• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
Image Map
  • Home
  • Podcast
  • About Us
    • Our Story
    • Contact
      • Blogger DIY Project Submission
      • Contact Us
      • Guest Post Submission
      • PR, Advertising and Partnerships
      • Brands and Media That We Have Worked With
      • Speaking Events
  • Frugal Living
    • All Things Frugal
    • Homemade Products Gallery
    • Garden
    • Family Life
    • Travel
      • Travel Tips & Resources
      • Travel Deals & Coupons
    • Savings
      • Find Your Store Deals
      • Freebies
      • Deals
  • DIY
  • Finance
    • All Things Finance
    • Finance Tips & Resources
      • Meeting Your Financial Goals
      • Managing Household Finances
    • Dropping Debt
    • Making Money From Home
    • Over 100 Ways to Earn Extra Income
    • Our Financial Journey
  • Recipes
    • All Recipes
    • Produce Tips
    • Breakfast Ideas
  • Printables
  • How To Blog
    • Start Here
    • Resources
    • Detailed Blog Income Reports

How To Clean Air Vents Like a Pro, But Naturally and Frugally

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read our disclosure policy here.

August 26 by Cassie 11 Comments

How To Clean Air Vents

We have shared a lot of cleaning tips as well as a lot of DIY cleaning recipes. I want to now share How To Clean Air Vents. 

This past week, our family’s environmental allergies have started kicking in for the late summer/early fall allergens. This often prompts me to do a more rigorous “fall cleaning” than a “spring cleaning” due to us suffering from our allergies more in the fall than the spring. 

There are a lot of things I do around my home and ways that we have naturally tried to prevent allergies from cleaning tricks, to having less carpet (currently only in the bedrooms and on the stairs going upstairs) and more laminate or wood throughout the house, wood blinds and a high powered air cleaner. Even this past summer, we made an upgrade to our heating/air conditioning unit with a RGF Reme Halo Purification system with ionized hydro-peroxides (in other words, purifying with hydrogen peroxide for a natural, healthful solution). I have had a goal of buying one of these and getting it installed for a while. We saved for it and finally got it! I do think it has kept our allergies at bay already this year. We installed it in May. 

But another thing I do often during this season is wash all my curtains, and clean out my vents.  It got me thinking that I haven’t shared what I like to do to clean inside my vents in my home. So I wanted to share how I get them clean on a dime and naturally! 

I will share my tips, but I only snapped a few pics because I was wearing gloves and it was hard to take photos with cleaning gloves and too annoying to keep taking them off. But I will explain as much as possible.

I do want to state that I LOVE hydrogen peroxide for so many natural uses in cleaning and personal care. I simply love it. In fact, it is my natural, health-concious dad that has really got me excited about using hydrogen peroxide for so many things. He uses it for everything. He has it in a spray bottle and uses it for so many things around my parents home and personally. In fact, we like to think of my dad like the dad in My Big Fat Greek Wedding with the Windex. That is my dad, but with hydrogen peroxide instead. 

We use food-grade hydrogen peroxide for homemade personal care recipes, but the 3% solutions in the grocery store will work just fine for cleaning. You will see below that this is the main product I use in my natural vent cleaning (not to mention the hydrogen peroxide purifier we added to our air conditioning/heating unit in the spring). 

How To Clean Air Vents

For the vents:

  • I simply remove the register (cleaning tips for this below)
  • Then I vacuum out loose debris, sticking the hose down the vents as far as I can to catch any remaining, unseen debris
  • I then use an old toothbrush and hot, soapy water to “scrub” the inside as far as I can reach down the vent, but most of the caked on debris will pile up where there is a “neck” in the system, which is generally when the vent to the room and the vents throughout the house connect. That connection point tends to gather yucky dust, debris and gunk. This bend is where most of the scrubbing takes place. 
  • Then I wipe out the loosened debris with the rag and soapy water. 
  • I want it to get an overall wiping, dusting, cleansing, and purification of my vents so I actually buy the spray hydrogen peroxide bottles, they are around $1, but even cheaper if you buy bigger bottles and add it to a spray bottle. I show how I make Homemade Jet Dry on Facebook HERE with that same product, so you can see what I am talking about. 
  • But before I spray inside the vent with hydrogen peroxide, I open the bottle and add about 5 drops of my favorite essential oil. I love lavender or lemon for this purpose. I use THESE OILS and there is a great price on them right now. 

That is my overall natural cleaning and purification of the vents and this really does wonders for our allergies and for the smells in my home. 

The second part is cleaning the registers. I will first tell you that we replace any registers that are bent, paint chipped, etc. as the metal, white registers we have are around $7 at Lowe’s and Home Depot. So any that have to be replaced, just simply get replaced for that low price. 

How to clean the registers effectively and break up the caked on ickiness:

  • While I am cleaning out the vents, I collect all of the registers and put them in a bin in my shower.
  • I add a few squirts of dish soap, plus 5 TBSP of Borax, and a 1/2 cup of baking soda. It’s very similar to my homemade Mr. Clean Magic Eraser recipe.
  • The purpose of this mix is to break down the grease, grim and ickiness that collects on these registers (especially ones from the kitchen floor).
  • Then I fill the bin with the hottest water I can muster from my shower faucet.
  • Let this soak during the duration of cleaning the vents, which will probably be about an hour. 
  • Once I have the vents cleaned, I will get a bowl of soapy water with borax and baking soda (the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser recipe exactly) and pull out each soak register and scrub it clean with the mix and old toothbrush. This will remove it all beautifully and make them look brand new! 
  • Dry them off and place them back over the vents. 

