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About 40% of McKinney housing was built in 2010 or later. The ducts in those houses are in good shape. What some of them still hold is the build: drywall dust, sawdust and the odd offcut, sitting where it fell.
A house is framed, ducted, drywalled, sanded, trimmed and floored in that order. The registers are open holes for most of it. Drywall sanding makes a powder fine enough to drift into every one of them, and on many sites the air handler is switched on to dry joint compound or cool the crews before the final clean.
Dust that lands in a duct stays until moving air picks it up. That is why a new house can put a pale film on furniture for months after move-in while the filter looks fine.
The check takes five minutes. Unscrew one supply register in a bedroom. Shine a light on the metal box behind it. White or tan powder, wood chips, screws or bits of drywall mean the system took in construction debris. A faint gray film does not.
Houses permitted in McKinney since November 2022 were built under the 2021 or a later edition of the international residential, mechanical and energy codes, which the city adopts and updates by ordinance. That covers how the ductwork was built. It does not cover how clean the site was kept.
The same thing happens on a smaller scale whenever walls are opened in an occupied house: a kitchen rebuilt, a wall removed, ceilings re-textured. The difference is that you are living there and can prevent most of it.
Ask the remodeling contractor to keep the system off during sanding, to seal the supply and return openings in the rooms being worked on, and to vacuum before the covers come off. If that was not done and the dust is already in the runs, a cleaning limited to the affected system is usually enough.
It should not, but many do, because the system was run or left open while the house was being finished. Look before deciding: take off one register and check the metal box behind it.
If the house is still under the builder's warranty, raise it with the builder first and in writing, with photographs. A cleaning you arrange yourself is the fallback.
Have the system switched off while drywall is being sanded, cover the registers and returns in the work area, and change the filter when the work is finished.
Say when the house was finished and what you saw. If it is a warranty matter you will be told to start there.
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