DuctCleaning.ws

Independent guide · we don’t clean ducts

Fact-Checking Policy

Direct answer

Every figure on this site is traced to a named source with a date, from a page we actually retrieved rather than a search result about it. Before we treat several sources as agreeing, we check whether they share one origin. Before we treat a figure as current, we check the age of the number rather than the age of the page. When sources genuinely disagree, we publish the disagreement and explain it.

The basic rule

No figure appears on this site unless we can name the organization that published it, the title of the document it came from, the date on that document, and a link to it. That information is recorded before drafting starts and it travels with the figure through every page that uses it. If any of the four is missing, the figure does not run.

This applies to numbers, to dates, to quotations, to attributed positions, and to descriptions of what an organization recommends. It also applies to negatives. When we say something could not be verified, that too reflects a search we actually performed, and we describe what we found instead.

What we read, versus what we saw about it

A search engine will show you a sentence that appears to contain the fact you were looking for. That sentence is not evidence. It may be truncated, it may be a heading rather than a finding, it may be several years old with no date shown, and it may be a description of a source rather than the source itself.

So we separate two categories and never let one masquerade as the other:

  • Retrieved. We opened the page or document, read the passage in place, and recorded the date shown on it. Only retrieved material can be cited.
  • Seen in a search result. Useful for finding out that a claim exists and where it might be documented. It is a lead, not a citation, and it is never the basis for a published fact.

This distinction is what stops phantom sources from entering the site. Two examples we encountered and rejected: an Architectural Digest duct cleaning cost page and current Consumer Reports duct cleaning cost data. Both get referred to secondhand. Neither exists. A workflow that cites what search results imply would have published both.

Checking whether apparently independent sources share one origin

This is the check that produced the single most useful finding on this site, and it is the one almost nobody performs.

Duct cleaning cost data appears in roughly eighteen publications. Read casually, that looks like broad agreement from many independent researchers. Traced properly, it collapses into about three real origins.

Worked example: tracing published duct cleaning cost figures back to their origins
OriginFiguresHow many publications carry itHow we established the link
Angi / HomeAdvisor project data $389 average, $271 to $509 typical At least five Angi owns HomeAdvisor and the two publish identical figures. NerdWallet attributes its numbers to Angi data openly. Today’s Homeowner’s $388 is the same series a revision earlier.
EPA’s per-system range $450 to $1,000 per heating and cooling system At least seven The range is identical across all of them, including the National Air Duct Cleaners Association (NADCA), and it originates in EPA’s consumer guidance rather than in any of their own research.
Genuinely independent Fixr at $300 to $700; Housecall Pro at $400 to $1,000, built up from $90 to $150 per technician-hour and a stated margin Two Different methods, different figures, arrived at separately. Both land between the other two lineages, which is why we weight the middle of the range.

Three consequences follow, and all three are visible in our published pages. We never describe the $389 figure as confirmed by five publications. We never present NADCA’s cost guidance as corroborating EPA’s, since it is the same number. And we treat the widely reproduced vent-count table, showing 8 vents at $200 to $400 and so on, as what it actually is: a per-vent rate multiplied by a vent count, printed four times.

The general form of the check: before counting sources, look for shared ownership, explicit attribution to a third party, identical figures down to the dollar, and arithmetic that reproduces one source’s rate. Any of the four means you have one source, not several.

Flagging stale figures that wear a fresh date

A page can be updated without its numbers being updated. Publication dates describe pages; they do not describe the figures inside them. Our standing example is the most cited price in the whole category.

Worked example: the EPA cost figure

EPA’s guidance states that duct cleaning typically, though not always, ranges from $450 to $1,000 per heating and cooling system. The live page carries a “last updated February 19, 2026” stamp, and dozens of publications cite it as a current federal figure.

We checked the same sentence against the January 2021 archived snapshot of the page. It is identical, word for word. The figure is therefore at least five years old and has never been inflation-adjusted. The 2026 stamp refers to the page, not to the number.

We did not drop the figure, because it is still the reference point for full-scope per-system quoting. We disclose its age every single time we cite it, which no other publication we found does.

The procedure generalizes. When a figure carries weight, we look for an archived earlier version of the page and compare the sentence, not the page. If the sentence has not changed, the date on the page is not the date of the number, and we say so where the number appears.

The same reasoning governs what we exclude. A Thumbtack cost page dated August 2017 is real, retrievable, and far too old to present as current pricing. An undated page is treated as unverifiable for currency and is not used to establish that a figure is current.

What we do when sources disagree

Our first assumption is that a disagreement is definitional rather than empirical, because it usually is. The steps, in order:

  1. Establish what each source is actually measuring. The largest apparent conflict in duct cleaning pricing is between roughly $389 and $450 to $1,000. Once you look, it is not a conflict at all: the first is what homeowners reported paying for a typical single-system job, and the second is a quote range for a full-scope cleaning that includes the air handler, coils, and blower. They price different products. Explaining that is more useful than picking a winner, and it is the core of our cost guide.
  2. Apply the source hierarchy. Where the conflict is genuine, a government or court source outranks a trade association, which outranks a commercial publisher. The editorial policy sets out the order.
  3. Check dates. A newer figure from a weaker source does not beat an older figure from a stronger one, but it does get reported alongside it with both dates shown.
  4. Publish the disagreement. If two credible sources conflict and neither is clearly better, we say both numbers and say that they conflict. We do not average them into a figure that nobody published.
  5. Refuse the tidy number when there isn’t one. Published figures for mold work associated with duct systems run from about $500 to about $10,000 across eight publications, a twentyfold spread, because they are whole-house remediation prices rather than a duct cleaning add-on. The correct output there is an explanation, not an average.

Claims that fail the checks

The process only means something if things actually fail it. These did, and none of them appear as fact on this site.

  • The “$99 whole house” scam special. Every instance traced back to competitor marketing content rather than to a regulator, a Better Business Bureau study, or a news investigation. Documented enforcement figures cluster between $29 and $69, so we cite the Washington State record instead.
  • Technicians planting debris in ducts. Found only in industry marketing writing. No government, court, or investigative source. We treat it as folklore.
  • Fake before-and-after photographs. Supported by a single archived state page, with the corroborating article paywalled. Too thin to state as established practice.
  • Cash-only payment demands as a scam marker. No government, Better Business Bureau, or trade-association source supports it.
  • Federal Trade Commission enforcement against duct cleaning companies. Verified negative. A duct cleaning case does appear in the nationwide robocall sweep the agency coordinated in June 2019, but that entry is a state attorney general action, and the agency’s own actions in that sweep concerned other industries entirely.

The full list, including the price figures nobody publishes, is on the facts and figures page.

When a check fails after publication

Verification is not a one-time event. Sources get revised, pages move, and figures we labeled as current become stale. Scheduled reviews are set out in the editorial policy, and anything we get wrong in the meantime is handled under the corrections policy, which commits us to disclosing substantive corrections rather than quietly editing them away.

What to do next

Sources & references