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February 1, 2020

Safety King is proud to announce that it has earned the home service industry’s coveted Angie’s List Super Service Award (SSA). This award honors service professionals who have maintained exceptional service ratings and reviews on Angie’s List in 2019.

“Service pros that receive our Angie’s List Super Service Award represent the best in our network, who are consistently making great customer service their mission,” said Angie’s List Founder Angie Hicks. “These pros have provided exceptional service to our members and absolutely deserve recognition for the exemplary customer service they exhibited in the past year.”

Angie’s List Super Service Award 2019 winners have met strict eligibility requirements, which include maintaining an “A” rating in overall grade, recent grade and review period grade.

January 15, 2020

Allergies & Dust

We get a lot of calls about allergies and dust. Dust is the biggest trigger of allergies worldwide. Anyone who is allergic to dust reacts to either mite constituents or animal allergens with complaints such as sneezing, eye irritations or asthma. An often overlooked factor for dust control are indoor humidity levels. The indoor air humidity plays a major role in the extent of dust turbulence. Experiments show that the adhesion of “moistened” dust to smooth floor surfaces increases dramatically above 30 to 40 percent. In this area, the weight of the dust particles also increases drastically due to water condensation. They stick together, form clusters, and quickly fall to the floor again.

The optimal humidity range for minimizing allergy complaints is therefore between 40 and 60 percent.

Maintain 40-60% Relative Humidity

The most crucial way to protect electronics from dust build-up is to enforce consistent humidity control. By using a whole-house humidifier you can manage interior temperatures and humidity levels far more efficiently. Keeping your relative humidity (RH) between 40-60% is important, as it minimizes the amount of time dust can spend airborne, forcing it to settle more quickly. Additionally, proper humidity control can minimize brittle components, reduce de-soldering occurrences and mitigate instances of electrostatic discharge (ESD).

FULL SYSTEM AIR DUCT CLEANING

While it is not a cure-all, regular cleaning of your entire air duct system including the supply side ductwork, return side ductwork, blower, and components like your evaporator coil can have a dramatic influence on the dust levels you experience in your home or business. According to the National Air Duct Cleaners Association ACR Standard (Assessment, Cleaning, and Restoration) residential air duct systems should be inspected every other year and commercial systems annually! Our 50 years of experience show us that under normal conditions duct systems begin to show significant accumulations of dust and warrant consideration for cleaning in about 3 years. Remodeling/remediation work makes the need for cleaning immediate.

Indoor Air Quality (IAQ)
Indoor Air Pollution and Health

Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) refers to the air quality within and around buildings and structures, especially as it relates to the health and comfort of building occupants. Understanding and controlling common pollutants indoors can help reduce your risk of indoor health concerns.

Health effects from indoor air pollutants may be experienced soon after exposure or, possibly, years later.

Immediate Effects
Some health effects may show up shortly after a single exposure or repeated exposures to a pollutant. These include irritation of the eyes, nose, and throat, headaches, dizziness, and fatigue. Such immediate effects are usually short-term and treatable. Sometimes the treatment is simply eliminating the person’s exposure to the source of the pollution, if it can be identified. Soon after exposure to some indoor air pollutants, symptoms of some diseases such as asthma may show up, be aggravated or worsened.

The likelihood of immediate reactions to indoor air pollutants depends on several factors including age and preexisting medical conditions. In some cases, whether a person reacts to a pollutant depends on individual sensitivity, which varies tremendously from person to person. Some people can become sensitized to biological or chemical pollutants after repeated or high level exposures.

Certain immediate effects are similar to those from colds or other viral diseases, so it is often difficult to determine if the symptoms are a result of exposure to indoor air pollution. For this reason, it is important to pay attention to the time and place symptoms occur. If the symptoms fade or go away when a person is away from the area, for example, an effort should be made to identify indoor air sources that may be possible causes. Some effects may be made worse by an inadequate supply of outdoor air coming indoors or from the heating, cooling or humidity conditions prevalent indoors.

Identifying Problems in the Indoor Environments
Long-Term Effects
Other health effects may show up either years after exposure has occurred or only after long or repeated periods of exposure. These effects, which include some respiratory diseases, heart disease and cancer, can be severely debilitating or fatal. It is prudent to try to improve the indoor air quality in your home even if symptoms are not noticeable.