Now you can breathe easy because the dirt, grime, dust, debris and ickiness is gone, and you have cleaned with natural products and a bit of essential oils for a nice, yet natural, smell! 

For “touch ups” between cleanings (I try to clean my vents once a year), just simply keep a bottle of the hydrogen peroxide spray on hand, add the essential oils and spray each vent and register periodically for that fresh smell. 

I am determined to fight the environmental allergies in my home as much as possible. I hope this one method will help you, your family and your home as well. 

How do you clean your vents? 

See more DIY cleaning ideas and recipes

How To Clean Air Vents

 

Filed Under: Cleaners, Daily Dose of Thrifty, Essential oils, Homemade Products, House, Natural Solutions

Previous Post: « 30 of the BEST Educational Freebies To Cover Every Grade and Subject
Next Post: How To Get 90% off Textbooks, While Making a Little Money »

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Amie

    Thank you SO much for this tip. I have needed to get my vents cleaned for a long time, but it is so expensive to have a company come do that. I will get right on this today!
    Also, we added a whole house heppa filter to our house a few years ago and we love it! Our allergies were instantly calmed and the amount of dust flying around in the air and on furniture has been reduced to almost nothing – which is really nice.

    Reply
  2. michelle doolittle

    I put cheesecloth under my vents, cut large enough that it comes up around the vent. You can see it, and it may not be the prettiest, but it will help if your furnace ever backfires, like ours did! It cost over 22,000 to have a company come in and clean for a week. The backfire put a nasty oily film on everything in the house, and it’s not something you can clean yourself. Our insurance company did pay, thankfully, but the cleaning company told us that cheese cloth would have contained the backfire yuck. Now I just do it automatically and it also helps with anything coming through the vent.

    Reply
  3. STACEE SEVERINO

    So we have floor vents and I was wondering how the heck do you get way deep in there? My adult step-daughter stayed in our home last year and some how she managed to get a lot of water in the vent all the way from the guest bathroom into the master bathroom and now there is a damp, yucky, mold smell that I can’t stand!! I don’t know what to do to get it clean and safe for me and my husband again. We are on limited income and could never afford to have a professional come out and clean the air ducts darn it.

    I’ll try spraying the hydrogen peroxide, thanks for that tip.

    Reply
    • Cassie

      Hi Stacee,

      Honestly, you can only get so far without a professional. But I have found that 90% of the gunk and yuckiness is within a reachable area. In your case, I would put gloves on and reach down as far as possible with the vacuum hose first, which should get quite far down! Then I would use a long handled scrub brush and scrub, then stick a rag on the end of the scrub brush to wipe dry. You might be able to reach much of it, especially if you do this at both ends of the line (the guest bathroom and then the same process at the master bathroom). It might not get 100% of it, but you should be able to get a significant enough amount that it will hopefully reduce the mold and mildew quite a bit! Let me know how that goes!

      Reply
  4. Pepyone

    Someone sprayed patchouli oil in my vents.
    They are ceiling vents.
    When the heater comes on, the smell is unbearable. How do I get rid of the smell. I can see the oil spots with a black light but I’m concerned it’s inside the duct.
    Help!

    Reply
  5. Joy

    Thank you for sharing your method for air duct cleaning. I love your recipe for cleaning the registers. All natural is the best. What do you use to dry them off completely? Do you just sit them out in the sun?

    The way I keep up with my hvac vents is changing out the filter once a month. I enjoy clean air in my home, so a new filter every month is worth it to me.

    Also, love you idea of cleaning your curtains. I should probably do that, because everyone in my home has been sneezing a lot. Didn’t think that there’s dust there too!

    Reply
  6. Delores Mann

    Very good on cleaning the vents. We have mice in and around the out part of the house but not in the house. We have a dirt room where our furnace and hot water tank is under the house. One time a mouse got in the vent of my room and maybe other times but did not get in the house. I have a lot of allergies and mice urine poison is one. I want to clean the vents to get that poison out of the air when the vents are in use. How do you suggest how I can do this. What ever product that I use it would have to kill the urine in the vent. After I clean the vents what could I do to keep them from coming in the vents? It has to be a smell that they hate and that isn’t bad for me to smell.

    Reply
  7. Ada

    Cool tips. I once tried to do it myself, and it turned out badly, besides, it polluted everything that was next to the duct. I think the easiest solution is to hire local specialists. I used the site https://lodiairductcleaning.com/ for this task and was satisfied

    Reply
    • Steven

      Polluted? What does that mean???

      Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Spring House Cleaning For Busy Moms | Frugal Nesting says:
    March 6 at 9:17 am

    […] How To Clean Air Vents Like a Pro, But Naturally and Frugally via The Thrifty Couple […]

    Reply
  2. 9 November Home Maintenance And Safety Tasks — Real Estate Spice says:
    October 30 at 5:37 pm

    […] Clean your vent covers and duct areas. Take a look here where this couple shows you how to clean your air vents like a Pro.   […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • RSS
  • Twitter

Read About Our New Book

Read About Our New Book

Check Our Our Podcast!

Check Our Our Podcast!

Get a Deal on Our Book Now!

Looking for Inspiration?







Our Most Popular Articles

Our Most Popular Articles

Copyright © 2023 · The Thrifty Couple · Please check out our Privacy Policy and our Disclosure Policy.