Cedar season: what actually helps, and what does not
From late December to February, every Austin house gets a fine yellow-green film on the sills. Most of the advice about it is wrong.
Every year between the middle of December and the end of February, Ashe juniper releases pollen across the Texas hill country, and every year a large part of Austin spends six weeks feeling terrible. We clean around 180 homes a week through that window, so we have watched what actually changes how a house feels and what only looks like it should.
Pollen gets in four ways, and only two are worth your effort
The particles are small, light and sticky. They arrive through open windows, on shoes and clothes, on dogs, and through the air conditioning return. Of those four, the two that matter most in a typical Austin house are the return vent and the sills, because that is where pollen accumulates rather than passes through.
- Return vents and filters. Your system pulls outdoor air through the return every time it runs. A loaded filter stops filtering and starts leaking around its edges.
- Window sills and tracks. Pollen settles here in a visible film, then gets stirred back into the room every time the window is opened.
- Shoes and clothes. Real, but a doormat and taking shoes off handles most of it.
- Dogs. A wipe-down at the door does more than any amount of vacuuming afterwards.
What we changed about our own visits
Our standard checklist runs top to bottom, and sills and vents used to sit near the end. In January 2019 we moved them to the front for Cedar Park and Round Rock, and in 2021 for the whole service area during cedar season.
The reason is simple: if you clean sills last, you have already disturbed the dust in the room and it settles back onto them. Doing them first means the vacuum pass afterwards picks up what you dislodged.
Cedar season used to mean two weeks of misery. Someone wiping the sills and vents every fortnight has genuinely changed that.
The things that do not help as much as people think
Air purifiers in every room. One good unit in the bedroom you sleep in beats four cheap ones spread around a house. Pollen exposure at night matters more than during the day.
Mopping more often. Pollen on a hard floor is not what you are breathing. It is the film on soft surfaces and the load in the air handler.
Deep cleaning in December. Tempting, but the season has not started. Mid to late February, once the counts drop, clears out what actually accumulated. We book a lot of deep cleans in that fortnight for exactly this reason.
What we do about it on a normal visit
From late December through February, every visit in Cedar Park, Leander and Round Rock starts with sills, blinds and visible return vent covers, and our crews carry a dedicated microfibre for them so pollen is not moved from a sill to a counter. It costs about five minutes and is included, not an add-on.
If you want more than that, a deep clean adds blinds slat by slat, ceiling fan blades and interior glass, which is the full version of the same idea.