While pollutants commonly found in indoor air can cause many harmful effects, there is considerable uncertainty about what concentrations or periods of exposure are necessary to produce specific health problems. People also react very differently to exposure to indoor air pollutants. Further research is needed to better understand which health effects occur after exposure to the average pollutant concentrations found in homes and which occurs from the higher concentrations that occur for short periods of time.

https://www.epa.gov/indoor-air-quality-iaq/introduction-indoor-air-quality

How Much Do Dirty Coils Cost You?

The short answer is PLENTY! Dirty coils, or anything that blocks the free flow of air into or out of the evaporator and condensing units can cost you in several big ways:

It will cost you more in electrical energy to run all of the system’s components longer and harder, especially the compressor.
Your refrigeration system may not be able to keep up and a too high temperature may prompt you to call for expensive emergency service.

Your equipment may fail prematurely due to the increased strain dirty coils place on its operation. Refrigerant can return to the compressor as a liquid and cause it to fail due to “slugging”. Replacing a compressor is a capital expense that you would probably want to put off until another day.
Unfortunately, cleaning evaporator and condenser coils is one of the most overlooked maintenance jobs there is. Although your coils are always getting dirtier, even right now as you read this, it is much easier in the short run to just ignore the problem and hope it won’t catch up with you. However, given enough time, it always will. The longer you go between coil cleanings and the dirtier they get, the more it can cost you. It is much smarter and cheaper in the long run to institute a regular preventative maintenance program with coil cleaning being one of the top priorities. How often is regular? Cleanings should certainly happen at least yearly and perhaps more often, depending on how dirty the environment is in which the coils are operating.

Having clean coils makes your system more efficient. Evaporator coils pick up heat from the air circulating inside the building. Condenser coils transfer that heat to the air outside the cooled space. Just by having the evaporator and condenser fans operating and pulling air through the coils, dirt and dust is deposited on them. Dirt and dust are poorer conductors of heat than bare metal, so it takes air passing through dirty metal fins that are attached to the coils of the evaporator and condensing heat exchangers for a longer time to exchange the same amount of heat as clean fins. Dust, especially, can build up over time and reduce the spaces between the fins, so that less air is able to pass through the fins with the same amount of fan power. Let the crud build up as badly as the condenser shown above which is just like an evaporator coil covered with frost that chokes off the airflow, the efficiency of your system will suffer due to increased compressor and evaporator run time.

Without accurately testing the electrical energy going into and the heat coming out of your particular refrigeration system, before and after a coil cleaning, it is impossible to state for certain how much those dirty coils are costing you. Based on such testing of several randomly selected residential and commercial systems industry studies estimate that dirty condenser coils alone are costing the owner of a typical commercial refrigeration unit between $220 and $625 a year in electric energy waste. Assuming an average of $400/unit/year that amounts to a total of $9.7 billion annual loss for the estimated 27 million commercial systems in the U.S. That’s a lot of wasted energy and money!

Many energy-related organizations warn of the danger of neglecting coil cleaning. The U.S. DOE advises that “a dirty condenser coil can increase compressor energy consumption by 30 percent.” and recommends inspecting coils a minimum of once per year. Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) also suggests an annual coil cleaning to its commercial customers as part of its ongoing efforts to promote energy-efficient HVAC-system operations.

The Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP) did a study that had some specific findings: “A dirty condenser coil that raises condensing temperature from 95°F to 105°F cuts cooling capacity by 7 percent and increases power consumption by 10 percent, with a net (compressor) efficiency reduction of 16 percent. In a 10-ton unit operating 2,000 hours a year, this wastes about $250 per year in operating costs. A technician can clean the condenser coil in about 1 hour, which typically costs about $150. In this example, the payback takes just over 7 months.

To make matters worse, dirty condenser coils are perhaps even less than half the story. That is because there are two types of heat exchangers in almost all refrigeration systems that collect dirt from the air passing through them: condenser coils, located outside the cooled space, and evaporator coils, located inside the cooler. Evaporator fans usually run all of the time, or about twice as much as a typical condensing fan, so they have twice the amount of time to collect dust and dirt from the air passing through the fins. And, unlike air conditioning systems, evaporators for refrigeration systems do not have filters that can be replaced, so the dirt builds up on, and in between, the coils and fins themselves.

