pianotuna wrote:
Hi,
Any recommendations on having the roof air vents and connecting tubing cleaned and/or treated?
While they are there should the floor vents be done too?
Or is this simply a BAD idea?
I'll pass this along to maybe help guide you.
I restore older campers, mainly from water damage. Most are 15 years old plus. When I take the roof off, all the ceiling AC ducts are exposed and in many cases, I have to remove them to replace a rotted rafter etc.
I have not seen much if any dirt or mold in a ceiling AC duct. Granted this is a smaller limited subset of AC systems, (16 of them) but they have age on them. Here is possibly why. In an RV, there is a filter of sorts (many are just cleanable mesh filters) and the filter is on the inside AC air inlet very close to the evaporator coil. The ceiling ducts are in the AC discharge outlet. Meaning the filter traps most of the dust and can stop a lot of it from ever getting into the discharge ducts. If the owner never cleans the mesh filter, it just clogs, and then there is not much incoming air, thus not much discharge air.
If the owner did away with the mesh filter or never cleaned it very much, then there is little to no filtration and any dust in the camper will end up in the AC system. But, the AC evaporator coil is just past the inlet filter and it traps a lot of the dirt the filter does not get. With no filter, it gets all the dirt and creates a very inefficient system. The ducts would get whatever made it through the coil.
I'm assuming you do not have a new camper, you never said how old it was or if you bought it used. If you take the ceiling air inlet grill down and the filter out, look at the evaporator coil. If the coil is pretty clean, (trust me a dirty coil will have lots of obvious dirt jammed in the coil) then the filter was doing its job and so were you or a prior owner in keeping it clean.
If the coil is clean, or only slightly dirty, then odds are favorable that the ceiling AC ducts are semi-clean also. If the coil is packed with dirt, that needs to be cleaned for sure and you can inspect the ceiling ducts (look inside) as they leave the air box in the ceiling. (pending on the brand/type of AC, you may have to take the air box apart to see the ceiling ducts) If the ducts at the air box are clean then the long ducts to the registers are clean also. And if they are dirty, well then you may have a mess in the duct system.
For the furnace, most of the campers I have restored have flexible ducts that are not in the floor. But even then, while the standard RV furnace has no air inlet filter, I have not seen a lot of dust in the ductwork. There may be some in the bottom of the furnace that settled, but not much.
In the few that had floor ducts, the dirt in the duct was from floor traffic dirt that fell down. It was localized under the register. A shop vac sucks it up.
The RV setup is different than a house with forced air AC/heat. Real long air inlet (suction) ductwork (house length) does have lots of ducts that dust accumulated over the years of running, as the filter is at the furnace and all the dirt and dust dropped along the way in the air inlet ductwork. The downstream forced air registers are a lot cleaner as the filter caught most of it. The home is lived in a lot of years at a time. The RV is not normally lived in long enough to accumulate the dirt a house can as the system did not run as much.
If you or your partner have significant allergies to dust, then cleaning your RV ductwork may be prudent. But now knowing the above, maybe you can inspect and see if you have a problem or not.
Hope this helps
John
2005 Ford F350 Super Duty, 4x4; 6.8L V10 with 4.10 RA, 21,000 GCWR, 11,000 GVWR, upgraded 2 1/2" Towbeast Receiver. Hitched with a 1,700# Reese HP WD, HP Dual Cam to a 2004 Sunline Solaris T310R travel trailer.
