How CleanRun Air Duct Cleaning Washington Was Born in Washington
It was the fall of 2013, and we’d just watched a homeowner in Capitol Hill pay twice what we’d quoted for half the work. The company she’d hired showed up with a Rotobrush machine, ran it for twenty minutes, and left her with a handwritten receipt and ducts that still smelled like the previous owner’s cat. She called us the next day, not because she knew our name, but because a neighbor had mentioned we’d been honest about what her system actually needed.
That afternoon, we sat in our truck outside Eastern Market with the heater running and the windows fogging up. We’d been working in the trade for years already, mostly for other outfits, and we’d grown tired of apologizing for an industry that treated duct cleaning like a carnival game. The coupon bait. The per-vent upsell. The vanishing warranty. Washington deserved something different, and we knew we could build it.
We called the parent company that same week. CleanRun had started that same year with a simple, stubborn idea: photograph every run before and after, quote one flat price per system in writing, and let the customer see what they paid for. We didn’t invent the brand. We brought it to Washington because this city, with its row houses and post-war apartments and new construction with flex ducts crammed into tight chases, needed technicians who understood what they were looking at. We promised ourselves we’d be the ones who did.
Tomas Reyes’s Personal Connection to the Air Duct Cleaning Trade
We got into this work the way a lot of people find their trade: by fixing something that was broken and realizing the fix mattered more than we expected.
It was a summer in our early twenties, humid even by Washington standards, and the AC in our aunt’s bungalow in Petworth was pushing musty air that smelled like wet cardboard. Three companies had quoted her prices that made no sense, each one higher than the last, each one describing a different problem. We borrowed a camera scope from a friend in HVAC, popped the register in her bedroom, and found what the others had missed: a collapsed flex duct behind the boot, lying in a puddle of condensation that had been growing mold for two seasons. It took us four hours to cut access, replace the run, and seal it properly. The smell was gone that same evening. She slept with the window closed for the first time in months.
That smell, that particular relief of air moving clean through a house, is what still gets us out of bed. We’ve been doing this for over ten years now, and the part that hasn’t faded is the moment when a customer stands at a register and feels the difference. The trade vocabulary has become second nature: plenums and boots, trunk lines and takeoffs, static pressure and friction loss. But what we love is the physical reality of it. The weight of a Nikro vacuum hose coiled just right. The metallic smell of sheet metal when you cut a new access panel. The sight of a before photo showing a duct lined with gray fuzz, and the after photo showing bare galvanized steel.
If we weren’t doing this, we’d probably be working with our hands some other way. Carpentry, maybe. Something where you start with a problem and end with proof. But this work chose us, or we chose it back in that humid summer, and Washington has kept us busy ever since.
Meet Tomas Reyes - The Person Behind Every Job
Tomas Reyes is the Owner and Founder of CleanRun Air Duct Cleaning Washington. He holds state licensure for HVAC and duct cleaning work in the District and maintains full insurance and bonding for every job his team performs.
Tomas trained under veteran tradesmen in the Washington metro area before joining the CleanRun network, learning the craft on Capitol Hill row houses with original ductwork from the 1920s and on new builds in NoMa where the flex duct was already kinked at rough-in. He is certified in air systems cleaning through industry-recognized programs and has spent his career working with Abatement Technologies and Guardsman equipment, the tools he trusts for residential work.
What separates Tomas from a corporate franchise technician is simple: he’s the one who answers when something goes wrong. He lives in the District, bikes the Anacostia River Trail on weekends, and believes a written quote should mean exactly what it says. When you hire CleanRun Air Duct Cleaning Washington, Tomas personally reviews every before-and-after photo before the job is closed. His commitment to you is direct: if we document it, we stand behind it. If we don’t document it, we didn’t do it.
Before
AfterOur Promise to Washington Homeowners
We operate under The Haven Standard, five clauses that govern every job we take. Haven Clause 1, Have it in writing, means you get one flat price per system, agreed before anyone touches a tool. No per-vent pricing, no add-ons once we’re in your basement. We learned this the hard way: early in our Washington work, a homeowner in Adams Morgan showed us a competitor’s invoice that had grown from a $79 coupon to nearly $900 by the time the van left. That doesn’t happen here because the price is fixed when we arrive.
Clause 4, Evidence on every job, means photographs. Every run, before and after. We use a camera scope to document what we found, what we removed, and what the duct looks like when we’re done. You get those photos. We keep copies. If there’s ever a question, the proof exists.
Clause 5, No surprises, is the one we guard most carefully. No door upsell. No “while we’re in here” pressure. If we find something outside the scope, we stop, explain, and quote it separately. You choose.
Our Credentials
- State-licensed for HVAC and air duct cleaning work in Washington, DC and surrounding jurisdictions
- Insured & bonded with general liability and workers compensation coverage for every technician in your home
- Over ten years of local experience serving Washington metro homes, from historic Capitol Hill properties to new construction in Navy Yard
- Strong local reputation built on documented work and customer-verified results, not marketing claims
Each credential matters because duct cleaning happens inside your home, around your family, often while you’re present. State licensure means we’ve met the District’s technical and ethical requirements. Insurance and bonding protect you if something goes wrong, not just if someone gets hurt. Local experience means we’ve seen the specific duct configurations common in Washington architecture: the tight chases in Georgetown townhouses, the shared systems in Dupont Circle co-ops, the fiberglass-lined ducts in 1960s Fairfax County ranches that require gentler handling than metal. And reputation, for us, is the sum of every photo we’ve delivered and every written quote we’ve honored.
Rooted in Washington
We serve the full Washington metro, but our daily work keeps us closest to the neighborhoods we know best: the row houses of Capitol Hill and Shaw, the garden apartments of Cleveland Park, the post-war ramblers in Arlington and Silver Spring where the original ductwork is still hanging in. We’ve cleaned systems after flooding in Alexandria basements, after renovations in Bethesda, and after decades of neglect in homes changing hands for the first time since the 1980s.
Our hours are Monday through Friday, 7:30 AM to 8:00 PM, and Saturday and Sunday, 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM. We schedule carefully because we don’t rush the documentation that makes this work verifiable. Washington is where we built this branch, where Tomas lives, and where we plan to keep working until the last duct in the last house is as clean as we can make it.
Written by Tomas Reyes, Owner at CleanRun Air Duct Cleaning Washington, serving Washington, DC and the surrounding metro since 2013.