Air-Duct Cleaning

I know on a lot of RV's the ceiling ducts are nothing more than channels cut in the Styrofoam insulation. I would think a rigorous duct cleaning with long wands/rods etc might tear up the Styrofoam. On the heat ducts I also imagine that the ends are not screwed in like solid duct work in a house. Most is probably flex tubing and hose clamped or zip tied on. Again I would exercise caution here so as not to perforate the duct or pull it from any connection. Things you may not know when damage is done let alone fixing it if you do know.

Effy wrote:
I know on a lot of RV's the ceiling ducts are nothing more than channels cut in the Styrofoam insulation. I would think a rigorous duct cleaning with long wands/rods etc might tear up the Styrofoam. On the heat ducts I also imagine that the ends are not screwed in like solid duct work in a house. Most is probably flex tubing and hose clamped or zip tied on. Again I would exercise caution here so as not to perforate the duct or pull it from any connection. Things you may not know when damage is done let alone fixing it if you do know.

Exactly.......

Any 'mechanical cleaning' will damage duct work.

Turn on furnace an use a vacuum hose down registers.
Turn on AC Fan and do the same.

Once the grill is taken off, it is very easy to see how the duct is made. You can use a mirror and flashlight to look both ways down the duct to see if there are any obstructions.
Some RV's use metal duct work for the furnace duct. Some use a sandwich type of construction for the floor and they just cut out a portion for the duct. If it is any kind of rigid duct, it is doubtful that a vacuum hose will damage it.

If they're from Maryland then they're stinkbugs. They tend to colonize in an out-of-the-way place (attics, behind furniture, definitely in ducting if they can get in) and reproduce and, as luv2dsgn mentioned, bombing or just spraying them with Raid will not kill them, the tough little buggers. Best is to pull out every drawer and check the undersides for the colonies, then shop-vac everything, get the hose up into the furnace ducting and even under the air conditioner housing. I've seen some products here in Maryland that say they are specifically designed to kill stinkbugs, but I'm not sure how effective they might be, especially with pets in the coach. Don't crush them or the reason for their name will become annoyingly obvious - a friend of mine nailed it when he described the smell as "a really green fart."

If you can't get a shopvac hose into the duct, consider sticking an air compressor hose into a narrow duct to blow whatever's inside down to the end of the duct where you might get better access.

I'm reading these comments about duct cleaning and replace, in my case, the word stinkbug with ladybugs. Ladybugs keep reappearing and we don't have many annually in our primary home area. They hitched a ride somewhere we've traveled and took up residence in the camper. I know what a stinkbug is and thankfully I don't have that fight.

What I would do is to take off al the grills,. plug them all up but one, put the fan on high and blow them out one at a time. You also can take a piece of chees cloth, wet it and hold over the open vent to catch any thing that comes out. I worked on duct systems, and find not much dirt etc. builds up in supply lines because forced air blows it out

In my opinion Vacuuming the duck is best option for you. The vacuum will eventually suck the bugs. Additionally you can also use any powerful blower for this purpose. Chose any professional and powerful blower/vacuum for this purpose like Hitachi RB24EAP or Husqvarna 350BT. These two are good enough. You can use neem oil,soapy water or bug zappers, in case you still have live bugs.

If you decide to go with a cleaning service be sure to ask exactly how they do it. We were considering having it done to our stick house shortly after we built it. When we talked to one of the services part of their process was to spray some adhesive type spray into the ducts after cleaning. Their reasoning was that it would keep dust down in the future. Needless to say if this procedure were to be applied in the motorhome ducts sometime in the future you could have a nice collection of stink bugs glued to the inside of the ducts. Probably not a good plan.