How to Reduce Mold in Your Air Duct System

Hey guys, Troy here with The Cleaning Cure Atlanta. I wanted to talk a little bit about air duct cleaning — one of the main culprits for collecting a lot of dust in homes across Atlanta and nearby areas like Marietta, Decatur, Sandy Springs, and Roswell.

Let me back up. For you to have mold in a home or mold in an area, you have to have three things:

• Moisture
• Dust or cellulosic-based material (like sheetrock, wood dust, etc.)
• Mold spores

Well, mold spores are everywhere — especially here in Atlanta’s humid climate — so you already have that in plenty. What you really need to worry about are the other two: moisture and dust.

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The Perfect Breeding Ground for Mold

Here’s a good example of a breeding ground for mold. Hopefully, you can see this — right here is acoustic material that was sprayed by the builder or whoever did it.

It’s one of my pet peeves. I can’t stand it when they do this — they leave the vent covers or the vent boxes wide open when they spray their acoustic and paint inside. It’s really rough, and when it’s rough, it catches dust.

As you can see, all these little dust bunnies and buildup inside — over time, you’ll have a metal vent cover that goes on top of this. It collects moisture or condensation because you have the cold from the air conditioner, and then it’s hot and humid like it always is here in Atlanta, especially in the summer months. You get moisture swirling with dust and air, and when a mold spore hits it — voila, you’ve got mold!

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How to Clean It Yourself (If You Can’t Call a Pro)

If you can’t get a good air duct cleaner to come out (like us here in the Atlanta metro area — we serve homes from Kennesaw to Peachtree City), one thing you can do — and I’ll warn you, it’s a pain — is to scrape all this out.

Here’s how:

1. Get yourself a good shop vac, preferably with a HEPA filter.
2. Put your respirator on.
3. Scrape all this material out.
4. If you’d like, you can mix a little bit of Thieves cleaner — I mix mine 2 ounces to 20 ounces of water — and spray just a little bit. Don’t overdo it; just spray enough to get it slightly soaked so it doesn’t turn into powder when scraping.
5. Then, scrape it off with the vacuum running to catch the debris.

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Tools That Help

Get yourself a bristled end cleaner (like this one shown) — a good, firm brush. Go in and scrape off the rough areas. That will help remove any excess mold growth.

Now, you will still need your air ducts professionally cleaned, where a technician goes through the entire ducting system and removes the buildup inside.

But this particular spot is a main area where mold grows — and it’s very common here in Atlanta homes, especially in older neighborhoods like East Point, Brookhaven, or College Park where the HVAC systems tend to run harder in the heat.

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Why This Matters

If you can reduce that buildup, you’ll also reduce headaches, runny noses, coughing, and other issues that come with black mold exposure.

I’m not going to say this is Stachybotrys, but it’s black, and it’s mold — so I’m just going to call it black mold.

So yeah — if you follow this, it’s going to help you out quite a bit with the air quality in your Atlanta home.

Hope this helps.
See you guys!