Direct answer
Everything on this site is published under a single byline, the DuctCleaning.ws Editorial Team. The work is research and writing done with substantial assistance from AI tools, directed and reviewed by a human editor, and built from primary sources. We have no field technicians, no licensed heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) professionals, no engineers, and no certified mold assessors. What we are good at is finding the public record, reading it carefully, and citing it accurately.
Why one byline
Pages on this site are attributed to the DuctCleaning.ws Editorial Team, an organizational author rather than a named individual. That is a deliberate choice, and it is the honest one. A fabricated expert with an invented biography, a made-up certification number, and a stock photograph would perform better in this category than an accurate description of how the work is done. It would also be a lie, and lying about who wrote something is a strange foundation for a site whose entire product is trustworthy sourcing.
So the byline describes the actual unit of production: a research and editing process, applied consistently, with sources listed on every page so you can go and check.
How the research actually works
Every page begins with a source hunt, not with a draft. The order of preference is fixed:
- Government and regulatory sources. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) guidance, attorney general filings and press releases, court complaints, and federal agency documents. These carry the most weight because they are accountable and, in the case of litigation, tested.
- Standards bodies and technical organizations, where a documented technical position exists.
- Trade associations, including the National Air Duct Cleaners Association (NADCA). Useful, frequently candid about bad actors in their own industry, and always labeled as industry guidance rather than neutral fact.
- Investigative journalism from established outlets, particularly where reporters obtained documents or interviewed named consumers.
- Commercial publishers and cost-data sites, used only for pricing, only when the page is dated and current, and only after checking whether apparently separate publications are reprinting one dataset.
Sources below that line, mainly HVAC company blogs and marketing content, are read to find out what claims are circulating. They are never used to establish that a claim is true. Several of the most confident-sounding assertions in this category exist only in that layer, and we list them in the what we could not verify section rather than repeating them.
Where sources are fetched, they are fetched directly rather than summarized from a search result. There is a real difference between reading a page and reading a snippet about a page, and the fact-checking policy explains how we keep the two apart.
How AI tools are used, and what a human does
This site is researched and written with substantial AI assistance. Being vague about that would be its own small dishonesty, so here is the division of labor.
The AI tools do: search for and retrieve primary documents; extract figures, dates, and quotations from them; compare sources against each other to spot repeated data; assemble draft prose to a specified structure; and check drafts against the site’s own fact base for claims that lack a source.
The human editor does: decide what the site will and will not cover; set the standard of evidence; judge whether a source is authoritative for the specific claim being made; decide what gets published, cut, or labeled as unverified; resolve conflicts between sources; and take responsibility for what appears. When a draft contains a claim that cannot be traced to a source in our fact base, the claim comes out. That has happened repeatedly, and the residue of those decisions is visible across the site in the sections where we say plainly that something could not be confirmed.
The failure mode of AI-assisted writing is fluent invention: a plausible statistic, a study that does not exist, a URL that resolves to nothing. Our defense is structural rather than optimistic. Nothing is publishable unless it traces to a source document that was actually retrieved, with its date recorded. A number without provenance does not get a softer label; it gets deleted.
What we are not, stated plainly
We have no field technicians. Nobody on this site holds an HVAC license, an engineering degree, an industrial hygiene qualification, or a mold assessor certification. We have never operated a negative-air machine, cut an access opening in a plenum, or inspected a customer’s system. We have conducted no testing of our own, and we publish no test results, because we have none.
We also do not have a proprietary dataset. Every price figure on this site is drawn from published sources, traced to its origin, and labeled with how many genuinely independent origins support it. Where the honest answer is one, we say one.
What that means for the reader
Take it as a statement of scope rather than an apology.
We are good at: establishing what EPA has actually said and where; finding the enforcement record and reporting it accurately; tracing a price figure back to its true origin and showing that eighteen publications can share about three of them; distinguishing a documented court finding from an industry anecdote; and telling you clearly when the evidence does not support the thing you were told on the phone.
We are not a substitute for: an in-person inspection of your system; a diagnosis of mold, which EPA notes cannot be confirmed by visual inspection alone and may require laboratory analysis; any judgment about whether your specific ductwork needs work; medical advice about symptoms in your household; or the licensing requirements where you live, which vary and which you should check locally.
The practical version: read us before you call anyone, and read us again with a quote in hand. Then have somebody qualified look at the actual system.
If you can improve a page
If you work in this trade and we have described something in a way a technician would find wrong, we want to know. We will correct it and say we did. Nothing on this site depends on us having been right the first time. See the corrections policy.
What to do next
- Editorial policy — the rules this process runs on.
- Fact-checking policy — the checks, with worked examples.
- About the site — what DuctCleaning.ws is for and how it is funded.
Sources & references
- U.S. Environmental Protection AgencyShould You Have the Air Ducts in Your Home Cleaned?Page last updated February 19, 2026The primary source we return to most often, including on the limits of visual inspection for identifying mold.
- National Air Duct Cleaners AssociationAvoid Air Duct Cleaning ScamsUndatedAn example of trade-association guidance we cite while labeling it as industry guidance.