About us

Scooter’s Coil Cleaners didn’t start as a business plan. It started with fifteen loud, aging wall units in an apartment building I manage.

About seven years ago, we finally replaced those old “wall bangers” with fifteen brand-new Carrier ductless mini splits — fourteen single-zone units throughout the building and one dual-zone system in the manager’s apartment. We bought them through a local HVAC company the building owner had known for years, and that same company handled the installation and ongoing maintenance. The difference was immediate: the units ran whisper-quiet, cooled the building far more evenly, and cut our electric bill almost in half compared to the old system.

A couple of years in, it was time to have the units cleaned. But the HVAC company we’d relied on was gone — wiped out by Hurricane Milton. So I started calling around to other local companies, expecting a straightforward service call. Instead, quote after quote came back at $750 or more per unit, once you added the trip charge and a handful of other line items — pushing each unit close to $1,000. For fifteen units, that was nearly $15,000. I was floored. It wasn’t in the budget, and it wasn’t going to be, so we had to find another way.

We found a local, family-owned HVAC company willing to do it for a fraction of that price, and they did good work. But even their rate was more than we wanted to keep paying year after year. So we did what any stubborn property manager would do: we pulled up the manufacturer’s own cleaning tutorials, bought the proper equipment, and started cleaning all fifteen units ourselves — usually once a year, sometimes twice, depending on the tenant. Units in apartments with well-kept filters stayed cleaner longer; units where tenants smoked, vaped, or burned incense or candles needed attention more often.

Word got around. Friends with their own mini splits started asking if we’d clean theirs too. Then friends of friends. Before long, we were cleaning mini splits all over town — not because we set out to start a business, but because we’d stumbled into a skill that turned out to be in short supply and priced way out of reach for most homeowners.

That’s the honest story behind Scooter’s Coil Cleaners: a property manager who couldn’t afford to pay nearly $1,000 a unit for something we learned to do well ourselves, and who figured other homeowners across the Tampa Bay area deserved a fairer, more straightforward option too.