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What to do to Estimate Commercial Air Duct Cleaning Jobs in 8 Stages

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Omexcleaning
What to do to Estimate Commercial Air Duct Cleaning Jobs in 8 Stages

Estimating commercial air duct cleaning projects is different from estimating and pricing residential projects. You cannot count the number of vents or go by the square footage of the building to estimate commercial projects. There is such a wide variety of HVAC system types that a simple one size fit all estimating approach will not work.


A workable estimating plan/process must be able to handle the wide variety of HVAC systems and components found in today's commercial buildings. Plus, you must have a good understanding of the various components that you will encounter because each of these components can offer their own unique cleaning challenges. Your goal is to have an accurate and repeatable estimating process so you can win more projects on a consistent basis. Let's look at the basic steps:


1. Review and understand the cleaning specification.

Most commercial projects have a cleaning specification that tells you what needs to be cleaned, the level of cleanliness that must be achieved, documentation requirements, etc. Cleaning specifications are determined by the project engineer or environmental consultant. The National Air Duct Cleaners Association (NADCA) cleaning specification is the basis for many of these specifications.

You must read and understand the cleaning specification if you are going to prepare a proper proposal. If you have questions on a cleaning specification be sure to call the engineer for clarification. If there is no cleaning specification you can help the building owner by providing one. The cleaning specification that you give will include items and requirements that can favor your companies' capabilities and give you a bidding advantage.


2. Review and understand the mechanical blueprints.

Get a set of blueprints for the project. You will need to know how to read blueprints. Large projects can have many pages of blueprints that can be very challenging. The best way to approach something like this is to look at one air handler and its associated ductwork at a time. The mechanical prints can also have important information about the scope of the air duct cleaning requirements and a schedule of units. All of this information is very important because it helps you to understand the HVAC system you are estimating.


3. Do a walk through of the project.

This will help you understand the project and let you see anything that will affect accessibility to the cleaning of the HVAC system. Accessibility to the HVAC system and components will help determine the production rate you will use. Good accessibility generally means a faster production rate and poor accessibility means a slower production rate.


4. Do a takeoff of the HVAC system.

After you have looked at and gained a good understanding of the mechanical blueprints and have done a walk through of the project you are ready to start working on your estimate. Based on the blueprints, you break down the HVAC system into its component parts and find the number of each component you have.


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