Houston Duct Pros is a referral service for air duct and dryer vent cleaning across the greater Houston metro. It exists because the job is sold badly here — as a $99 coupon at one end and a vague “whole system” at the other — and because the one fact that would let a homeowner judge a quote, where unlicensed duct cleaning stops and licensed HVAC work starts, is almost never on the page.
This site does not clean ducts and does not offer to. When you call or send the form, the inquiry goes to one independent duct and dryer vent cleaning contractor covering your part of the metro — one of seven zones, from Katy and Cypress in the northwest around to League City and Clear Lake on the bay — and that contractor quotes the job, in writing, under their own business name. If the scope calls for anything inside the sealed part of the system, a Texas-licensed air conditioning contractor does that part under their own license, and you are told so up front.
Nothing here is a bidding pool. You do not get six calls. You get one contractor, a written scope, and a checklist on this site to compare it against.
Texas does not license duct cleaning as such. The Department of Licensing and Regulation’s air conditioning rules let a person without a contractor license clean the air distribution system as long as the work stays between the supply plenum and the supply grilles, and between the return grille and the air handler intake; makes no cuts to the ductwork or plenums; changes no electrical connections; and disassembles only removable grilles and registers. That is the job this site refers.
The same rule says what does need a license: applying disinfectants, anti-fungals or anti-microbial products to the ducts, the plenums or the system — the rule calls it biomedical remediation — along with anything that opens the air handler, cleans the coil or the blower, or cuts an access opening. That work belongs to a licensed air conditioning contractor, appears on a quote under their license, and is why no license number appears on this site: it has none to show, and displaying someone else’s would be a violation of the same rules.
Most of what goes wrong in this market happens at that line. The $99 special that turns into a $900 “sanitizing” on the driveway is usually an unlicensed crew selling licensed work. The site is arranged so you can see the line before the truck arrives.
The EPA’s position is that duct cleaning has never been shown to prevent health problems. The site sells cleaning as what it is — removal of what has accumulated — and not as medicine.
Dusty ducts do not measurably raise a bill. Crushed, leaking or disconnected ones do, and those are repair problems, which the site says when it sees them.
There is no interval. Clean when one of five specific things is true, which for many Houston homes is never, and for a house that just came out of a remodel is now.
Nearly every house in this metro is slab-on-grade, which puts the air handler and every foot of trunk and branch duct in the attic. Much of the country runs ductwork through basements; Houston has none, so the system lives where summer temperatures pass 120°F, the insulation is blown-in and loose, and the duct itself is flexible, internally insulated and rated for fifteen to twenty-five years. Harris County’s median home was built in 1988. Fort Bend and Montgomery counties’ were built in the mid-2000s, mostly two-story, mostly on two systems. Between the two, a very large number of houses are running on original ductwork that has never been opened, and a very large number of newer ones have just crossed the age where first-generation flex starts to fail.
Add the region’s remodeling rate, its humidity, its pests, and the fact that a two-story floor plan routinely vents the dryer through the roof, and the reasons to look inside the ducts here are more specific than they are in most places. The service-area pages on this site are written around that: what the housing stock in each part of the metro was built with, and what that means for the ducts.
There is no email address on this site, on purpose. The phone number reaches a line for this site, and the form leaves a written note of the problem and the zone. Phone and form end up with the same person. Say what you are seeing, roughly where the house is, and how many air handlers it has if you know.
Houston Duct