Kurt Presley, President/Owner of Dalton Environmental Cleaning
Dalton Environmental Cleaning was established in 1991 by the Dalton family as a Duct Cleaning business to go along with their well established Carpet Cleaning business. Kurt Presely ran the Duct Cleaning side of things for the Daltons and, in 1996, they offered to sell him that part of the business.
Presley had been thinking about opening his own business, “but I had already worked for five years building this name up, and I realized back then how important a name can be. So I gave up wanting my own name on a company and stuck with this one.”
The business operates in the general area of southeastern Michigan. Dalton operates all year long performing both commercial and residential air duct cleaning.
Presley has five employees he runs as two crews, with three American Caddy Vac trucks. “Back in 2001 we moved our business from Livonia out to Whitmore Lake which is halfway between Ann Arbor and Brighton. That’s when we switched from portable equipment. We had portable gas-powered equipment, which was decent, but hard to move around. We would roll them around the backs of the houses or the shortest distance to the furnace. I used disposable bags on them because they would breathe better, but they also let dust come puffing out while we were working, and that’s not good. They were hard to start, you had to start two different motors. They could be very finicky in cold weather. Also, we set them close to the houses, and a lot of times the exhaust smell would come into the house. That’s not good. Then of course, at the end of the day, you’re pretty tired after doing a couple of jobs. If you have to roll that 350-400 pound vacuum up a hill, it gets heavier and heavier as the day goes on!”
“When we switched to the duct cleaning trucks, it just ended all those headaches. I started to have contact with Mac (Mac Mattoon, owner of American Caddy Vac) and he was telling me how, “Once your guys start using our trucks they’ll never want to go back!” and he was right! We started off with a commercial unit. It was kind of a prototype, the first with an automatic transmission. I still have that truck, it still runs fine, we still use it on a daily basis after 18 years!”
Over the years, Presley added another American Caddy Vac. Both of those units are still in operation. The original was built on a Ford F-450, and the second was built on a Ford F-350 and has been their residential cleaning unit. In 2016, he added a third American Caddy Vac to the fleet. “We recently purchased a new American Caddy Vac built on a 4 wheel drive chassis because with Michgan’s climate, we have trouble getting to a customer’s house and commuting so we purchased a Dodge Ram four wheel drive unit, a 4500. We’ve been real happy with that.”
Presley says that the cold weather comes with challenges. A few weeks prior to this interview his crews had been working in fifteen below zero weather which can cause air lines to freeze up. “With the heat of the compressors you can get a lot of condensation. We keep de-icers on board and we try to keep the trucks running while we’re setting up to keep things warm. It’s pretty rare that we really have a problem, but when it gets that cold obviously you have to watch things pretty carefully. We thought that customers would cancel when it was that cold but they didn’t! But these trucks, they just keep going, keep chugging along. They don’t give us many problems with regard to the weather.”
Presley loves the Quincy 370 compressors they have on all three of their units. “It’s endless air basically! We can just go and go and go. We do a lot of dryer vent cleaning, and it demands quite a bit of air when you’re splitting the lines up between a couple of guys.” He also loves the convenience of the automatic hose reels because his crew can just put a wet towell on the on the air hose and it’s cleaned as it is reeled in. “No more wiping down back at the shop! You can do it right there at the job, so you’re starting every job with clean air hose.”
Presley has seen plenty of interesting things in his decades in the duct cleaning business. “One of our most memorable stories was that a customer called and said she had no air flow to one of her vents on the second floor. She had just moved in, and that room was cold, so she called us out to clean her duct work, hoping that would take care of the problem. When the crews started investigating, they found on the second floor that there were some little boy’s underwear plugging the vent. So they started fishing them out and fishing more out and fishing more out. They ended up pulling out forty-seven pairs of underwear, ranging from size six to fourteen, so he had been doing this for a number of years. I can’t imagine what his mom was thinking, where his underwear were going, but they went from the second floor. The vent went straight down. You don’t run into that too often in a home, but it went straight down, and it filled it up all the way down into the basement and around the elbow, the 90-degree elbow in the basement.”
Presley is a big fan of the trucks, and the service he gets from American Caddy Vac. “They’re very professional. As soon as I call, they handle the problem, or if they can’t, if somebody’s not there, they’ll call me back promptly with an answer. I’ve always had good care from Mac and Steve and the whole crew. They’ve always been good to me. Obviously, I came back and bought another truck! I would definitely recommend them to anybody that wanted to get into truck equipment or for different choice in trucks.”