While also delivering less air, all types of evaporator fan motors themselves consume more energy whenever the airflow is constricted. The Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnership (NEEP) performed tests in which the airflow through an evaporator unit’s coils was blocked in varying amount by sheets of styrofoam to simulate blockage by dirt and dust, frost, or boxes of product stored too close. They found that an old-fashioned shaded pole motor’s used 104 watts when air flowed freely through the unit, but that it increased 20% when they completely shut off the flow of the air, like what one might see with a totally frosted evaporator. An energy-efficient ECM evaporator motor of the same size fared even more poorly, relatively speaking, by burning 43 watts with clean coils and 60% more, or 69 watts, with the styrofoam covering all of the coils. Blocking the airflow in by 75% and an ECM used 23% more energy. Even blocking the flow of air out of an evaporator by only 50% increased the power consumption of either kind of motor about 16%.

What can we advise from this data?

Raise the evaporator temperature by efficiently moving as much air through the evaporator coils. This can be done by regularly (at least annually) cleaning the evaporator coils, straightening any bent fins, being sure that the coils are completely unrestricted, and not blocking the flow of air into or out of the evaporator.
Lower the condenser temperature by efficiently moving as much air through the condenser coils. This can be done by regularly (at least annually) cleaning the condenser coils, straightening any bent fins, and not blocking the flow of air into or out of the condenser.

So the question is: When was the last time you had your coils cleaned?
CALL SAFETY KING TO CLEAN YOUR COILS AT 1-800-AIR-DUCT or 1-800-247-3828

AC Coil Cleaning

A Flashback to the Foundation of NADCA

Our Founder and Visionary Michael Palazzolo poses with other Presidents of NADCA at the 30th Annual Meeting in Nashville Tennessee this past week. After 31 years Safety King is the only founding member company left at NADCA.

Flashback to earlier this week when all of the past NADCA presidents who were at the 30th Annual Meeting stood in front of the timeline! #NADCA19 #memorylane #pastpresidents

Posted by NADCA: The HVAC Inspection, Cleaning and Restoration Association on Friday, April 5, 2019

How has Safety King Stood the Test of Time?

If you live in Michigan, Safety King, Inc. is the most reputable air duct cleaning company around! Safety King has 50 years of experience in the duct cleaning industry and has been training other duct cleaners internationally since 1985. Safety King also provides complimentary before & after pictures so you can see exactly what you are paying for. If you live outside of Michigan, you can go to NADCA.com to find a certified duct cleaner near you.


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Award reflects consistently high level of customer service

Utica, MI. 4/12/19 – Safety King Air Duct Cleaning Inc. is proud to announce that it has earned the home service industry’s coveted Angie’s List Super Service Award (SSA). This award honors service professionals who have maintained exceptional service ratings and reviews on Angie’s List in 2018.

“Service pros that receive our Angie’s List Super Service Award represent the best in our network, who are consistently making great customer service their mission,” said Angie’s List Founder Angie Hicks. “These pros have provided exceptional service to our members and absolutely deserve recognition for the exemplary customer service they exhibited in the past year.”

Angie’s List Super Service Award 2018 winners have met strict eligibility requirements, which include maintaining an “A” rating in overall grade, recent grade and review period grade. The SSA winners must be in good standing with Angie’s List and undergo additional screening.

“Safety King is honored to receive 2018’s Super Service Award from Angie’s List. Each continued year of award-winning service in the field of air duct cleaning brings us pride. Our high quality service is thanks to 50 years of experience and customer feedback.”

Service company ratings are updated continually on Angie’s List as new, verified consumer reviews are submitted. Companies are graded on an A through F scale in multiple fields ranging from price to professionalism to punctuality.

For over two decades Angie’s List has been a trusted name for connecting consumers to top-rated service professionals. Angie’s List provides unique tools and support designed to improve the local service experience for both consumers and service professionals.


Safety King has been a provider of air duct cleaning services in southeast Michigan in the USA since 1969. You can reach Safety King by phone at 1-800-AIR-DUCT, and by email at info@safetyking.com.

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