on the shortest path, long-radius elbows where a turn cannot be avoided, a damper cap and no screen. Repair and rerouting is $150 to $400.

Once a year for most households, twice for large families or any run that goes through the roof. Most second-floor laundry rooms in Fort Bend County vent through the attic to a roof cap, and those long runs are exactly the ones that clog and come apart. The National Fire Protection Association counts about 13,820 home fires a year involving clothes dryers, and failure to clean is the leading cause at about a third.

The blower compartment is vacuumed and photographed on every duct job. Cleaning the blower wheel and the evaporator coil is a separate service at $249 to $349, and in this climate it is the one most often worth adding, because a damp coil is where the musty smell lives. Texas lets an unlicensed crew clean ductwork from the supply plenum to the grilles if nothing is cut, no electrical connections are changed and only grilles come off. Opening the air handler to clean the blower wheel and coil goes beyond that, so that work is done by or under a TDLR-licensed air conditioning contractor.

Do not run the system until someone has looked. That is the EPA's guidance for any system that may hold mold, and a flooded air handler qualifies. The camera inspection comes first, then cleaning, and sanitizing only on what the camera shows. A run that was under water is usually replaced rather than cleaned, and that is priced from the photos.

Texas has no separate duct cleaning license. TDLR rules allow duct cleaning without an air conditioning license as long as the work stays inside the duct system with no cuts or electrical changes, so insurance and method are what matter. The crew carries general liability insurance, works to the NADCA ACR standard, and sends before-and-after photos.