The typical owner home in Annandale dates from 1967, and in a rambler or split-level from those years the central air comes in two halves. The condenser sits on a pad in the yard. The cooling coil rides on top of the furnace on the lowest floor, pulling water out of the air on every humid day and sending it down a small drain line. A summer of that water through a line nobody cleared is how a basement carpet gets wet.
In Wakefield, which covers Canterbury Woods and the streets off Wakefield Chapel Road, about 95 homes in 100 are single-family, and Broyhill Crest, north of Little River Turnpike, is houses too. Sixty years grows real trees, and a condenser under them collects leaves around its base all winter and seeds and dust on its fins all spring. Those fins shed the heat carried out from inside, so the outdoor coil gets cleaned, and the tech tells you if a shrub has crowded it.
The other Annandale is the condo and garden apartment buildings around the business district, where Little River Turnpike crosses Columbia Pike, plus Woodburn, where about three homes in ten are in buildings like that. About a quarter of owners in the Annandale Census place and in Woodburn heat with electricity, usually a heat pump, so the outdoor unit due for its spring look worked straight through the winter. In an upstairs unit, the drain line may cross above a neighbor’s ceiling.
Ductless mini-splits are a bigger part of our Annandale work than anywhere else we work regularly. Plenty of 22003 houses cool two ways: central air on the original ducts, plus a wall head in a back addition or a finished lower level. The mini split gets its own tune-up at the same $99 a system, so the central air and the heads can go on one visit.