Air Duct and Dryer Vent Cleaning in Fort Myers and Lee County

Hurricane Ian came ashore at Cayo Costa on September 28, 2022, a Category 4 at 150 mph. The county's damage map ten days later counted 4,671 homes destroyed and 12,384 with major damage. Many of the houses that came back got new drywall and new insulation, and the dust from all of that work went where the return air took it.

If water reached the air handler or the duct, the EPA's advice is not to run a system you suspect has mold in it. Start with the camera, $79, credited toward cleaning. It shows whether a run can be cleaned and resealed or has to be replaced, and that decision gets made from photos you can see, not from a guess on the phone.

Building at full speed

Lee County has permitted more than 13,000 new housing units every year since 2021, 15,411 of them in 2024, on top of the rebuilding that followed Hurricane Ian in 2022, and the county has passed 860,000 people. Few of those homes had the ducts cleaned before the family moved in. Lehigh Acres, Estero and Fort Myers are now mostly homes built since 2000, and Cape Coral is about half. A system that ran while the walls were sanded and textured is full of fine white dust, and it keeps blowing out of the registers until it is pulled out under negative pressure. One cleaning after the builder leaves is the job, and it is the same one whether the house is new or rebuilt.

Fort Myers itself

Fort Myers has grown from about 48,000 people in 2000 to more than 100,000, and just over half its homes date from 2000 or later, while three in ten date from 1970 to 1999 and about one in seven is older still. The newer homes often still hold drywall dust from construction; the older ones have duct that has spent decades in a Southwest Florida attic, sagging, holding dust in the low spots and sweating wherever the insulation has slipped. Cleaning those means resealing the runs, not just vacuuming them.

The weather keeps that problem going. Morning humidity at Fort Myers averages about 90 percent, and two thirds of the year's 57 inches of rain falls from June through September. Cold supply duct in that attic air sweats at every bare joint. The fix is mastic on the collars and the insulation pulled back over the metal, done as part of the cleaning.

Roof caps and under-slab PVC

A lot of Lee County laundry rooms vent up through the attic to a roof cap, and those long runs are the ones that clog and come apart. The other common layout here runs the dryer vent under the slab in 4-inch PVC, which the Florida code allows for a horizontal run beneath the slab and nowhere else. Those runs are hard to see and slow to dry, and the lint inside packs down in the humidity. Both kinds are cleared from the dryer to the outlet, and the airflow is checked before and after.

Two state licenses in the picture

Florida has no duct cleaning license as such. Two state licenses still come into the job: taking any part of the system apart is air-conditioning contractor work, and mold growth larger than 10 square feet belongs to a licensed mold remediator. Both show up on the state DBPR license search, so you can check a name before anyone opens the air handler.

The price

One system is $395 to $495, everything from the return grille to the last supply register, resealing included. A second system on the same day is $250. Dryer vent cleaning runs $129 alone or $475 to $575 with the ducts.

When you call, say whether the house took water in 2022. That one answer decides whether the visit starts with the camera or with the vacuum.