Jim's Biography
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Hi, my name is Jim Thomson.
I have been in the duct cleaning industry for over 40 years. My father started a furnace and air duct cleaning company back in 1980 . He started out using a Power Vac truck . It was PTO powered and a really good piece of Kit for the job. We ran that same truck for close to 20 years before it was retired. I started out cleaning with my dad and brother in 1982 and worked after school and every day through the summers.
Back in the 1980’s there was no formal education for duct cleaning, it was always just learning trial by fire, the hard way. My father never said no and we always took on any job that came our way. We cleaned air ducts in all sorts of homes and buildings - from thousands of basic residential homes, to commercial contracts like hospitals with HVAC systems you could drive a car through. We even cleaned thousands of dead pigeons out of a generator cooling shaft hundreds of feet long that required dozens of garbage bins to haul all it away .
Once Graduating High school in 1988 I took over the business from my father and quickly grew the business to multiple duct trucks . We had a chance to clean the ducts at our local prison and being thirsty for more work we gladly took on the job . The prison however had a caveat that we could not run our duct trucks as they did not want all the prison doors from the truck to the ducting in prisoner areas open.
Back in the 1980’s there was no such thing as a portable duct vacuum , you either ran a duct truck or a shop vac, and the prison was massive and not able to be cleaned with a shop vac. So we ventured out into the world of engineering and invented our first high powered portable duct cleaning vacuum, probably one of the worlds first. After a few weeks, the prison job was finished and our new high powered portable vacuum became a mainstay in our equipment line up, and we found it to be just as valuable of a tool as the duct truck.
In the 1990’s we expanded the company to multiple offices and created a fairly large duct cleaning enterprise. After 20+ years of being on the tools, I ventured into equipment manufacturing and re-engineered our vacuum systems to be more commercially viable and started a new company manufacturing furnace and air duct cleaning equipment where I met my current business partner Scott Schnitzerling.
Hypervac Technologies company photo, 2014
Together we were able to build some of the world's most powerful air duct cleaning equipment including:
- Electric Portable Vacuums
- Duct Trucks
- Portable Gas Vacuums
- Agitation Tools
- Camera Systems
and the company went on to become a well respected Duct Cleaning Industry Leader still in operation today.
