When we were newlyweds, my husband and I bought a house since we lived with our parents before marriage.
I was so excited to start homemaking but was a bit clueless about things like HVAC maintenance.
Several months after our move, my allergic rhinitis started flaring up. I am allergic to fur and pollen, and we didn’t have any pets, and it wasn’t the season for hay fever. My husband thought that maybe we had mold, so he called the mold hunters, who, after inspecting the entire house, only reported finding fur in the ductwork. That’s how we discovered my trigger and immediately scheduled an HVAC technician to do an extensive duct cleaning and get the fur out without damaging the HVAC unit. As the cleaning happened, I moved back to my parent’s house while my husband worked with the HVAC professional to restore our home’s air quality. He also found out that the previous homeowners had some cats, which they didn’t mention, hence the fur stuck in the entire air purification system. We are fortunate that the HVAC company offers home service for the cleaning because it happened faster than we expected, which the local contractor explained was because they’d installed the air quality systems in the house, so they were familiar with the setup. Once the cleaning was done, the technician also changed our air filter because it was already contaminated with fur and other dirt. We opted to go with the disposable filters, hoping that they would keep the air clean and help with indoor comfort, which is the best allergy management decision for me.